Is Burnout Just About Work?

How stress from one aspect of life can cascade to other parts of life, and how to manage it all.

While the World Health Organisation defines burnout as caused by chronic, unmanaged work-related stress, the reality is that burnout can occur in other areas of our lives.

Burnout is a form of exhaustion caused by constantly feeling overwhelmed.

It’s a result of excessive emotional, physical, and mental stress over a long period of time. This stress can come from work, school, parenting, our intimate relationships, or from being a caregiver, just to name a few.

Burnout in general results in feelings of emotional exhaustion that then lead to negative attitudes towards oneself and others.

For example, ‘school burnout’ results in cynical attitudes toward school, feelings of inadequacy as a student, and exhaustion at school, while ‘parental burnout’ results in overwhelming exhaustion, feeling like you’re not “good enough” as a parent, a loss of pleasure and fulfilment in your parenting role, and emotional distancing from your child/children.

We don’t exist in silos.

When one part of life is off track with unmanaged stress it starts impacting all parts of life.

Chronic stress from different areas of our lives can lead to burnout elsewhere. For example, a study by Pines and colleagues found that job and parenting stressors led to job-related burnout, and marital stressors lead to couple burnout. Stress from one area of our life can spill over into another.

This becomes even more evident when aspects of your life seem to co-exist (such as working from home and parenting). We all need plans to make how we are operating in all aspects of life sustainable.

Tips for Helping Burnout

Burnout is about the systems around you; your workplace or your caregiving demands. The WHO refers to workplace burnout as a ‘workplace phenomenon’ because it is the workplace that needs to be addressed. The systems need to change - by changes in communication, prioritization, work demand, relationships, autonomy etc. Learn a step by step process to recover from burnout in our new course.

Regardless of what aspect of your life is being affected by chronic stress and burnout, there are things you can do to manage and build your capacity to deal with demands.

Here are some tips to get started:

Do something that brings you joy once a day and do it for at least 15 minutes.
Prioritize sleep.
Learn and practice mindfulness. This gets you to focus on yourself and how you’re feeling. You can practice mindfulness by focussing on anything in your environment like your left big toe!
Get moving…. Even if it’s a 15 minute walk around the block.
Find support in friends, family, co-workers or a therapist to discuss your feelings.

If you would like to learn more about what you can do as a leader to help yourself and lead your team or to create meaningful team and system change for Burnout Prevention and Recovery, check out our workshops here.

Consciously design your day, or somebody else will.

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Inspired by….

Bask, M., and Salmela-Aro, K., (2013). Burnout out to drop out: Exploring the relationship between school burnout and school dropout. European Journal of Psychology of Education 28:511-528

Gerain, P., and Zech, E. (2019). Informal Caregiver Burnout? Development of a Theoretical Framework to Understand the Impact of Caregiving. Frontiers in Psychology 10:1748

Mikolajczak M., et al (2021). Beyond Job Burnout: Parental Burnout!. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 25(5):333

Pines, A.M., et al (2011). Job Burnout and Couple Burnout in Dual-earner Couple in the Sandwiched Generation. Social Psychology Quarterly 74(4):361-386

Swit, C.S., and Breen, R. (2022). Parenting During a Pandemic: Predictors of Parental Burnout. Journal of Family Issues. January 2022. doi:10.1177/0192513X211064858