Burnt out ..?
I was reading an article in the Weekend Australian newspaper recently titled “Jakarta doctors losing battle and their lives”. The report written by Amanda Hodge and Chandni Vasandani, highlighted the plight of doctors and nurses working in hospitals during the current pandemic. One of the doctors referred to the strain they were under saying things were going crazy as they were so understaffed with doctors and nurses becoming infected with the virus.
Some of them had resigned and others having to go into isolation. This state of affair’s has also been seen in Nursing homes in Victoria, with a carer speaking to a broadcaster on radio 720 last week describing conditions as critical, with not enough staff to handle basic duties in many homes.
The long-term effects of stress involved in this work will ultimately lead to Career Burnout a painful syndrome identified back in the early 70’s by researchers who discovered new insights into its danger.
Today, burnout has become such a widespread problem that there is an official diagnosis for it. The World Health Organization recently classified burnout in its 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
Just how many people are feeling burned out on their work? A 2018 Gallup study of nearly 7,500 full-time employees found that 23 percent reported feeling burned out at work very often or always, while an additional 44 percent reported feeling burned out sometimes. Additionally, nearly 40% of workers are so burned out that they’re on the verge of quitting.
Fortunately research findings into its cause has led to innovative ideas for its prevention and cure.
Burnout is defined as a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in emotionally demanding situations.
Those who are at the highest risk of this syndrome are the very people who enter their professions full of high ideals, expecting their work to give their lives a sense of meaning, only to discover, after years – or sometimes only months on the job, they have begun to stop caring and are feeling increasingly depleted.
To make matters worse, people tend to respond to burnout in ways that only intensify their problem. Some quit their careers after gaining years of knowledge and skill, only to experience guilt and the feeling of failure. Many become cynical and climb the corporate or administrative ladder to escape, then becoming jaded managers and supervisors whose malaise saps their colleague’s energy and enthusiasm.
Others move from job to job developing a sense of hopelessness and failure. (When I worked in the public service for a short period in the 70’s I saw many examples of this problem.)
Burnout is not an isolated phenomenon that characterises a limited number of individuals. On the contrary it occurs very frequently in a wide range of people, especially those working with people in most of the human services and at all levels of management.
The cost of burnout
Burnout has detrimental psychological effects and is a major factor in low morale, absenteeism, tardiness, and high job turnover. It also plays a primary role in poor management and in the inadequate delivery of health, education, and welfare services. People who burn out develop a negative self-concept and negative job attitudes.
Their concern for the welfare and feelings for the people they work with becomes dulled and frequently they come to treat their clients, colleagues, and employees in detached, hostile, and uncaring ways.
I encountered a case of burnout when I was coaching a local sporting club where our President had the responsibility of running the local sports club and the football club affiliated to it. He was also involved in a local business group and was a shire councillor. On top of this he ran a large orchard in a difficult season.
Being a very capable person, people tended to nominate him to lead these organisations and ultimately accept the responsibility for their success. Unfortunately, in these circumstances a person who is a good organiser, energetic and capable, usually finishes up with all the responsibility and finds it difficult to get people to help him. To make matters worse Mike received very little recognition for his efforts and a fair degree of criticism because he couldn’t be everywhere at once!
Several years later he told me that at that time he felt the pressures, conflicts, demands, and too few emotional rewards and acknowledgement were causing him to feel detached and hostile to everyone including his family.
Burnout has three basic components
These components are identified by physical, emotional, and mental conditions. You cannot say “I’m burned out today” and be all fired up the next day. More needs to happen, in order, to get out of burnout than just the passage of time. The physical side of this syndrome involves a feeling of exhaustion with low energy chronic fatigue, and weakness. People in the process of burnout report accident proneness, increasing susceptibility to illness including colds and flu, frequent headaches, nausea, and muscle pains.
Other sufferers have eating and sleep disorders. The second component of burnout involves emotional exhaustion, with feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and entrapment. In extreme cases these feelings can lead to emotional breakdown, depression, and thoughts of suicide.
The third stage, mental exhaustion is characterised by the development of negative attitudes towards one’s self, work, and life itself. Burnout victims often report dissatisfaction with their work, sporting endeavours, social life and have a lowered self-concept; they feel inadequate, inferior, and incompetent and this is passed on to their colleagues at work.
Burned out professionals may come to see their clients, employees, patient’s, or students as aggregates of problems rather than individuals.
I had a friend who was a prison officer who was suffering from this condition. The burnout was possibly brought about by having to work for long periods and ‘doubling-up’ shifts because of poor management and staffing shortages. He once said, “There all just animals in a cage”. This surprised me because he had always been a tolerant person up to that time.
His negative attitude change was not helped as he had also developed a drinking problem that was part of his coping strategy, which only made matters worse. (contd. part 2)
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