Are you burnt out?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30tabs. Make your summer sizzle at Whole Foods Market. Wendy's new Biggie Deals lets you choose whatever you're in the mood for. It's like a music mixing board of deals and you're the producer. Go with some chill folk music with the JBC in the$4 Biggie Bite snack. Try the drum and bass of deals with a double stack and a$6 Biggie bag. Or go full on sandwich symphony with an$8 Biggie bundle. The grand finale of snacking. And the best part? They all come with napkins! Four, six, and$8 Biggie deals how you want them. At Wendy's. Price and participation may vary. Single items at regular price. Prices may be higher in Alaska, California, and Hawaii.

1:06Hello and welcome. I'm Kimberly Wilson. I'm a counselling psychologist. And this is Complex. The psychology podcast that helps you navigate through all the information and misinformation that's out there about psychology and mental health. So hopefully you can live more positively, calmly, and with a little bit more balance. In this episode, I'm exploring burnout. I think so many of us are feeling stressed and overstretched, particularly at this time of year. I always talk to clients about things like the pressures of seeing family and the expectations of the season as well as work. And I kind of feel like I hear the term burnout pretty much every day, whether that's in clinic or talking to friends, talking to colleagues.

1:57and so it feels to be a really broad experience for a lot of people but what does it actually mean to be burnt out and what can we do about it if it's something that we're experiencing

2:17well my friends I'm so glad you're here because I've got a listener story to share with you and I'll be chatting with an expert guest so that we can unpack this topic together and share some genuinely useful tips for you. So, let me be your guide through the traffic jam of misinformation to the clear mountain pass of understanding.

2:42My guest today is Dr. Peter Olushoga and he's in the studio with me today. Hello, Peter. Hello. Thank you so much for being here with me today. Tell me a little bit about yourself. So as you say, I'm a senior lecturer and a chartered psychologist up at Sheffield Hallam University. My areas of interest and research are stress and burnout and well-being. I spent a lot of time doing work in high-performance sports. So my PhD was all around stress and coping in world-class sports coaching. And since then, I've done a lot of work around sort of burnout and well-being in sort of broader high performance environments.

3:23And am I right in thinking that you used to play basketball yourself at quite a high level? Well, yeah, I wouldn't say quite a high level, but I did play 20 years in National League basketball and I coached during university and I coached in the National League as well as playing. So that experience of coaching led me to see just how stressful that role can be. And then when I went back to do my postgraduate study, studying sport was the kind of natural choice. Gotcha. So the kind of demands of high performance, taking care of a team, your skill being judged game by game. Yeah, exactly that. Yeah.

4:02Immense amounts of pressure, having lots of stuff to deal with. Okay. So you can come at this from a personal and professional and academic perspective. So thank you very much for being here and let's get started. So Peter, what is the definition of burnout? What are we talking about here? Well, interestingly, it's not a medical condition and there's no clinical diagnosis for burnout, but it's a psychological phenomenon that's a response to chronic workplace stress. The first time I saw burnout for sure was when I was a student and I was working in a women's healthcare clinic and there was a receptionist she'd been there I want to say 28 years or something like that and it was it was really demanding work we were talking about you know women's health and terminations of pregnancy and quite kind of emotionally draining stuff and she was so lovely to me she was really supportive she was really helpful she wanted to make sure that I was okay.

5:02When it came to the clients, the cynicism, she was so shut off. It was like, I'd heard it all before. Or here comes another one. Oh, you know, there's nothing new about your story. Just fill in the form and go and sit down. And it was really striking for me kind of being like fresh into it and looking around and thinking, I'm here to kind of help take care of people and seeing her response. And I suppose that's quite different from what people might think of as the kind of high octane, you know, corporate burnout scenario, but it still fits. Yeah, sure. And I think there's that there is this cliche of burnout being in those real high performance type environments.

5:45And again, my work's in sports, it's a real high performance environment, we see a lot of burnout in those sorts of environments. But really, it's about people and relationships and it's really really prevalent in occupations where there's people work involved so nursing teaching lawyers anything where there's lots of people work and relationships that's where we start to see a lot of burnout just because of the emotional investment in what people are doing so that's really interesting that it's a workplace phenomenon and i have a listener story here i'm going to read it out because i think it really touches on some of these issues and i'd like to know what you think.

