Three Things We All Do That Lead to Burnout and How to Break the Cycle
Burnout, bore out, chronique fatigue, absenteeism, and stress are household words now, common incidences with far-reaching consequences. What if we could break the cycle?
Image: JumpStory
We humans are such a funny species, so prone to a persistent naïve belief that we are invincible—which we then combine with the systematic downgrading of the notion of rest. And we are notoriously bad at estimating the real time it takes to do anything.
It's an explosive combination, which makes us all prone to burning out, both at work and at life in general. What can we do about it?
don’t Burnout: Acknowledge vulnerability
The real issue is not so much about being invincible as it is believing we are lucky. Eighty percent of the population has a cognitive bias called optimism bias, which means we assume that something bad would never happen to us. Bad things only happen to others. This bias helps us live long and healthy lives. When it's not leading to some sort of risky behavior.
According to cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot, "We're more optimistic than realistic." Her studies show that brains fail at "integrating bad news about the future."
I don't think we need studies to prove that bad things do happen to us. Like burnout. Running out of gas. Seventy-five percent of people have felt burned out at work, and forty percent have felt so during the pandemic in particular, according to a FlexJobs and Mental Health America survey of more than 1,500 people.
That's nearly as many as those who think it will never happen to them. Maybe it's time to consciously get realistic. And consciously acknowledge that we are vulnerable. It’s a fine balance to find, being realistic without giving into the nasty draw of pessimism.
Don’t Burnout: Take rest seriously
How many of you have ever thought that sleeping is a waste of time? Connected images of rest with unproductiveness? I have. There's so much I want to do. If I could just recuperate those eight hours, imagine what I could get done? And the time I would have to spend with friends—now that we can again(!)—eating and sipping wine late into the night. Surviving on a caffeine drip.
Without even getting into all the other reasons people don't rest enough—like stress, sleep disorders, not taking time to wind down—let's just focus on how so many of us simply neglect our sleep. We deprive ourselves of it, not getting enough within any given 24-hour period. Or we desynchronize it, forcing our body to be awake (or asleep) at times that are out of synch with our own circadian rhythm.
When we have enough sleep, alertness and reaction times will vary about ten percent as the body passes through natural peaks and valleys throughout the day. Sleep deprivation and desynchronization increase these variations.
The thing is, we can’t train our bodies to tolerate sleep deprivation or desynchronization like we can train our muscles or cardiovascular system.
We have to rest. Or else we get physically tired. We get socially tired. And after a while, we don't even realize we're tired. This is known as “cognitive fatigue" and results in reduced alertness, slowed reaction time, and impaired decision-making.
Cognitive fatigue affects everyone. Psychology Today explains it as "an accumulation of too much: Too many decisions. Too much work (in not enough time). Too many interruptions, demands, and shifts in attention. Too many things going on without time to pause and restore." What happens? Basic mental tasks become difficult, concentration, forgetfulness, irritated, overwhelmed, headaches, tension, increased heart rate, disconnected. The brink of burnout.
To avoid burning out, we need rest. On a regular basis. Take it seriously.
Don’t Burnout: Plan on not being able to plan
I know I'm not alone. Setting out the best laid plans, mapping that project out in time with a gantts and colors and deadlines and task lists. Only to have it all shot to hell in the first week.
In 1977, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined the terms "planning fallacy" to describe how we tend to underestimate the amount of time it takes to complete a task. We're crappy at considering how long it's taken before, and we assume, thanks to our optimism bias, that there won't be delays. Then we add on plain old wishful thinking.
This crushes projects. Inaccurate time estimate are the primary cause in 25 percent of failed project according to the Project Management Institute's 2018 "Pulse of the Profession" report.
To get planning right, we need some sort of reference class, for which the outcome is known, to assess the distribution of outcomes for that class coming up with a class average, then add an intuitive estimation, and assess the degree to which the type of information which is available in this case permits accurate prediction of outcomes, and finally adjust toward the average of the reference class.
Yeah, that paragraph lost me too. Here's this biohacker's guide to planning:
Plan on not being able to plan accurately. Add time. Systematically. Then add some more.
Ask someone else to estimate the time for you. A number of research studies have shown that we're a lot better as estimating how long it takes someone else to do something.
Attend to your daily chronobiology: there are times your cognitive ability and mood are high, and times when they are low. Plan during the low points, when you're less optimistic and potentially more realistic. You'll know when it's time, you'll feel unfocused and tired.
If you are a tracker at heart, measure your estimates and record the conditions in which you made them to find out when you are most accurate.
Breaking the Burnout Cycle in a Nutshell
In the end, it's all about awareness and accepting who we are intrinsically, with compassion and perhaps a little lightness of being. So before the burnout cycle gets you:
Acknowledge that you are vulnerable, when that optimism is not serving you.
Take rest very seriously. Sleep. Relax. Take time off.
Plan on being a crappy planner. Give yourself more time.
“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”