Causes of Burnout and What we can do about it
The dynamic balance in the relationship between the demands made on an employee and his abilities and skills to meet these demands often forms the cause of the development of Burnout. As we can read in the article on our site about Flow, the greatest state of experience, a state of Flow occurs when the challenge and the ability to cope with the challenge are well-balanced. If our work is too easy and too simple we often see that we start to get bored and lose interest. When the challenge is big, but our skills and abilities are limited, we often witness the occurrence of fear, worry, and frustration. As we can read in the article How do our body and our mind react to stress?, such feelings may be strong enough to trigger the stress reaction. The Stages 1 and 2 are clear examples of the situation in which the Burnout patient will find himself when for a long period of time, he experiences lack of the proper balance. When we have a further look at the causes, we must study the factors that cause the challenge to be too big or our abilities and skills to be too limited. Factors that increase the chance of Burnout are:
- Personal Factors
Character qualities like perfectionism, inability to know and protect one's limitations, having high expectations, idealism, preparedness to give, being prepared to care, loyalty, a desire to stand out. Other factors that may increase stress in the personal field are: problems in one's private life, financial worries, health problems, poor interpersonal relationships, the loss of loved ones, and leading an empty life.
- Work situation and the nature of work
Boring work, having no influence on one's working conditions, insufficient support by colleagues and superiors, bad management, a heavy work load, irregular working hours, lack of clarity as regards to tasks and responsibilities, the intensity of the work, a lack of balance in the relationship of the employee and his client (a teacher that gives much and receives little, working with unpleasant patients in health care), the person's attitude towards sick leave, bureaucracy, etc.
What can we do about Burnout?
We can reduce stress by decreasing our work load or by increasing our ability to deal with stress. Reducing the stressors is a hard thing to do, because usually we cannot control them. Unfortunately, our work load can only be decreased by other people. Whatever we may want, usually we have no control over things like work pressure, our colleagues, and the interpersonal relationships. Many causes have to do with the organization structure, culture, values, work situation, and nature of work. In this field, there is an important job to be done for organizations and employers. They should approach stress by means of system - oriented thinking instead of process - oriented thinking. This means that stress should be looked at in the context of the organization and not as the problem of an individual.
But the individual himself can also do something. Each and every individual can do something to be better able to cope with stress and to reduce the chance of Burnout. In the first place, it is important to organize your life in such a way that you can easily deal with stress. Good food, regular exercise, time for rest and relaxation, social activities, and not making your life too complicated are things that everybody can take care of. Moreover, we think that there is a good supportive role for techniques like Meditation when it comes to the prevention and the recovery of Burnout. Read Meditation, a great way to deal with Burnout to learn how Meditation can help you with Burnout.
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'The "don't care" attitude of mind is a good way to relax, but better still is the complete transmutation of thought, changing fear into confidence, hate into love, anger into tolerance, and anxiety into peaceful trust in Absolute Law. In this way a balance of the "opposites" is acquired and one may tread the middle path of peace.'
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