6:24So for the sake of the listener's privacy, I'm going to call her Samia. Samia says, I have a question around burnout. My husband is very passionate about doing well in his job and expends a lot of energy and time working hard and ensuring he's producing top quality work. We've got two children and live away from family. Because of this, we don't have a lot of physical support and I would say we get less time for ourselves than some of our friends with children. Then she asks how can I support him without getting burnt out myself? So I think that's really interesting because to start with I'm thinking oh maybe she's describing her husband as burnt out but actually what she might be saying is I might be being affected as well.

7:12I feel at risk potentially of burnout and it's not a workplace presumably she's thinking about at home taking care of her children taking care of her husband is burnout part of her story as well? How would we think about this? How do we disentangle it for Samia? Well absolutely yeah because although the definition of it is an occupational phenomenon a workplace phenomenon for a lot of people work is home and home is work so people in caring roles people with responsibilities at home like that's work in itself so absolutely people can can burn out in other situations as well i think that's really important because i think there's a way that people who expend a lot of effort energy time emotion outside of a professional or workplace might feel that their work is undervalued and might feel like their efforts aren't recognized as hard and difficult and that that might put them at risk of burning out as well.

8:09I think it's really important for people to hear that. And I feel like burnout is so often dismissed or just not taken seriously. So let's see if we can help Samia to untangle it. Peter, let's get into the complexity.

8:27There was some research out recently that found that 91 % of adults have experienced high or extreme stress in the last year. And And I mean, maybe that doesn't surprise you, but I find that quite a hard number to get my head around. Does that make sense to you? Yeah. I mean, I think given the ordinary stress that people have to deal with in their day to day, and then you add on everything that's happening in the world around us right now. We are in a time of political instability. We're in a time of economic instability. So all of that worry is heaped on in addition to the stresses that everybody is experiencing at work.

9:04So I think, yeah, alarming, but I don't really think it's that surprising. It all feels the same. It all piles up. And I suppose that's really helpful for people to know as well, which is that, and it's something I come back to quite often on this podcast, which is that your mental health experience or psychology isn't purely generated from inside of you. It's this interaction between you and the outside world and the environment and society, politics, geopolitics will play into that as well. So we have this working sense of what burnout is. if we take a closer look at the term though because it's quite casual sounding and we know it's not a medical diagnosis but where does the term come from?

9:41So the original research into burnout came from the 1970s where people were looking at people working in drug rehabilitation clinics, poverty lawyers, that sort of thing and there was this observation that those sorts of people were experiencing this phenomenon again characterized by this exhaustion and cynicism and doing that people work that relationship type work. And just kind of feeling really wrung out. And I guess it touches on those features, doesn't it? You're putting a lot of effort in, a lot of energy, there's a lot of emotion. And a high need population. We're talking about it a lot at the moment, but it's not new.

10:15But what is interesting about what's happening now is that it seems to be affecting different generations differently. And there are trends online like quiet quitting. And there's the latest one is hashtag lazy girl jobs. which is where people are trying to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort yeah which i don't hate as a concept like it makes a lot of sense but it feels like it's a real response to hustle culture and having a side gig and just waking up at 4 a.m and pushing pushing pushing yeah and i think the quiet quitting phenomenon is really interesting to me because what it essentially boils down to is actually doing your job as it's described in your job description, right?

11:05So it's not not doing work. It's just doing what you're supposed to be doing and not doing all of those added extras, the work that you do because of expectations that are placed on you. But where do you think those expectations come from? Are they internal? Are they cultural? Are they from the workplace? I think it's all three of those things. I think that it's pervasive that the messaging that we are getting through social media is that we need to have a side hustle and we need to be productive and we should be getting up and meditating and exercising and journaling and practicing gratitude and all of those things all those things are good things but it's just that additional pressure to do all of those things and i think we internalize them and feel the need to be going over and above and doing that extra yeah it's quite a cliche therapeutic term but a human being versus a human doing right that actually where we feel like we have to be doing in order to be purposeful and valuable and worthy and the work of being a human which is about experiencing joy and relaxing and having leisure time and being creative and being open is really important to the human experience as well yeah and we sacrifice that in order to be successful.

