What Is and How to Recover From Burnout

Burnout refers to a state of emotional and physical exhaustion that results from poorly managed workplace stress.

The term ‘burnout’ was first used in literature to describe healthcare professions; however, ‘burnout’ is now recognized as a form of occupation stress that is not industry specific.

Considering this, the first condition for ‘burnout’ is that it is work related. Although unemployed clients may also experience high levels of stress, their experience is not classified as ‘burnout.’

Occupational burnout is experienced in three dimensions:

1. Fatigue

• Tired even though they get enough sleep, or can’t sleep or rest enough

• Feel like you are overstretched or overwhelmed by the amount of work

• Lack of energy for tasks that require emotional or physical input

• Lack of motivation for work-related and everyday tasks

• Huge amount of effort needed to complete tasks

2. Cynicism about work

• Feeling disheartened, discontent, or disillusioned with your work

• Not being invested in the work

• Feeling unhappy with your accomplishments

• Disconnecting from your colleagues

3. Feelings of inefficacy

• Feeling that you are being less efficient, like it takes longer to complete same tasks

• Feeling that you produce poor-quality work, or are poorly suited to do your job

Scientifically Proven Treatments

Fortunately, there are several things you can do at home to recover from burnout. To recharges, you must take a break from work and participate in other activities with the following properties:

• They have beneficial consequences.

• They promote good health and habits.

• They foster supportive relationships.

The best way to counteract the cost of work is self-care. Specifically, you should focus on your wellbeing first. The importance of self-care is simple when we return to the battery metaphor. If your battery is not fully charged, then you cannot provide enough energy to their work and life responsibilities.

By improving your wellbeing, you will become more resilient to workplace stress.

Promoting self-care can be difficult especially when coupled with bad habits, such as working overtime, responding to work messages or texts after hours, and saying yes to everything, resulting in an unreasonable workload.

Activities that can support burnout work recovery include:

• Low-cost, Downtime activities:

These are activities that are not outcome driven or productive, require little effort, and are purely enjoyable. Examples are coloring, watching tv, napping or simply laying down on the couch.

Low-cost activities will improve your physical vigor and cognitive liveliness, but not feelings of recovery.

• Social activities:

These include social interactions with friends and family. The goal of these social interactions is to develop healthy support networks to protect clients from stress.

Social activities improved physical vigor, cognitive liveliness, and recovery.

• Physical activities:

Regularly taking part in sports can reduce the harmful effects of stress. Exercising in a group or with friends can also foster social relationships and encourage a healthy sleeping pattern.

• General health and needs:

Satisfying other important drives such as eating and sex. Eating a healthy diet, rather than eating irregularly or unhealthily, will contribute to an overall feeling of wellbeing. Enjoying sexual activities with your partner will help foster feelings of love, intimacy, and support. Other activities that can help promote general health include meditation and enough sleep.

Daily recovery is vital

Overwhelmingly, research suggests that daily recovery efforts are more important than waiting for the weekend or a vacation.

In other words:

• More frequent breaks are better than one long annual vacation.

• Daily recovery periods are more important and effective than weekly, or less frequent, recovery periods.

Put your smartphone away

Burnout recovery is hampered by work–home interference, which is when our home and work needs conflict. Smartphone use after hours put people at risk of work–home interference, specifically:

• Receiving text messages about work after work hours

• Actively checking work email after work hours

If you use your work phone after hours you are more likely to experience work–home interference and struggle with burnout recovery. If you can ‘disengage’ from work, then you were able to relax.

If you were wondering, avoid syncing your smartwatch with your work email; it will have the same deleterious effects.

Other strategies

Other recommended strategies known to assist with burnout recovery include the following:

• Detach from work. Remove yourself mentally and physically from work after work has ended. At the end of the day, close your laptop and walk away.
  

• Deploy coping strategies that directly target a stressful situation, rather than coping strategies that aim to change feelings about a situation. These are known as problem-based coping strategies and emotion-based coping strategies, respectively. Avoidance strategies such as ignoring the situation are extremely unhelpful.
  

• Employees who used compensation strategies to cope with negative job reviews were better able to cope with workplace stress. Compensation strategies include relying on other people for help (e.g., forming a daily writing group), using technology (e.g., adding reminders to their calendars), and learning new skills.
  

• Promote good healthy habits, such as a healthy diet, regular exercise, and enough sleep.
  

• Meditation
  

• Prayer and Attending religious ceremonies and support groups

How Long Does It Take to Recover?

It’s difficult to estimate the time needed to recover from burnout.

In a study aimed at improving burnout recovery, the intervention results showed positive effects (Hahn, Binnewies, Sonnentag, & Mojza, 2011). Participants in the treatment group received training about the importance of self-care, recovery from burnout, goal setting, time management, how to disengage psychologically from work, and other strategies (the full program is described in Hahn et al., 2011).

Compared to baseline measurements taken before training, participants who received training showed the following:

• One week after the second training session, recovery scores were higher, quality of sleep was better, and self-efficacy scores were higher.
  

• Three weeks after the second training session, recovery scores had plateaued, quality of sleep improved further, self-efficacy improved further, negative affect was lower, and perceived stress was lower.

The difficulty with an intervention study is that recovery was aided through an artificial environment (i.e., the study design itself). Naturalistic studies show more variability in burnout recovery because employees are not actively treating their burnout through some type of intervention. In some instances, employees still report feeling burnout even after one year, and sometimes even after multiple years.

A Look at the 6 Recovery Stages

Stage 1: Admitting there is a problem

At this point, you realise that something was wrong. You feel tired and overwhelmed and displays psychological and physical signs of burnout. These symptoms continue to escalate, and with feedback from family and friends, you come to realise that you are experiencing burnout.

Stage 2: Distancing from work

After recognising that work was problematic, you take a break from work. This break can be psychological and physical. For most people, this break is framed as sick leave, but sometimes even resignation.

Stage 3: Restoring health

During the third stage, you might need to sleep excessively; longer periods in a single sitting or frequent naps. Besides sleep, engaging in other low-cost activities and not wanting to complete tasks that are too draining. After feeding these physical needs, you might want to do things purely for the ‘fun’ of it. You start to reengage with their hobbies and enjoy physical activities.

Stage 4: Questioning values

By now, you might be reflecting on your old values and taking efforts to replace these with new efforts. You are questioning what you think is important and why, and then find meaning in new values. One common change during this stage is that most people place more emphasis on their health.

Stage 5: Exploring work possibilities

During the fifth stage, a lot of people work hard to find job opportunities that are aligned with their new values. The time taken to find a satisfactory work environment differs a lot, so respect your own journey.

Stage 6: Making a break, making a change

Some people will just need a break, some will change jobs, others might completely change the career. There is no right or wrong answer, and we encourage you to find what is best for you!

A Final Say From the Team

Building our awareness and our ability to respond quickly to signs of burn-out - a.k.a our Emotional Fitness - is essential, but not easy.

We all know we should eat more veggies and less junk food and that we should watch less Netflix and go for more walks. But despite our knowledge and good intentions, we all struggle to do the things we know will help - it takes a lot of practice and discipline.

This is why we created Soar.

If you want to get rid of burn-out and accelerate your professional growth, join one of our groups!