What causes burnout?
What is burnout?
Burnout is a sense of complete overwhelm and exhaustion. It goes beyond the sense of tiredness at the end of a long day or week, to a feeling of pure emotional and physical exhaustion. The exhaustion coincides with feeling emotionally overwhelmed and unable to continue with the tasks assigned to you.
Why am I struggling with burnout?
Anyone can struggle with burnout, however, it is more common for certain people and in certain situations. Healthcare professionals often enter their job roles due to a desire to help others. It’s common for healthcare professionals to put the needs of others before their own needs. For some, this can stem back to early childhood where they may have learnt to keep others happy or to meet the needs of others. Working in a healthcare setting can become an appropriate outlet for this need, however, with certain stressors it can also become a recipe for burnout.
Burnout can occur in personal aspects of life, however, is most common in work settings and the focus of this blog is on workplace burnout.
As well as being a healthcare professional or someone who puts the needs of others before your own, factors that may make you more likely to experience burnout include:
- Difficulties with your role including:
- Having a high workload
- Feeling as though your job role changes frequently or as though you are unsure what your responsibilities are
- Feeling as though those around you fail to recognise your hard work or the effort you put in
- Difficulties with relationships at work including:
- Feeling isolated and a lack of peers who can offer you support
- A lack of support from those more senior to you, for example, managers or supervisors
- Certain personality traits including:
- Struggling to say no or tolerate feelings of having let someone down
- Being a perfectionist or a high achiever. This may also mean that you overcontrol situations and find it hard to delegate
- A lack of self-care:
- Prioritising work over everything else, including your own needs, relationships and self-care
- Not taking care of yourself physically, including not eating a balanced diet or getting enough sleep
- Wider life stressors including:
- Having other sources of stress in your life, for example, caring responsibilities or financial worries, which leave less headspace for work related stress
- Feeling out of control at work or in your personal life
How can I cope with burnout?
To cope with burnout it is important to identify the stressors that you face in your work and home life that might be contributing to your burnout and reshape areas of your life which are depleting you by developing new strategies to support your recovery and strengthen your resilience and wellbeing for the future. You may need to readjust your personal and workplace boundaries to protect your own wellbeing.
Coping with burnout can be debilitating and often requires support from others. This may be something that you find difficult, however, it is usually too large a burden to cope with alone.
Burnout UK was founded by psychologist Dr Julie Hannan and provides online courses for people to overcome and prevent burnout. Our courses are written by Psychologists and approved by the British Psychological Society.