12:25And I think that absolutely is part of this sort of trend towards the experience of stress and burnout. And for anybody listening, if they're wondering whether they're experiencing burnout, what are the key characteristics? How do we understand it? Well, there's three main characteristics of burnout. The first one is emotional and physical exhaustion, which is exactly what you'd expect it to be. It's just feeling entirely depleted to the point where even making simple decisions is really difficult. The second characteristic is something called reduced personal accomplishment. And that's a sense that no matter how much effort we're putting in, we're just not really getting anywhere.

13:06The third characteristic is something called depersonalization or cynicism. And this is just developing a cynical attitude towards work and towards the relationships that we have at work. Like that receptionist that I was working with all that. Exactly. But for it to be burnout, we need to be experiencing all three of these things for an extended period of time. And that makes it sound like there's something about a lack of an opportunity to recover. We all get tired. We all get cynical at times. But often we have an opportunity to rest. We regain our equilibrium. We feel a bit better and suddenly the sun's out again.

13:42If we're looking at kind of symptoms or signs, how does it manifest in individuals? Well, lots of different ways, I think. The exhaustion part of it, our sleep gets disturbed. That's a big indicator for not sleeping particularly well. We can have an increased susceptibility to illness. Our immune function is compromised. So we might get more headaches, you might get more colds. There's that sort of sense of feeling a bit detached from, again, from work or from the people around you, often a sense of like withdrawal and isolation. And I think that's a really important one, that it can be hard to recognize that, but you feel like you're just shutting down a little bit.

14:27It's almost like the shutters come down and you're just not really interested. People can be having a conversation and you just don't really care. A real turning inwards. Yeah. And most people who experience burnout don't really recognize it until they're already burnt out. So it's all of those little sort of signs and warning signs that we can maybe look out for that indicate that maybe we're on that path towards burnout. Okay, so that sleep disturbance, the cynicism, the withdrawal. Is there anything else? Again, because the sort of immune function can be compromised by that ongoing stress, people might experience digestive issues like stomach pain, that sort of thing as well.

15:07Okay, so really for people listening to understand that this isn't just a neck up stress, I feel a bit overwhelmed or I feel tired, it's a full body experience. And like Samia, our listener who wrote in, it's not just the individual of course, it has these ripple effects that stretch out, what do we know about that? Well, from the work that I do in sport, I do a lot of work with coaches who experience burnout. And one of the things that they always talk about is the impact on relationships. So the impact on the people, not only that they're working with, but outside of work as well. So that feeling of depletion, that's not just a work thing.

15:47They take that home as well. They have no time for family anymore. They feel detached and withdrawn from the family. Yeah, and that's particularly cruel, isn't it? Because what we know, one of the most consistent findings and mental health research is that the things that help you feel more resilient, that literally give you longer longevity, are the quality of your relationships. Exactly, yeah. And if your chronic stress and your burnout is interfering with that, you've got another barrier to feeling better because you don't have access to those people. And there's a guilt associated with that as well.

16:18You know that you're detached. You know that you're not the same person that you perhaps were at home. And that brings with it that sense of guilt that you're not doing enough at home either. so it just kind of exacerbates the problem sometimes. Okay and so a lot of the things that you've described I imagine to listeners sounds a lot like depression or anxiety but they're not quite the same thing. Not quite no there is a lot of overlap though and I think sometimes people who maybe feel like they're experiencing depression actually it's just burnout. There's also a sort of increased susceptibility to depression if we are experiencing ongoing stress and burnout as well.

16:54So there are links between the two. So really important that we are able to help people to identify these aspects as soon as possible so they can take action as quickly as possible. What do you see in your world in terms of how people either recognize or don't recognize burnout or what happens when they get to the point of, I don't know, you say collapse or shutdown? Yeah, it's exactly that. It's one of those two options people are really bad at recognizing that they're burnt out and they often don't recognize it until it's too late there's a couple of examples actually of high performance coaches again talking about sport um but jürgen klopp the liverpool manager um took a step back stepped away from from managing um because he was experiencing the signs of burnout which is kind of a rare thing for somebody in that sort of position to do um but by and large what we see is people hitting the wall.

