Is it possible to break the cycle of burnout for good?
I At the age of 18 I suffered a burnout for the first time. I studied part-time, worked part-time and wrote on the side, which amounted to more than a full-time workload. Plus, I was partying most nights, wanted to make the most of my last student days – and needed to let off some steam.
I thought I could walk the tightrope pretty well, and in terms of output, I did. But one day, when I came to my office job, something in my tired response to my boss’s friendly question about my day made her look further.
I listed everything I was juggling – and the weight of it hit me. My manager immediately reassigned all my shifts except those I needed to pay my bills.
I am forever grateful to her for recognizing what I couldn’t see myself. I might have been able to manage my responsibilities, but I couldn’t keep this up much longer.
That time I avoided the worst burnout, but the burnout still came back regularly. I usually wave it off as just another busy time, egging myself on with mantras like “the only way out is through.”
But the cumulative toll hit at the end of 2020, and after six months of working almost around the clock, I broke down at my computer mid-sentence.
After coming to that brutal stop, I changed my life. I went to stay with my parents for a few months and worked on a short-term contract on a shift basis to regulate some parameters around my working hours. Then I moved to a smaller city for a slower pace.
Since then I have managed to keep burnout – for the most part – at bay. Every now and then I take one too many jobs, other responsibilities pile up and I find myself on the brink again.
Twelve years after my first experience with burnout, the cycle seems grimly predictable. Many of my friends also seem to be recovering from a bout of overwork and overwhelm, or are on the cusp of the next one. “I think I’m burning out again,” someone said grimly recently about an impending promotion.
Is this just the nature of modern life: doing our best to keep our heads above water between bouts of drowning? Or is it possible to break the cycle for good?
KAndi Wiens says yes. Now a senior fellow in the master’s program in medical education at the University of Pennsylvania, her own extensive experience left her with a lucrative career as a consultant to study solutions to burnout. In her first book, Burnout Immunity, Wiens shares how to recognize the signs of increasing overwhelm and break the cycle for good.
“It’s about making it very clear to yourself what your definition of success is, and where that definition comes from – and then challenging that,” she says as we connect over Zoom. “Is that the definition I want to live by for the rest of my life?”
Wiens grew up in poverty in rural Montana, with a family history of mental illness and alcoholism. She became the first in her family to go to college and supported herself by working three jobs.
The excitement Wiens felt about reaching such a high level, combined with external validation and the fear of sliding back into poverty, created a deeply ingrained work ethic. This led to her taking on higher level roles and more responsibility, even as she started a young family.
Like me, Wiens now traces her tendency to overwork to lessons she learned in childhood. For years we both took precautions and struggled to change.
In 2011, Wiens received a blood pressure reading of 200/110, which indicated a hypertensive emergency – associated with organ damage, failure and even death. Her doctor immediately prescribed medication and bed rest and warned her to go to the emergency room if she so much as developed a headache.
Despite herself, Wiens felt relieved: she finally had an excuse to sleep. Since then, she tells me, she has been on a mission to help people protect themselves from burnout and even develop lasting “immunity.”
Her health emergency was “incredibly painful,” partly because of the shame she felt about struggling. “The last thing I wanted to do was let someone down or let myself down,” Wiens says. “I worked very hard to get where I was. To give it all up because of my health, that was scary.”
But it led to a reckoning in her personal and professional life. Through her work, Wiens came into contact with the then emerging research on emotional intelligence and recognized its relevance for resilience to burnout. In 2013, she quit consultancy to delve into the subject full-time.
Although the term has been used frequently in recent years, burnout is an occupational phenomenon. recognized by the World Health Organization due to chronic stress in the workplace. It is characterized by feelings of exhaustion, negativity or cynicism about work and reduced effectiveness – but not everyone is equally susceptible to it.
In Wiens’ survey of chief physicians from 35 major hospitals, 69% reported stress levels that were severe, very severe, or “the worst possible.” But they showed no signs of burnout, or even seemed to be on the right track. The same pattern emerged when Wiens did further research and interviewed hundreds of people in high-stress occupations – suggesting the exciting possibility that some might have what she calls “burnout immunity.”
In Wiens’ survey of thirty financial professionals, one of them said that they loved their work and woke up feeling good every day. Another was at a breaking point and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” Wiens was shocked to discover that the two individuals worked in the same department of the same office, shared a manager and had virtually the same workload.
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“Different values, past experiences, personality traits and temperaments” all play a role in how we deal with stress, she says: “Some people are naturally more tolerant.”
But developing your emotional intelligence can help you cope. Cultivating knowledge about yourself and others, and learning to recognize and regulate your reactions, can buffer against burnout and break stress spirals.
For Wiens herself, it took “deep work” to reveal the early influences that drove her anxious performance and people-pleasing tendencies, and to identify the triggers that reliably stressed her out.
Armed with that clarity, Wiens learned breathing and mental “reframing” techniques to manage her nervous system in the moment. She credits the work of Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal for teaching her to identify when her stress is healthy and even productive—and how to prevent it from increasing.
Now Wiens regularly rates her level of overwhelm on a 10-point scale; a score of seven or higher constitutes a ‘distress zone’ from which she must take steps to get out. “I find it very comforting that when things get really stressful, I can remind myself: I’ve been stressed before, and I can get myself back,” she says.
Part of developing “burnout immunity” is better understanding and even befriending the stress so that it can be better managed and its impact limited. By paying more attention to the quality of my stress and its reliable triggers, I have been able to be a better boss for myself – just like my manager at age 18, who saw the writing on the wall before I did.
But it is difficult to implement these measures in workplaces where burnout is normalized or even rewarded.
“There is a belief in many professions that burnout is an inevitable part of success,” says Wiens. She remembers working with her consulting colleagues until midnight, sometimes over a glass of wine.
Now she looks back on herself as the metaphorical frog in boiling water, oblivious to the increasing heat. “My organization would have happily taken advantage of people like me, who are eager to give and give and give,” she says.
Sometimes, says Wiens, no amount of self-awareness is enough to protect you from burnout: the root cause is the workplace itself. “You can’t heal in the same place you get sick.”
Organizations need to take responsibility for chronic stress within their workforces and take meaningful steps to address it – not just organizing lunchtime yoga sessions, or “throwing out a survey,” says Wiens. “One of the main drivers is dysfunctional leadership.”
WIens’ research shows that aligning your work with your values is the key to combating burnout. Not everyone is able to work for themselves, follow their passion or take time off. But people with less flexibility can try to do this even in small ways, she says: “It’s about looking at the intersection between the work you love to do, what you can get paid for, what the world needs and where you are good at. bee.”
Wiens is already working on her next book, which will help people understand their individual circumstances and assess where the sacrifices they have made are not paying off.
She is convinced: it is “absolutely” possible to break the burnout cycle. Right now, she’s under as much stress as she’s ever been, but “I have the skills I need to deal with it,” Wiens says.
Sometimes I find myself walking the same tightrope I started walking when I was eighteen. But now, instead of doing everything I can to avoid falling, I’ve learned to recognize when I’m wobbling – and how to get off safely.
Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal Your Relationship with Work by Kandi Wiens was published on 23 April from Harper Business