Category: Extinguish Burnout

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that evolution has shaped us to be more concerned with the negatives that happen to us than the positives.  If there’s a choice to worry about a lion hiding in the grass, the human who worried survived.  As a result, we’re predisposed to worry, be concerned about, and focus on the challenges we face instead of the opportunities.  However, as humans, we’re gifted with conscious awareness and a rational mind that can sometimes grab the reins of our historic perspectives and shift them a bit.

Happiness and Burnout

Burnout is caused by a feeling of inefficacy.  Those feelings flow more freely when you’re focused on the negative.  It’s easier to feel like you’re not making enough progress when you’re focused on the setbacks instead of the opportunities.  When you can refocus your attention on the things that make you happy and the things that are going well, you naturally feel as if you’re making more progress, you’re more effective, and life is better.

We tend to believe that we can compartmentalize our general mood and feelings into buckets and keep them from interfering with other areas of our lives.  However, research shows that our emotions in one area of our life bleed into other areas without our knowledge.  Stress reduces our creativity and our compassion for others – whether we’re aware of it or not.

Changing Happiness

Part of our happiness is defined by our genetics.  There’s a predisposition to a certain happiness level – sort of like setting a thermostat on the wall.  All things being equal, the heating and air conditioning will try to keep the temperatures set.  However, we can light a fire in the fireplace – which isn’t under the thermostat’s control.  While there are many ways to increase our happiness, two are particularly powerful: gratitude and savoring.

Gratitude

For most of us, meals are routine.  We enjoy a good meal, and we don’t give it a second thought.  Years after leaving home, children realize they took for granted what a great cook mom was.  We become accustomed to goodness and fail to realize how good things are now.  We can hold on to these things by making the conscious decision to catalog what we’re grateful for each day.

This might take the form of a gratitude journal, in which you write the things you’re grateful for each day.  The key point isn’t the writing.  The key point is to reflect on the day and recognize the good things.  It’s easy to succumb to our biology and focus on the negative, but by focusing on the positives, the things that we’re grateful for, we can shift our general mood and level of happiness.

When we recognize that more good things happen than bad, we lift ourselves out of the swamps of unhappiness.

Savoring

Recognizing the good things that are happening to us is a start, but unless you’re willing to dwell in them, they’ll still pass by too quickly.  That’s where savoring comes in.  Just like the idea of letting a forkful of a delicious meal sit on your tongue before chewing and swallowing, we can allow ourselves to experience the positive of the moment longer and more deeply before moving on.

Once you’ve built a habit of gratitude, you can apply it to your daily routine.  Instead of waiting until the end of the day, you can become more able to recognize good things when they happen – and savor those moment.  When someone holds a door for you, you can consider how the world is improving, how you’re a human worthy of respect and assistance.  Just lingering in these thoughts for a few moments is enough.

With these two simple techniques, you can develop your happiness, and ultimately help keep yourself out of burnout.

Drawing the line between self-care and self-indulgence is a tricky proposition.  How much time should you spend recharging before returning to the battle to help others?  There is, it seems, no single right answer.  We know that we need to care for ourselves, yet when we’re doing that, we’re not sharing our concern with the rest of the world.

The problem is one of debt.  Not financial debt but a relational debt that we owe to ourselves.  We can continue to give and give, but eventually we’ll end up consuming our reserves, and we’ll start to borrow from our future in terms of our physical or mental well-being.  The debt service – the additional psychic cost – of being so depleted is debilitating.  Protecting ourselves from getting into this psychic debt should be and remains a priority.

The kind of thing that can keep us from psychic debt is an appropriate amount of self-care.  But what separates self-care from self-indulgence?  The short answer is the long-term impact.  Consider for a moment the idea of binge-watching your newest obsession with a television series.  It will likely be enjoyable and feel good for the moment, but, in most cases, it will bring no lasting joy, nor will it make you feel particularly refreshed.  As a result, it would fall under the category of self-indulgence.