17:49People getting to the point where they literally cannot do it anymore and they have to take a break or a step back for whatever reason. So when we move from stress, chronic stress, to hitting the wall of burnout, what does that look like? I think one of the biggest signs is just that total withdrawal. We're so emotionally depleted that we can't even face getting up to go to work in the morning. We're so completely exhausted, we can't face dealing with other people. So it's that sort of detachment and withdrawal and just not wanting to do the thing anymore. It really reminds me of when I experienced burnout for the first time and I had this very emotionally demanding job and it got to the point where just the thought of going to work would make me want to cry.

18:39And I also had to cycle through central London traffic at rush hour and so the entire experience was of just feeling like I had to brace I had to brace to get to work had to brace for the commute and then I had to brace emotionally to get through the day and it was just like my body said we are done yeah I've experienced burnout myself as well and it's sort of very similar to that that just feeling of like I know what's coming I know what the day has in store for me and I can't motivate myself I can't move myself to actually do it yeah and although something like burnout doesn't necessarily have its roots in childhood and things like that, there will be individual differences, maybe characteristics, personality that make someone more vulnerable.

19:24Is that right? Yeah, there's a few things that are perhaps important to consider here. So the first one is motivation. So there's research to suggest that people who are more intrinsically motivated, so doing what they do because they love it, are less likely to experience burnout than people who are more extrinsically motivated. And what are extrinsic motivations? So doing things for external rewards like salary, recognition, that sort of thing. Something else that's really important is identity. And what we find is that people who develop a singular identity, so their whole identity is tied up in what they do, their job role.

20:04So if something or if my job isn't going well, and my job is my entire life, then nothing's going well so what are you left with so that identity piece means actually it's a really fragile foundation for well-being okay so the other thing that that crops up in the work that i do is the way that we're committed to the work and there's a couple of different profiles i suppose you could describe them so the first one is attraction and this is the idea that we do the job because we want to. We are engaged with it. There are lots of benefits to it. You find it interesting. You find it interesting. There's not many costs to it.

20:43And people who are more attracted to their job are less likely to experience burnout. The other profile is entrapment. And this is kind of the opposite. It doesn't sound good, no. And this is where we start to feel like there's maybe a lack of attractive alternatives. So I do this job because I've always done it and everybody expects me to do it and people think that I'm good at it so I've kind of stuck in it and that entrapment can also be financial we're stuck in a job because we kind of need to pay the rent okay so maybe we're saying something like it's psychologically helpful just to feel you have other options it's that kind of sense of autonomy and agency if I didn't want to be here I could be somewhere else yeah absolutely I'm a decision maker in my life

21:33whenever i talk about stress to anyone i always put a little caveat in at the beginning which is a little bit of stress is fine we are adapted we evolved to manage acute amounts of stress and that what we tend to be talking about when we're thinking about the harms of stress is chronic stress and so if we're thinking about a scale and i like to do a scale just because it helps listener to get some context at what point put you under pressure at what point do we hit that tipping point from stress chronic stress into burnout okay can i take your scale and turn it into a seesaw oh yes please so the way that i describe stress or think about stress is in terms of like a seesaw or a set of weighing scales, right?

22:23And on one side, we've got all of the demands that we face on a day-to-day basis. They can be big things, they can be little things, it can be personal things, work things, whatever. All of them go on one side of this seesaw. And then on the other side are our coping resources. So these are all the things that we have in our lockers that help us to deal with stress, help us to manage stress. So that can be things like social support, support of family and friends can be things like my own ability to manage my own emotions and what happens is when the demands pile up or when they get too big or there's too many of them the seesaw will tip that's when we're experiencing stress right when that happens for a long period of time when we don't get that balance that's when we're more likely to experience burnout Okay, I love that because it makes it dynamic so that we've got these balanced scales.

