BRINGING IT HOME
With your desk now metres from your bed, burnout could be rearing its ugly head
The modern malady once associated with strip-lit offices has followed us into our homes, and ‘burnout: the WFH edition’ can be even more toxic than its predecessor. WH reports on the condition that’s hiding in plain sight
There are some things that are best left in the noughties. We need never speak of a vajazzle again, and the less said about Dane Bowers the better. So it’s really quite annoying that the buzzword of noughties office culture is doing the rounds once again. But when it comes to burnout, annoying is the least of it.
There’s a reason you’ve been hearing a lot about burnout of late. The condition received the homeworking memo and, somewhere between lockdowns one and two, it departed your deserted office building and crossed the threshold of your home, where it’s lingered like a bad smell. A Yougov survey commissioned by Mental Health UK, published last October, found that one in four women in the UK felt unable to manage work stress and pressure, with just under half of them confident that their employer had a plan in place to protect them from burning out. The same month, the campaign group Compass published a report (apocalyptically titled Burnout Britain), which made a rallying cry for change in response to the news that mental distress among workers is now 49% higher than it was in 2017-19 across most UK sectors. A socially distanced Christmas and New Year and another national lockdown later, we suspect those numbers have only climbed. It’s a trend that’s starkly at odds with the expectations we all had of our home-based lives in the early days of the first lockdown (anticipation of happy Fitbits, freshly painted banisters and a clear inbox). And while working from home in a pandemic is a privilege – one many of us are more aware of than ever right now – with the future of office culture still unclear, getting a handle on burnout is a worthy ambition. So how can you show it the door?
FAN THE FLAMES
A delve into the burnout archives reveals the term was actually doing the rounds when vajazzles were but a twinkle in Amy Childs’ eye. ‘When burnout was first formulated as a diagnosis in the early 70s, it was associated with the caring professions in particular,’ reveals Professor Josh Cohen, psychoanalyst and author of Not Working: Why We Have To Stop (£9.99, Granta), referring to the work of the American psychoanalyst Herbert Freudenberger. Back then, the term was largely dismissed as pop psychology, but a body of empirical research – studies on burnout increased by 64% from the 80s to the 90s and by 150% from the 90s to the 00s – propelled the term into the public consciousness just in time for the 2008 financial crash. Still, it wasn’t until 2019, when the
World Health Organization added it to its list of occupational phenomena, that it was considered a bona fide mental health issue. Defined as ‘chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed’, its symptoms include exhaustion, negative feelings about work and, somewhat unsurprisingly given the other symptoms, reduced productivity. And while it’s since been diluted and co-opted (see: Zoom burnout; relationship burnout; political burnout), the repercussions remain severe; a 2017 review of the health consequences of burnout found good evidence for it being a precursor to cardiovascular diseases, musculoskeletal pain and depressive symptoms, and to someone needing psychotropic and antidepressant treatment.
Given where we’ve come from, you can understand why removing the ‘workplace’ part of ‘chronic workplace stress’ last March delivered a quiet sense of optimism among some; hopes of getting up a little later, working the hours that work for you and maybe even (whisper it) taking
It’s a profound sense of disconnection – the kind a holiday can’t shift
a lunch break. So where did it all go wrong? Part of the problem, explains Professor Cohen, is that while the conditions that contributed to said stress in the first place (threadbare teams, heavy workloads, rampant presenteeism) remained the same, your ability to deal with them diminished thanks to another ‘B’ word you’ve been hearing a lot of lately: boundaries. ‘Our pre-covid lives might have been more frenetic, but most of us had physical distance between our domestic and working lives. Now that our lives are being conducted in a single space, the different areas have bled into one another, with our most intimate relationships operating right alongside our more public relationships,’ he explains, referring to the screaming children, talkative partners and ecstatic-to-haveyou-home pets. The Burnout Britain report describes the mass move to home working as the ‘collapse of the home/life balance’, and while you were clocking up an estimated 28 extra hours a month, the time you saved by not travelling to your job was gobbled up by cooking lunch, unloading the dishwasher and doing yet another load of washing – tasks which, as a woman, probably fell to you (women in the UK provide 74% of all childcare time and spend, on average, 26 hours a week doing unpaid domestic labour, while in comparison men only do an average of 16.2). It all adds up to burnout affecting those with the most demands on them, whose boundaries have been most eroded (read: women). According to the report, women were 43% more likely to have increased their hours beyond a standard working week than men, and for those with children, this was even more clearly associated with mental distress.
