Beating burnout
We’ve never met at least I don’t think we have but I bet I have a good idea of how yesterday went for you and how today’s already panning out.
From the moment we wake to the time we eventually fall asleep we face a daunting list of things that need to be done. From the first electronic chimes of the alarm telling us to get up to the first blue flickering of our phones we face a torrent of information, messages, notifications, emails all demanding our attention and our energy. Our minds start to swirl in a soup of decisions, things we need to remember to do, the things we never got to yesterday but should have and finally when we collapse exhausted at the end of the day we are left thinking and feeling:
- I didn’t get anything like as much done as I’d hoped
- I lived today mostly focussed on what others want from me and not what I needed
- Tomorrow I will likely live this all again
Unless you’re one of my coaching clients chances are we’ve not yet met. So how do I know this is you? Because these factors presenting us with a very real prospect of burnout are reaching epidemic proportions around the world.
In a survey by job aggregator Indeed [1] burnout is on the rise. In 2021 52%, over half the survey respondents said they had experienced burnout up from 43% pre pandemic. Millennials are the worst affected generation with 59% saying they have or are experiencing burnout and Gen Z are not far behind.
Burnout resulting in lost employee engagement, sickness, absence, involuntary turnover and absenteeism is estimated to cost around £190bn, yes that’s right billion dollars annually.[2]
Researchers at the University of California identified demand overload, lacking control in the workplace, poor reward systems, a socially toxic work environment, inequity and conflicts in values as six contributing factors to this worrying statistic.
And the price of burnout falls unequally. Research shows as the pandemic struck women were significantly more likely to give up on what they’d achieved in order to cope with the additional responsibilities they’d acquired through caring responsibilities.
It’s a poor joke to say the only person who ever got everything they needed completed by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.
The rest of us are not so lucky. For years we have fallen for a seductive antidote called efficiency. The allure that we can live and compete in a more machine-like way, to eliminate downtime, to stay on task for longer, to remove distractions, to be more focussed. That the reason we’re not good enough is because we’re not as good as machines that threaten to replace us. The result is all too often finding ourselves finishing work exhausted and yet rarely with that sense of completion. We return home even if these days that means stepping outside the home office, lacking all the energy we want to give to those who love us as we extend ourselves over and over. The Japanese coined the term Karoshi. It’s used to describe sudden death, often of people relatively young from exhaustion and overwork[3] . Though difficult to measure it’s estimated that 20,000 people in Japan die in this way. Sobering stuff.
When there’s just more than can fit in 24 hours, up comes the second strategy we have been taught will save us that’s called prioritisation. Ordering and structuring our work helps to a degree but it’s a false miracle cure. Unless we are absolved of responsibility and accountability for the things that don’t get done because they are not urgent then we are never truly at peace because we know deep inside that there are little bombs everywhere that could go off any second and when that happens, people will look around to us and say why didn’t you see that was going to happen?
No-one has yet shown us how we can bend the rules of time. We know living this way is bad for us but learning to be more efficient will only ever get us so far. We need new strategies to avoid burning ourselves to destruction.
We cannot create more hours in the day. But the thing that drives us and keeps the show on the road is energy.
We cannot make the days longer, but we can learn to harness our own energy and that of others around us to make the hours count for more.
We cannot stop the world from asking more of us as leaders, workers, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, but we can learn that different types of things we do add or deplete our own sources of energy and that if we organise ourselves with the unique combination that fires us up as individuals we can achieve more, with a greater sense of satisfaction without trying to bend the rules of time.
Instead of waiting for efficiency and prioritisation to come to our rescue we can learn to master and take leadership of our energy. We can learn how to harness our creative energy to see possibilities instead of lists of endless tasks. We can become collaborators through which we combine our energy with that of others to craft a more explosive and effective dynamic. And as leaders of people we can choose to inject catalytic energy into the teams we lead, the spark that enables everyone to bring their own unique brand of “smart” to the table, allowing no ounce of available energy to go to waste.
And we can do it all in way that is sustainable, living to our values and that gives us deep joy.
This is the journey of breaking free of burnout to mastering energy
Let me help you become Better Every Day
https://oncehub.com/ianbrowne
[1] Indeed Study Shows That Worker Burnout Is At Frighteningly High Levels: Here Is What You Need To Do Now (forbes.com)
[2] https://www.hoganassessments.com/blog/employee-burnout-in-the-workplace-covid-19-pandemic/#:~:text=Burnout%20has%20a%20major%20cost,much%20as%20%24190%20billion%20annually.
[3] https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l4774/rr-0