23:19And what it says is I can be experiencing maybe quite a lot of stress, but if I can add in resources, if I can add in support, if I can find extra help, then I can tolerate it, I can bear it. Maybe not forever, but I can kind of tip it in my favor. but if I end up also arguing with my partner or if I become physically ill if these other things tip then even stresses that were manageable for a while even if the stress stays the same yeah so if we zoom in on the solutions what can we do one of the things that comes out in the burnout literature is that it's not necessarily the job demands that are the cause of burnout It's more the lack of ability to recover from those really busy periods.

24:09So one thing that becomes really important in terms of recovering from or even preventing burnout in the first place is making sure that we're recovering and resting and that that's part of what we do on a day-to-day basis. Okay, because I think often what people do, let's say just on a week-to-week basis, is push, push, push, push, push Monday to Friday, maybe longer, and then I'll rest forward slash collapse. at the weekend. So what you're talking about is actually, no, we need more opportunities to rest, maybe what we might call micro recoveries spread out across the week, across the day. Yeah, exactly that.

24:47I talk a lot about using micro breaks. And, you know, a two week holiday in the Bahamas would be amazing, but we can't do that every time we feel stressed. Can't do that once a month. No, we can't do that once a month for lots of reasons. So can we start to build in those micro breaks and that can look like a lot of different things that can look like standing up and going to look out the window for 10 seconds just taking what you're seeing what you're looking at it can be taking a deep breath it can be having a stretch it can be just doing a lap of the office or you know wherever you work so just these small moments of recovery have a cumulative effect is there an aspect of recovery which is about being able to see a tangible outcome of your efforts i'm wondering about kind of hobbies or um outside interests yeah um we talked about identity being um again important in terms of burnout and having that singular identity if we've got other things in our lives right and they can be hobbies they can be like friends they can be family if we're thinking about what's really important to us outside of work and making sure we're taking care of those things like that is huge in terms of not only that recovery but also that sort of prevention of slipping into burnout in the first place.

26:05So maybe your work is one of your passions, but can you reclaim passions in other ways? I think reclaim is a really important word there because one of the things that frustrates me about well-being advice and burnout advice is that we're asking people a lot of times to do more. take up a hobby do some exercise all right get to the gym and people who are experiencing burnout and stress don't necessarily have time to do all of those extra things so what things are you already interested in what passions have you got that maybe you've sort of put to one side right can we pick some of that stuff up but I suppose one of the things I'm always really cautious about is um when we're thinking about mental health is to not make the individual responsible for the harms that are caused by the environment or an outside situation.

26:54And if we're thinking about burnout as a workplace phenomenon, it's not just on the individual to manage those conditions. That's exactly right. So I see burnout as an organizational issue, not an individual one. So again, if your job is asking you to do extra work, those expectations to go above and beyond and you're not able to do your 70-hour week like that that's not a you problem that's a that's a job problem right burnout is a perfectly normal and reasonable response to an environment of unrealistic expectations and pressure yeah so hr directors you're listening and there are more definitive solutions like for example stopping the work that you're doing so i suppose maybe there's something about stepping back as well for some people yeah the surefire way to recover from burnout is to stop doing the thing that you're doing but there's an immense amount of privilege associated with that as a strategy there are some high profile examples again in sports of coaches who've taken that step who've decided that they're on the track to burnout.

28:07And actually what I really need to do now is to step away from what I'm doing to either take a break or leave the job entirely, switch to something else. Again, there's a lot of privilege in that as a strategy. But I think what we can do and what is really important is to be more compassionate to ourselves in those moments. So there's a lot of stigma, for example, associated with like taking sick leave for mental health reasons or taking time away. But can we just be a bit more compassionate to ourselves, knowing again that this is an organizational issue? And there's some research out there as well that shows that self-compassion specifically is linked to things like increased optimism, increased engagement with self-care and well-being practices, and decreased burnout.

28:55We love a bit of self-compassion here on Complex. Thank you very much for being here. And what I love about a conversation like this is there are things that you can do. Self-care is really important. self-compassion is really important but also your organization and the wider world has a responsibility to you your well-being your mental health isn't a purely solo endeavor and at times we need to be able to give that responsibility back to those organizations in order for them to look after us as well yeah absolutely we often think about well-being as an individual effort but I think we missed that community element to it and the importance of community and well-being.