As someone who has experienced burnout more than once, this is a question that wellbeing coach Janice Leeming has personally researched and worked hard to address.
One of the things that kept me going through the many twists and turns of my long career in the charity sector is my passion for making a difference – and I suspect I share this common denominator with many people who are driven to change and achieve things through their work. Passion can be a good thing and is associated with many positive outcomes, from reducing stress to empowering us to be more productive and achieve greater things. However, several studies have shown that what can be termed passion can also be associated with exhaustion and burnout. One of the reasons for this is, is that passion can produce a conflict between work and other life activities and as a result we cannot let go of the work activity and we drive our bodies and minds into exhaustion (1).
We live in a society where constantly being busy and productive and dare I say it ‘stressed’ can be seen to be a good thing. However, our nervous systems do not agree with this and the positive aspects of being under pressure, for a short period of time, become problems for us if the demands we put upon ourselves continue without a break. Indeed, we often associate mental ill health with stress, but many physical illnesses also have stress as a root cause (2).
One of my favourite models of wellbeing is the see-saw, credited to Dodge et all 2012. This model helps us to understand that our state of wellbeing is a constant balance between the demands we and others put on ourselves and the resources we have to be able to cope with those demands. These demands and resources include social, physical and psychological. In any given situation, we will have a unique mix of demands and resources going on, and, to avoid burnout, it is crucial that we find some balance between the two.
When I look back to my own experiences of burnout, it is clear that there were several factors at play each time, including my driving passion for making a difference, a determination to succeed (no matter what the challenges), a lack of acknowledgement about how things in my personal life were impacting my ability to juggle demands and an inability to detach from work situations I had no control over and had done my best to resolve. For each of us, the balance between demands and our resources to cope will be unique.
There are several things we can do to prevent burnout and the first one is to look at how we can increase our resources when our demands increase.
One of my personal favourites, in terms of resources, is the relaxation practices that come from yoga. Relaxation can be seen not so much as a state as a process, a series of levels of increasing depth. As we properly relax the whole body and breathe slowly and deeply, certain physiological changes occur: muscle tension is reduced, and there is a decrease in the activity of the sympathetic nervous system and an increase in parasympathetic activity. Even a few minutes of deep relaxation can reduce worry and fatigue more effectively than many hours of restless sleep (3).
Other resources we can build in can include (and there are many):
- Prioritising activities that bring us joy
- Having healthy boundaries in all aspects of our lives
- Eating nutritious foods
The second area we can look at is reducing the demands that we and others are placing on ourselves. It may be that we have so much going on in our personal lives that, for example, that extra committee role commitment we have just taken on has to be dropped.
Our response to managing our demands is going to be very individual. One of the things that help us work through our options is the 4 As of Stress Management, which shows us we can:
- Avoid the demand (by e.g. saying no to extra work)
- Adapt to the demand (by e.g. increasing our resources, changing the way we look at it)
- Alter the demand in some way (by e.g. working less hours, being assertive with other people’s behaviour)
- Accept the demand (if we are not able to do the above, then finding ways to accept and cope with it by e.g. talking to others and finding ways to sooth our emotions)
So good questions to ask ourselves in times of stress are firstly, how do I help myself by increasing my resources now? And, secondly, what can I do about the demands I, and others, have put on me at this time? We have a choice to ignore this balance between demands and resources, but as the see-saw model reminds us, this is likely to be at the expense of our own wellbeing and our ability to thrive.
References:
- Vallerand, Robert & Paquet, Yvan & Philippe, Frederick & Charest, Julie. (2010). On the Role of Passion for Work in Burnout: A Process Model. Journal of personality.
- Stress Management, Approaches for Preventing and Reducing Stress; A Harvard Medical School Special Health Report (2013)
- The New Book of Yoga, The Sivananda Yoga Centre
