Pressure, stress, burnout.
They’re all pretty much the same, aren’t they?
Actually, while there are similarities, they are very different.
It’s helpful to think about pressure, stress and burnout as sitting on a continuum. If we understand the differences between the three, it helps us identify where we, and the people around us, might be at any given moment.
So, thinking about pressure, we can consider the things that drive or motivate us to complete a task: a deadline, perhaps, or a target we want to hit. Deep-seated unconscious motivations, such as competence motivation, can play into pressure actually being helpful, priming us for task performance and completion.
Stress can be thought of as the point where that pressure starts to become less helpful. Perhaps the deadlines are piling up, a sense of control begins to dissipate, and rather than motivating us, the pressure tips over into something burdensome, overwhelming and uncomfortable.
The human stress reaction is intended to help us when we encounter threats and danger, to equip us to survive by activating our fight or flight instinct.
Here’s the thing, though. While that system is brilliantly evolved to help us confront and survive mortal peril, it isn’t the best strategy for dealing with a project deadline. Fighting or running away from a deadline probably isn’t going to help much.
Burnout can be thought of as the wearing out of our mental and physical resources, where our stress response, our survival system, has been activated over such an extended period that the system becomes fatigued and exhausted. As Maslach and Leiter (2016) put it, burnout is “a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job.”
In terms of understanding how each of these shows up and impacts us, it helps to understand who we are. And by that I don’t mean what our name is, but what makes us tick, what’s important to us.
As alluded to above, we have deep-seated motivations which move us towards and away from outcomes and behaviours. These drives can be very powerful, and our desire to fulfil them, whether that’s feeling competent at a task, accepted by others, or safe and secure, can be accompanied by anxiety and stress when we can’t satisfy them.
At a more conscious level, we can also consider the impact of our values, the guiding principles that shape how we want to move through the world, how we want to behave, interact and conduct ourselves. Just like fulfilling our unconscious drives, acting in line with our values helps us feel balanced, settled and at ease with ourselves.
Great, so to manage burnout all we need to do is know ourselves and then fulfil the things that are important to us.
Ah, hold that thought for a second.
The challenge is that our world doesn’t work like that. None of us is an island, and just as we impact the world around us, the world around us impacts us. This is crucial to understanding how burnout develops.
Consider again who you are, what’s important to you, and why you might sign up for a certain job or role. There’s a good chance you want that role to help you be your true self, to live through the things that make you, you.
Now imagine that capacity being diminished or undermined by the very role you took on: resources stretched, your impact limited, the workload becoming overwhelming. The psychological contract you entered into, what you thought was going to be the case, turns out to be very different in reality.
This idea of burnout through “moral injury” was advanced by Kopacz, Ames and Koenig (2019). They explored the gap between what happened and what should have happened, and how that gap challenges our values and norms, giving way to painful emotions such as shame, guilt, self-condemnation, feelings of betrayal, difficulty trusting and difficulty forgiving.
Being who we want to be, and fulfilling our motivations and values, is a challenge because the world around us doesn’t always support our pathway to it.
So, what can we do?
There are helpful activities we can adopt: relaxation exercises, seeking support from others, looking after ourselves with good nutrition and rest.
However, without being flippant: you cannot yoga your way out of burnout.
The inability, perceived or otherwise, to fulfil core parts of who we are cannot simply be magicked away by downward dog.
So, what else can we do?
Interestingly, tools from evidence-based psychological therapies can help. Lorente, Vera and Peiró (2021) concluded that reframing could support nurses’ wellbeing and resilience against the backdrop of the pandemic. Reframing, finding and developing different perspectives, perhaps on how, even with the challenges, we’re still able to live through some of the important aspects of who we are and want to be, can be helpful.
I would go further than this, though, and propose that managing and mitigating burnout is not simply down to the individual. The context in which the burnout happens needs to be understood and addressed too.
And that, I submit, places a responsibility on leaders to take action on the organisational and system factors feeding into burnout.
I would challenge leaders to lean into doing things differently: innovating, collaborating and developing new ways of solving problems, even when that means ceding some power, influence, budget or control. Proper, open and honest communication channels, informed by empathy, must be built and maintained to develop trust and to disarm disengagement and cynicism.
None of this is easy. It takes skill, self-management and compassion. But then, who ever said that leadership was easy?
The impacts of not effectively mitigating burnout are plain to see. The imperative for action, I would submit, is equally clear.