It’s important to pause here and say that self-indulgence is necessary in appropriate amounts, just like food is necessary for our body – but it can be overdone, leading to obesity.  We need to accept that we can’t be “on” all the time.  We need to accept that there are times when self-indulgence is the right thing.  The key, however, is to not confuse the occasional self-indulgence with self-care.

Self-care leaves us with the residue of long-lasting benefits.  Each time we perform self-care, we develop a deeper understanding of ourselves or the world or the way we want to transform ourselves or the world.  Self-care makes the demands that we face in the future a bit lighter and strengthens our inner fortitude so that we can go out in the world and help others with bigger loads for longer.

Self-care might look like meditation, exercise, a contemplative walk in the woods, or a myriad of other things that build our long-term capacity to be ourselves, accept ourselves and our world, and, ultimately, sustain ourselves for longer.  Instead of a psychic debt, we build a psychic storehouse that’s stocked with the energy we need to persevere through long periods of intense load.

So, in the end, the difference between self-indulgence and self-care is simple: long-term impact.  The only complication is that sometimes that self-indulgence is self-care.  Sometimes you have to accept that the decision to allow yourself some self-indulgence is in itself developing a greater sense of acceptance and love for who you are and your need to be human – as long as the self-indulgence doesn’t go too far.

How can you tell if you’re just down, you’ve got depression, or you’re being consumed by burnout?  Sometimes, the official answers aren’t so useful.  Officially, depression is diagnosed based on the time and appropriateness of feeling down.  For instance, the loss of a loved one should cause someone to feel down – even for an extended time.  However, in general, the guidelines are a depressed persistent mood for longer than two weeks.

So how do you know if you’re suffering from depression directly, or if you’ve got burnout that’s leading to depression?  Being burned out increases the chances that you’ll develop depression, so perhaps burnout is the root cause of the malady of depression that you feel.

The real problem is what we call “depression” is such a broad category of things that it’s difficult to pinpoint a single cause.  From chemical imbalances to self-talk or self-image issues, depression can come from many sources.  Finding the root of depression keeps many counselors busy, and despite good work, counseling often seems to have limited ability to locate and eradicate the root cause.

One of the challenges is that we get so focused trying to find the source of the depression – the root cause – that we forget that many of the ways that are used to defend against and recover from burnout are the same techniques used for depression – regardless of the source.  We’re so worried about finding the cause, that we forget to focus on the cure.  Certainly, in some things, it’s essential to find the root cause, but in others there may not be any one root cause.  There may only be a set of causal factors that lead to the situation – none of which, if individually identified and resolved, solve the issue.

Whether you’re suffering from burnout, depression, or both, you may find that being more aware of the support you receive from others – and not discounting it – will lighten your burden.  Perhaps it’s learning to view the results you see from your efforts in a different light that will make things a bit brighter.  Maybe the challenge for you is learning how to set boundaries and develop decision-making criteria that will allow you to say no without feeling guilty.

Ultimately, the most powerful approach to dealing with burnout or depression is changing the way that you view yourself in terms of both your self-talk – the way you talk to yourself – and self-care – the way you take care of yourself.  If you can change the way that you talk to yourself to be more loving and more accepting of who you are, you’ll feel less internally-generated shame, and it will feel less like walking around in muck.  If you can learn effective self-care strategies, you can feel like you’re not indulging yourself, you’re rejuvenating yourself.

In the end, it may not matter whether you’re suffering from burnout, depression, or both.  It may be that your real goal is simply to find approaches that allow you to grow out of whatever pit that you’re in.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently added new criteria for burnout as a part of its ICD 11 coding scheme.  This moves burnout forwards as a specific condition that can be diagnosed as an occupational phenomenon by health and mental health workers.  However, the impact to your business is more than just the fact that burnout can be formally diagnosed now.

What is Burnout?