And yet, to think of burnout purely in the context of workload – both the domestic and professional kind – is to misunderstand it, argues Professor Amy O’hana, counsellor and author of Beyond Burnout. She first experienced burnout in her early twenties, when she was working as a social worker, and became so interested in the topic that she ended up doing her doctoral dissertation on it. What makes this new wave of burnout so pervasive and potent isn’t what it puts upon you, she argues, but what it takes from you. ‘It’s true that what differentiates burnout from other mental and emotional problems is vocation; it’s always linked to your vocation,’ she explains. ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean your career or job, but your wider sense of connection with work, productivity and meaning. My theory is that burnout comes from feeling disconnected.’ This disconnection, she explains, can take many forms; you might be feeling disconnected from your colleagues, missing the
‘how was your weekend?’ small talk you used to take for granted; or perhaps you’re feeling disconnected from the work, with digital meetings only delivering a fraction of the energy and enthusiasm that the
IRL kind used to provide. This explains why feelings of burnout have only increased the longer this has gone on. ‘The more disconnected you feel from the things that matter to you, the more burned out you’ll be,’ adds Professor O’hana. For psychotherapist Raven Stralow, this disconnection is having a very real impact on our collective sense of self, by creating what she calls an ‘achievement-shaped hole’ in our lives. It makes sense: with the bulk of your usual indicators of success – smashing that 20kg chest press at the gym, or the annual company pay rise – emphatically unavailable, progress has stalled on all fronts. And once the initial enthusiasm for filling that achievement-shaped hole waned, as Stralow put it, ‘plenty of people discovered that baking banana bread didn’t do shit for them’. The result? Feeling even further removed from your old (striving, achieving) self.
HEATED DEBATE
Which all adds up to what, for you? The future of the professional working world remains a question mark; while a number of companies (Twitter, Siemens, Slack) have extended the option to employees to work at home indefinitely, others are asking whether a return to the officebased world of old might be better for both employees and the companies they work for. But while the debates roll on, the risk remains; so how do you identify the signs when you’re not burning out in an ergonomic office chair at 10pm on a Tuesday, but at your kitchen table, on your sofa and in your bedroom? All the experts WH spoke to confirmed that what separates burnout from stress and exhaustion is the emotional turmoil. Professor Cohen notes the ‘inner agitation’ it leaves, and your mood is a great barometer. ‘If an angry tone comes to your mind’s ear – resentful, bitter – the chances are you’re burned out, rather than just tired.’ For Professor O’hana, it’s that chronic sense of disconnection, the kind that a few weeks of eating well and working out or a holiday can’t shift. Naming it as burnout is important, she notes, since it shares symptoms with
depression. ‘Emotional exhaustion, lack of productivity and sleeplessness are symptoms of both, but while antidepressants and psychotherapy may help relieve them, they won’t be getting to the root cause of the issue.’
It’s important to say that if you suspect you’re experiencing burnout right now, you should flag it with your manager, or enquire with your HR department about what support is available via their employee assistance programme. But practical strategies can also be useful in dealing with that mental clutter; you know, the stuff you meant to get done today that’s now spilling over on to tomorrow’s to-do list. One such technique is called
Zorro circles (yes, inspired by the fictional swashbuckler who learned to fight in small ovals before progressing to bigger, harder feats). Start by writing down everything on your mind, be it a work responsibility or a future worry. Once your brain dump is on the page, organise the items into two categories: things you can control and things you can’t. For the former, pick the three to five most important items to tackle first – then tackle them. For the latter, ignore. Surrendering the things you can’t control will free up headspace for the things you can, not to mention it should lower the volume on your worries from a roar to a whisper. Mind still wired while sinking into the sofa come evening? Professor Cohen suggests that you acknowledge that internal agitation. ‘Next time you feel that stab behind your temples that’s making you think: “What do I have to do next?” – instead of becoming its servant, begin to tune it out,’ he explains. ‘Say: “I understand there’s something urgent that you feel I need to do – but this moment is more important.” It’s about training yourself to recognise the claim of your own tiredness and your own commitment to yourself.’ Whatever your working set-up looks like – and will look like – consider this your timely reminder to lean hard on what brings you joy, relaxation and calm – three things you’ll need to keep close, pandemic or no pandemic.