The road to burnout

Everyone's rushing around, everyone seems to be complaining about working too hard. No surprises then that more people are saying they're feeling burnt out. It applies to all lines of work: bankers, IT workers, advertisers, management consultants, lawyers, social workers, teachers. Even journalists. But what exactly causes burnout?

Some interesting insights in this piece from New York magazine with the great headline Can't Get No Satisfaction. It's a long read so make yourself some coffee and check it out because it's worth it.

It cites one piece of research which shows that burnout has little to do with overwork. Indeed, overwork is only one of the reasons. Burnout also comes from working in an unjust environment; working with little social support; working with little sense of control; working in the service of values we loathe; working for insufficient reward, whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback.

It also cites research suggesting that younger people burn out more often than older people. "This conclusion may seem counterintuitive, because we associate burning out somehow with midlife disillusionment. But not if we think of burnout as the gap between expectations and rewards. Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it's the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wall."

Also, married people tended to burn out less often than single people, as long as their marriages were ok. It was also more likely to hit childless people than people with kids.

So burnout is about the gap between what we expect, and what we actually get. And it happens to people who build their lives too much around their work.

And it's also driven by a sense of inefficiency which raises the question of whether emails, mobile phones, laptops and the BlackBerry (or CrackBerry) has made burnout more likely. The more we speed up, the more frustrated we get when we have to slow down.

Consider for instance this bit of research cited in the magazine:

"In 2005, a psychiatrist at King's College London did a study in which one group was asked to take an IQ test while doing nothing, and a second group to take an IQ test while distracted by e-mails and ringing telephones. The uninterrupted group did better by an average of ten points, which wasn't much of a surprise. What was a surprise is that the e-mailers also did worse, by an average of six points, than a group in a similar study that had been tested while stoned. That's right. Stoned. Those people were literally burned out, and they did better."

So how close are you to burnout? Does it have anything to do with your workload or is other stuff contributing? What are the best ways of avoiding burnout? Or does it just come with certain jobs?> December 11, 2006 http://blogs.theage.com.au:80/managementline/archives/2006/12/the_road_to_bur.html