Burnout was first discussed by Herbert Freudenberger in 1974.  Since then, the defining characteristics of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy have held relatively stable – these are, in fact, the core of the WHO definition.  Though Freudenberger’s original work, and much of the subsequent work, targets burnout toward anything someone is passionate about, WHO defines burnout solely as an occupational phenomenon related to work.

Burnout has historically been assessed using variants of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI).  More recently, the public domain Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) has become available for use to allow individuals to be assessed without the cost of the MBI.

What’s the Cost?

Because few organizations have assessed their employees for burnout with either the MBI or the CBI, it’s difficult to pin specific numbers to the impact of burnout.  However, we do know that there are several factors that are influenced by burnout.

Gallup reports that 85% of employees worldwide are not engaged or are actively disengaged in their job.  Employees can’t be engaged in the organization if they’re actively in burnout.  Organizations with the best engagement see turnover numbers that are 59% lower than those with low engagement scores (Gallup, Inc. 2017).  Further, we know from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that, across all industries, voluntary turnover was 24.6% in 2016, 25.7% in 2017, and 26.9% in 2018 (Bureau of Labor Statistics n.d.).  Josh Bersin estimates the cost of replacing an employee is somewhere between 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary (Bersin 2013).

Poor engagement costs your organization about 24% of your annual payroll, assuming 26.9% voluntary turnover, 1.5 times annual salary, and a 59% reduction in turnover.  (The cost rises to 32% if you use 2 times the salary.)

Gallup also reports that high engagement organizations have 21% higher profitability than their low-engagement peers.  In short, poor engagement – and thus burnout – hits the bottom line.

What Can Be Done?

Like any other aspect of your business, it’s possible to get control on the burnout problem and reign in the bottom-line costs – as well as the costs to the employees that you care about.  There are two ways you can support employees in their fight against burnout.

A Sense of Control

At the heart of burnout is a sense of hopelessness – that there’s nothing you can do to make things better.  Hopelessness is, at its heart, a lack of a feeling of control – or even influence – on the things happening around you.  The less influence you feel you have, the more hopeless you’re likely to feel.

Leaders can help the sense of influence by listening to employees, including their ideas and fears.  This doesn’t mean that you must utilize every idea provided or address every fear (if that were even possible).  Taking a small suggestion or simply listening at all can help restore a sense of influence and ward off helplessness.

Acknowledge Successes

After every success is the next challenge.  In business, we’re very accustomed to reorienting and getting ready for the next challenge.  However, in doing this, we sometimes don’t give our – or our employees’ – successes proper attention.  By spending a few minutes on acknowledging successes, we can restore a sense of agency with employees.  We can help them see that we are getting some wins.  It’s not all just a new hill to climb, there’s the one we’re standing on.

You don’t have to throw an elaborate party or even pause.  Simply acknowledging that the last win allows you to take on the next challenge is enough to break down helplessness and refocus everyone on the good work that is being done – even if you don’t win every fight.

Putting It Together

Burnout is a very serious issue for any organization that can cost up to a quarter of the annual payroll.  Helping employees avoid burnout isn’t impossible or even difficult.  A little bit of well-timed listening and a small amount of encouragement about the things that have already been accomplished can mean the difference between burnout and profitability.

References

Bersin, Josh. 2013. “Employee Retention Now a Big Issue: Why the Tide has Turned.” LinkedIn Pulse. August 16. Accessed June 11, 2019. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130816200159-131079-employee-retention-now-a-big-issue-why-the-tide-has-turned/.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. n.d. Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Accessed 06 11, 2019. https://www.bls.gov/jlt.

Gallup, Inc. 2017. “State of the Global Workplace.” Accessed 06 11, 2019. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238079/state-global-workplace-2017.aspx.

Originally posted on Inside Indiana Business. You can read the full blog post here: http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/story/40741669/the-business-impact-of-burnout.

