Issue 8 |đĄThe Ultimate Guide to Avoiding Burnout: Science-Backed Strategies for Stress Management
Neuroscience can explain why this happens so often, and how we can use our biology to overcome it.
đ¨ The Big Idea: We owe it to ourselves - and the people we lead - to better understand Burnout and how to avoid it
đź The Big Picture:Â What Burnout is and why itâs happening so much these days
đ The Business Case:Â The shocking cost of Burnout to the U.S. Economy | The startling stat that can give us a quick win in the war against exhaustion
đ§ What To Do Next to avoid Burnout: Close your stress âappsâ every day
đ§ What To Do Next if you feel Burnout coming on: Follow the S.I.E.S.T.A.S. Method
đ Key Takeaway:Â Burnout is a slow-moving disaster for individuals and organizations. Follow these guidelines to prevent Burnout in yourself and the people under your care
đŹ Go Deeper: Take this Two-Minute Test | Listen to this Podcast with Chris Bailey Â
đş Pop Culture Parting Shot:Â Youâre not alone - Don Draper, Elon Musk, and Arianna Huffington have all burned out
đ Reading Time: 5 Minutes
đ¨ The Big Idea
Burnout could be the official word of 2023 (and of this decade, honestly). Despite its prevalence, most people donât know what it is nor what to do to prevent it.
According to the World Health Organization, Burnout results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
This framing is crucial because it underscores a key point: the ubiquity of Burnout is as much a failure of company leadership as it is a problem faced by overworked individuals.
While management practices are partly to blame, so too is modern life. Neuroscience can explain why we are so ill-suited for the low-level but chronic stress we face today. But it can also point to potential solutions.
This knowledge will be valuable if you suffer from some of these symptoms. Itâs equally vital if youâre a leader and have team members near or at Burnout.
Read on to get two science-based tools to prevent it from happening and recover from it when it does.
đź The Big PictureÂ
What do we mean when we talk about Burnout?Â
Burnout is not a medical condition â itâs âa manifestation of chronic unmitigated stress,â according to Dr. Lotte Dyrbye, a scientist who studies Burnout at the Mayo Clinic. But how does that manifest itself in practice?
This state is not characterized âjustâ by fatigue, though thatâs a critical symptom; there are significant emotional downsides to go with the physiological ones. Prof. Lucas Miller of UC-Berkeley breaks down what to look for when diagnosing it:
Profound physical and emotional exhaustion
Generalized negativity or cynicism
A feeling of professional inadequacy
A final distinction to keep in mind is that thereâs a difference between being tired and being burned out. It all has to do with your ability to recharge. Being tired is when your battery is low; being burned out is when you canât even undertake activities that would re-energize you.
Why does it happen so often now?
You're not wrong if you feel more people than ever are experiencing Burnout. The events of the past three years have pushed many of us to our brink. But the true culprit lies in an evolutionary brain bug.
We were never designed to deal with chronic stress. While we live amid skyscrapers, our brains still think theyâre back in the Stone Age. When we experienced stress then, it was almost always short-lived and infrequent.
Being chased by a predator was terrifying, but it didnât happen every day â and you didnât carry that state of extreme alertness back with you to camp and throughout the following week. In other words, the stress âcyclesâ we navigated were intense but short and â crucially â completed.
Fast forward to today: we donât face terror on the savannah, but our low-level stress loops never get closed. The brain responds to stress by flooding your body with cortisol, giving you energy and focus to deal with the threat. But our stress response was never meant to remain on indefinitely, and thatâs where the modern evolutionary mismatch occurs. Our brain reacts similarly to any stressor â a cranky email or a hungry lion â even though theyâre not equivalent. Over time, that flooding of your system with cortisol wears you down.
Stress is different from Burnout:
Stress comes from an event, and the perception of the event is stressful. It requires both.
The Amygdala (the brainâs alarm system) gets activated and sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus, which activates the adrenal glands. This creates a biological cascade which is Fight, Flight, or Freeze.
If our body is like a car, stress presses down on the gas.
đ The Business Case
42% of Office Workers have experienced Burnout (Guardian, August 2023)
45% of people check emails as the last thing they do before going to bed, according to Cary Cooper, a professor of organizational psychology at the University of Manchester. Note: This is a surefire way to burn yourself out. So hereâs a quick win: be a part of the smarter, more sane part of society and Donât. Check. Emails. Then!
$47.6 Billion: What Burnout costs U.S. employers in lost productivity in 2022, according to one survey. To put that number in perspective, that is more than the global ed-tech, pet care, and smart home security markets combined.
1:1: A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that it will take roughly the same amount of time to recover from Burnout as it did to get burned out. So if the last six months of work and life have tipped you into that state, donât expect to get right after a long weekend or holiday. You have to imagine itâs like a physical injury: it will take time to nurse yourself back to good health.
đ§ What To Do Next to Avoid Burnout
Here is a sobering truth: the only way to recover from Burnout is to take full time off in a low-stress environment - usually for multiple months. This is why prevention is the best medicine now. Fortunately, neuroscience gives us tactics for effective stress management.
Burnout is the result of thousands of uncompleted stress cycles. So the best way to prevent it is to regularly close out those stress loops, much like we have to shut down those apps that stay open on our phones.
The analogy is apt, as both the stress and the apps lurk in the background, gradually but unmistakably affecting your performance.
Every couple of hours, get away from your desk and walk outside. Even 10 minutes in nature or a park will lower your cortisol.
Every night after work, switch off by doing something cognitively demanding or physically immersive. Cooking a complicated meal or playing tennis with a friend forces you not to think about the office and helps you shut down that cycle.
Every week, take 2 to 4 hours to clear your mind and engage in what you find to be a refreshing activity. For some, thatâs a bike ride or a hike; for others, itâs a dinner with friends.
Not all breaks are equal. You have to do something that is cognitively demanding enough that will force you to switch focus. It has to be novel and challenging enough to engage your mind.
In order for the mind shift to be maximally effective, you must psychologically detach from work.Â
đ§ What To Do Next if you feel Burnout coming on
I have developed a framework to help my clients avoid Burnout. The S.I.E.S.T.A.S. Method (hat tip to IoNTELLIGENCE Community Member Mike Ross for helping me with the name) is a science-backed approach to stopping you from tipping into mental and physical exhaustion. Â
đ Key Takeaway
Burnout is a slow-moving disaster for individuals and organizations. Follow these neuroscience-based guidelines to prevent Burnout in yourself and the people you lead.
đŹ Go Deeper
Listen to this Six Pixels of Separation Podcast Interview with Chris Bailey and IoNTELLIGENCE community member Mitch Joel on âFinding Calm In The Productivity Chaos.â
Take this Two-Minute Burnout Test from Harvard Business Review
đş Pop Culture Parting Shot
Don Draper:
The high-stakes advertising world took its toll on the main character in âMad Men.â His relentless pursuit of success and personal demons lead to an apparent burnout, most notably in Season 6.
Elon Musk:
The C.E.O. of Tesla and SpaceX has spoken openly about working 120-hour weeks, especially during Tesla's Model 3 production. In an interview with The New York Times in 2018, Musk described this period as "excruciating" and acknowledged that the intense workload took a toll on his personal life and well-being.
Arianna Huffington:
The co-founder of The Huffington Post collapsed from exhaustion in 2007. This incident served as a wake-up call, leading her to reevaluate her approach to work and well-being. Huffington went on to write the book "Thrive," focusing on the importance of work-life balance, and later founded Thrive Global, a company dedicated to addressing Burnout and promoting wellness.