Let's Talk About Burnout
Burnout is not a character flaw
Let’s talk about burnout. What it is, and what it is not.
Burnout is not a character flaw. Certainly, burnout adversely affects normal functioning but is not in itself an ‘abnormal’ response. It is our mind and body resisting what harms them but being pushed on regardless. As many aspects of our lives lean towards the “unhuman”, a human’s body and mind will respond by malfunctioning. For example, we live in an age of distraction where our energy and focus are scattered. This itself disrupts endocrine function and overloads the nervous system, making us fatigued and ineffective. The World Economic Forum in 2019 called burnout a “pandemic”, and noted that numbers are increasing, despite the large amounts of time and other resources invested in companies’ health management efforts. There are many powerful forces that are driving burnout: the workplace, our routines, work from home, social media, physical lifestyle, and emotional patterns.
The burnout crisis is entirely unsurprising.
In 2019, the World Health Organization classified burnout as an occupational phenomenon characterized by:
1 – Feelings of energy depletion and exhaustion
2 – Increased mental distance from others, one’s job or feelings of negativity
3 – Reduced professional efficacy
Burnout depletes our physical, cognitive, and emotional vitality, sometimes to the point we don’t feel human anymore. Just a cog in a machine. The negative effects inevitably affect life outside work too, and cause long-term changes to the body. Burnout is a process; it does not happen suddenly, but the warning signs can be easy to ignore as they only become paralyzing when the burnout is severe. What takes place is more like a silent crumbling then shattering, fraying then snapping- slowly and then all at once, and often invisible to others until the damage is already disastrously advanced.
In the coming weeks we will be discussing how to identify your risk of burnout, and the steps you can take to prevent and reverse this miserable condition. My work has shown that preventing burnout requires three complementary pillars:
Getting to the root
Mind and body working together, not fighting
A design mindset to our life, each day
Let’s work through these systematically so that we can thrive however difficult circumstances may be. The fact that there is near-universal agreement that burnout is a growing problem despite increasing knowledge and engagement suggests (even with measurement effects) that the factors that cause burnout are substantially stronger than efforts to mitigate it. Clearly the world will continue to throw up imperfect situations, so how do we heal and thrive regardless? The Indestructible project focuses on creating deep mastery of our own mind-body systems, so that we can build ourselves to be resilient to burnout, and live our lives with energy and purpose.
Here are some introductory resources to begin exploring:
Articles
Videos
Burnout: How Addiction to Distraction is Eroding our Capacity
I look forward to assisting you on this journey.
Have a lovely weekend,
Natalie