Many people fear that they have burnout.  Attached to burnout is a negative stigma that says you’re not good enough or strong enough.  As a result, people worry that they have burnout when they don’t.  While there’s nothing wrong with burnout, it’s not the same thing as simple exhaustion.  The problem comes from the fact that one of the indicators of burnout is exhaustion.  So, if you have exhaustion, how do you know that you don’t have burnout?

The answer is deceptively simple.  Do you still feel energized while feeling exhausted?  If so, you are just exhausted – not burnt out.  Here’s why.  If you still feel energized, you’re still pushing towards a goal.  That isn’t the behavior of someone who is burnt out.

Look at this another way.  If you could rest for an entire day, would you regain your zeal for your goal – or would you just trudge through the muck one more time to try to move a bit closer to the goal line?  In the first case, you’ve just reached the physical limits of your body.  In the second case, you’re most likely suffering from burnout.

Exhaustion is what happens when our physical and mental limitations are reached.  We find ourselves depleted of energy.  However, even after relatively short periods of rest, either from sleep or with a day of fewer activities, we bounce back like Tigger.  We find that our exhaustion was short-lived, and, with a brief recharge, we’re ready to go again.

A brief rest for someone with burnout seems to have no effect.  They don’t have the same desire that they once had.  The goals that seemed so important are suddenly a burden.  Instead of getting recharged, those with burnout often feel frustrated, afraid, and sometimes like they are failing.  Frustrated that they can’t regain their energy like they once did, and afraid that they’ll never be able to find their energy again.  They feel like they are somehow a failure, because they cannot make it all work like they want to.

If you want to know if you are simply exhausted, take the no-phone, no-internet test.  Plan a weekend where you’ve got no phone and no internet.  Plan to rest, relax, and, more importantly, disconnect from the rat race that most people call their lives.

Everyone can find a way to disconnect for a weekend.  There will be a way for the office to function without you.  You can bring the family with you if they’re more supportive than demanding.  Just put the brakes on your life and slow down.  If you end the weekend refreshed and chomping at the bit to get back to your world, it was a simple case of exhaustion.

If you end the weekend and feel more peace but no more energy, then burnout may have taken hold.  You’ll need to find ways to fill your personal agency by looking more closely for positive results, seeking the support of others, doing more self-care, and finding ways to limit both the demands that you place on yourself and those you accept from others.

While exhaustion is a symptom of burnout, not all exhaustion is burnout.

Burnout is defined as feelings of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. What else could you feel if you know that, as soon as you hang up the phone, it will just ring again with the next customer? How can you avoid burnout when every day is an onslaught of the same thing?

Published on HDI. Read the rest of the article here: http://www.thinkhdi.com/library/supportworld/2019/dont-give-in-to-burnout.aspx

Burnout generally starts with debugging.  It’s the defect that you can’t seem to find.  The trudging through logs and poring through databases is seemingly endless.  Slogging through thousands of lines of code to find that one wrong thing can feel like it will never end.  That’s when burnout starts to make its stranglehold.

Burnout has been a part of the software development industry since the very beginning, with high-performing developers burning out in a blaze of glory.  However, it doesn’t have to continue to be this way.  We can continue to enjoy our work if we can figure out what burnout is and how it grabs us.

Defining Burnout

The first step is identifying what burnout even is.  While definitions vary, the consensus is that burnout is characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.  That’s a great for identification, but it’s nearly useless for learning how to prevent burnout or recover from it.  The key characteristic is inefficacy and its effect on your beliefs.

Inefficacy makes us feel as if we don’t have any control, and that is the heart of decades-old research by Martin Seligman and his colleagues.  They defined it as learned helplessness at the time.  More recently, his former colleague, Steve Maier, discovered that it wasn’t learned helplessness at all – it was learned control that allowed the brain to be adaptive about finding a solution that made the difference.  Our belief about our ability to control our environment – our efficacy – allows us to be productive.

We’ve all felt like we’re unable to find a bug that’s been plaguing us or been faced with a technical problem that we don’t know how to solve.  It also happens when we’re trying to get our code to work and realize the build is fundamentally broken by other developers, so it feels like we’re spending all our time debugging other developers’ code.  The feeling that we’re not getting our work done can be frustrating.

