when chronic stress becomes burnout
While burnout can be an intensely isolating experience, the feeling of being burnt out at work is about more than an individual issue. Burnout doesn’t just describe an individual condition, it describes a relationship that is in trouble.
Our relationships with our work are not one-sided. When they are healthy there is a sense of balance between what we’re giving and what we’re getting back. We bring our selves, our time, our experience and expertise, our attention and our efforts. In return, we get a sense of satisfaction, opportunities for growth and learning, support through challenges, connection with other people, institutional structures that contain and support the work, and pay that allows us a level of financial security and the ability to have a meaningful and fun life outside of work. If you’re feeling burned out—this may not be a sign that you just need to take a break or a bubble bath. It can also be a sign that something is off in the relationship.
If you’re looking at changing your relationship with work and shifting dynamics that create burnout, you might find the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) assessment and associated tools helpful. This is a resource created by Dr. Beth Hudnall Stamm, an internationally recognized traumatic stress researcher, to support healthcare workers in assessing and maintaining their own mental health in highly stressful work environments.
While the ProQOL was designed around healthcare work, its discussion of burnout can resonate with alot of work (paid and unpaid) that involves caring relationships, including parenting, educational labor, and organizing work. The ProQOL resource on burnout explains: “People struggling with burnout often have very high workloads, have few opportunities for rest, or are working in unsupportive environments. They often feel unappreciated or that their efforts make no difference.” The ProQOL assessments can help with identifying the unique factors that are contributing to your increased sense of burnout. This might include:
reduced feelings of satisfaction & efficacy in your work;
a sense of low support from others in your work or personal community;
fatigue around being constantly asked for more than you can give;
secondary traumatic stress;
or moral distress around social or institutional barriers to doing a good job.
When we identify problems in the relationship, we can take steps to fix them—advocating for increased supports, removing barriers to effective and satisfying work, creating stronger boundaries, processing intense experiences, and challenging policies and practices that go against our values. We can also take a look at the problems that aren’t responsive to change strategies, and evaluate our other options within that context.
I particularly like the ProQOL handout on perceived support, which lists out questions and possible steps to increase your feeling of being supported in your work, and the handout on moral distress, which highlights organizational factors that can increase or decrease the risk of moral distress. They also highlight that there is a direct relationship between organizational power and moral distress for health care workers—the more decision-making power providers have to address challenges in their work environment, the more protective the environment is against moral distress. Part of recovering from burnout might also mean looking at power dynamics and exploring new ways to increase your sense of freedom & meaningful control around your work.
If you’re feeling burnt out, know that you’re not alone. While you might feel stuck and isolated now, beginning to ask these questions and engage supports is the first step towards restoring your feelings of interest, satisfaction, and interconnection at work.