Efficacy Expectations

Most developers get a feel for how long things are going to take.  Even the most optimistic developer has a sense for the effort.  They may estimate it low, but they know their estimates are typically low.  If the estimate and the actual effort are relatively close – after scaling – we feel like we’re getting things done.  However, if our expectations and our actual productivity differ for too long, we’ll begin to lose sense of our efficacy.

Whether the estimate was wrong, there were unforeseen circumstances, or some mixture of the two, we’ll feel this as an inability to get things done, and that increases our risk of burnout.

Perception of Results

Our perception of inefficacy isn’t always about the expectations of our efficacy.  Sometimes it’s that we’re not perceiving our results in a way that’s consistent with our actual performance.  We run late on checking in the feature we signed up for – but we do so because we created a reusable framework that pulls three times as much work off the backlog.  We only count the feature we checked in – because, after all, that’s the work we did.  We don’t count the additional value of the elegant and reusable solution we found to the project.

If we fail to recognize the unique and special value of what we’re doing and instead minimize or forget we even did it, our actual results and our perceived results are out of alignment.

When this occurs for too long, we feel like we’re not effective at doing our part to pull the project forward.  We feel like we’re not as effective as we should be.

Mind the Gap

In the end, burnout is the gap between our expectations of our effectiveness and our perceived results.  It’s the place that we crawl into when we feel like we’re not good enough, we’re not doing enough, or others are getting results that are better than ours.  If we have lowered expectations and lowered perceived results, we’ll be fine – it’s only the mismatch that challenges our feelings of efficacy.

While we should seek a reasonable expectation for our efficacy and a reasonable recognition of our results that are grounded in reality, it’s even more important that the expectations and perceived results are in alignment.  We can have an inflated sense of power as long as we have an inflated sense of our results.

Converting Efficacy to Agency

Our efficacy isn’t the whole story.  Efficacy is a backwards-looking measure.  It’s what we have done in the past, though we live in the present.  The result is that we must move from what we have done to what we can do today and in the future, and that is our personal agency.

You can think of personal agency as a bathtub.  The results we accomplish, the support we receive, and the self-care we do all fill our bathtub up.  The demands that are placed on us drain our personal agency.  When our personal agency bathtub is empty, we’re in burnout.

The key to looking at burnout in this way is that we have the capacity to change all of these.  We can focus on high-value activities that drive more impactful results.  We can ask for the support we need – and, by and large, we’re likely to get it.  We can choose to do self-care or not.

While it may seem like we have little impact on the demands placed on us, we have a surprisingly high degree of control.  We may not be able to tell our manager no, we won’t do what they want, but we can negotiate on the deadline and what will be impacted by high-priority projects.  By negotiating on the deadline and the impacts to other deliverables, our demands can become manageable.

If you want to learn more about burnout and how it works, you can find out more in the book I coauthored with my wife, Extinguish Burnout: A Practical Guide to Prevention and Recovery.

While most people don’t want to be in burnout, occasionally, you’ll meet the person who feels like burnout is a badge of honor.  If they don’t have burnout, they’re not working hard enough.  In a recent conversation, I heard, “I’ve been working this way for 40 years, and I don’t think that I’ve got burnout.”  From one perspective, that’s great.  From another, it’s not.  It’s like a goal that wasn’t obtained.  (There’s a bit of irony in being burned out because you can’t be burned out.)

Burnout isn’t about how much you work – or don’t work.  It’s not about how full your calendar is or how many exotic trips you take.  Burnout is about how you perceive your results.  If you believe you’re meeting the expectations you should have, then you’ll be safe from burnout.  Work 20 hours a day, and you’ll be fine.  Sleep on a cot in your office, if you must.  If you feel like you’re making a difference.

Here’s a challenge.  Think back to the point in your life when you felt the busiest.  Maybe you were getting four hours of sleep and dividing your time between three different things – any two of which being more than most people can handle.  Did you feel burned out or energized?  I’m not saying that there wasn’t a bit of exhaustion and a chronic lack of sleep in the mix.  What most people realize is that they felt the most alive when they were active and engaged.

Being burned out doesn’t mean that you’ve managed to work hard enough, and now you’re enough.  Being burned out shouldn’t be a goal any more than being exhausted should be.  If you feel like you’re not trying hard enough because you’ve managed not to get burned out, you may have missed the point.

Burnout is the negative result of the mismatch between your expectations and perceived results, not some desirable vacation destination that only the select few get to go to.  Feeling like you’re missing out on something or didn’t do something well enough because you’re not there isn’t helpful.

The most engaged, lively, and productive people we know have learned – sometimes repeatedly – how to avoid and escape burnout.  That should be your goal, too.

There are some attitudes and perspectives that help make you resilient to burnout.  Others make it easier for you to deplete your personal agency (ability to get things done) and land in the state of burnout.  (Burnout being at least partially defined by your belief that you’re unable to change your situation.)  One of the most insidious of these attitudes is shame.  Shame robs you of your personal agency by shooting holes in your personal agency bathtub, thereby leading you to exhaustion of your personal agency and burnout.

Understanding Shame

Shame is the belief that you are bad.  This is different from you’ve done bad, which is guilt.  While the distinction can be covered in a few words, it’s often difficult to separate in our lives.  We believe that our behaviors define what we do, and if we’ve done bad, then we must be bad.  However, this is an unfair oversimplification.  If we do one good thing, it doesn’t make us a good person universally.  Neither should doing one bad thing make us a bad person.

Despite the simple logic, we often get hung up on the question, “How could I have done that?”  In the most condescending and judgmental tone that we have, the question reverberates through our consciousness with a resonance that’s hard to shake.

Shooting Holes

If our personal agency is viewed as a bathtub that is filled by results, support, and self-care and emptied by the demands are placed upon us that we accept, then shame shoots holes in the bathtub and allows our personal agency to leak out.  It’s difficult to accept our ability to do good in the world if we believe that we’re not good.  It’s hard to believe that we should be allowed the personal agency to make changes in the world.

Instead of our personal agency doing work through the demands placed on us by other people and ourselves, our agency disappears in frustration, conflict, and confusion.  The result is a more rapid loss of our personal agency and the onset of burnout.

Patching Holes

Of course, the easy solution to this loss of personal agency is to eliminate shame.  Once shame is removed, the holes in the bathtub of personal agency are patched, and the natural flow is restored.  However, it’s not as easy as snapping your fingers to get rid of shame.  The ability to separate what you have done from who you are – thus separating guilt from shame – is useful but not enough.

Recognizing that you’re not either good or bad but instead are – like all of us – a mixture of both can move things a bit further.  But, for most people, it’s still not across the goal line.  At the core of shame is self-judgement, and it is unfortunately much harder to get rid of.

Acceptance

The antidote to judgement is acceptance.  Unfortunately, you can’t just decide on self-acceptance if you’re unwilling or unable to accept others.  Acceptance – and lack of acceptance – seems to leak from one area of your life to other areas.  The more accepting you are of yourself, the more accepting you’ll become of others and vice-versa.  By fostering an attitude of acceptance, you minimize or eliminate judgement; and shame can’t survive without the self-judgement that fuels it.

To increase your acceptance of others and yourself, you can ask yourself, “What does it harm for them to be different than me?”  When judging yourself, you can ask, “Why must I be perfect?”  Our human condition is filled with variation.  With all of us imperfect humans, to not accept these things is a judgement that doesn’t match reality.

Shame accelerates the conditions for burnout.  Shame is a lack of acceptance and judgement of ourselves.  If we solve the judgement and acceptance problems, we vaporize shame and make it harder for burnout to grab ahold of us.