Burnout is our bodies asking us to pay attention, to slow down and to make changes, says Jonathan Moult...
What is ‘burnout’? It is a from of self-communication (or a “symptom”) indicating that things are not OK – we’re overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, exhausted.
These are ‘feelings’ and feelings mean something. Strategies like this are the ways we try to cope - they can be healthy or unhealthy - but their aim is to make us feel better. We need to cope and, indeed, we want to be doing well.
But at their heart, they are coping mechanisms as they do not address how we meet our needs. Unhealthy (note, not unnecessary) strategies include ignoring those feelings, denial, avoidance, disavowal (“this is good for me!”, “there’s nothing I can’t do”), ‘self-medicating’ and so on. Healthier strategies: positive compensation – sleep more/better, eat healthily, exercise, acquire new skills – this may include self-help/guided self-help (mindfulness, meditation, mental health apps) and possibly psychological education. In this way, we act upon ourselves for a better outcome.
However, as coping mechanisms these strategies work at the level of mitigating against those difficult feelings (- i.e. burnout, but it can be about other things too) – that is, symptom reduction. Of course, this is not a bad thing at all, we all need to cope and we want to feel better – but the feelings (burnout etc.) will likely return once the strategy has been ‘implemented’ (if this has even been possible to do) and, over time, there may be the feeling that nothing has changed – the strategy didn’t work or was too exhausting or too difficult to maintain.
This may add to further feelings of stress. This may be because many of the self-help coping strategies aimed at symptom reduction of the type above usually speak to cognition (conscious thought processes), and change (see below) rarely happens at the level of cognition alone (- if it did we would all decide to be happy and be done with it) and always involves engagement in changes in emotion processing (affect regulation) – i.e. our emotions, our unconscious and how we address our unmet needs. (And unhealthy strategies of the type mentioned above don’t encourage these processes at all).
Therefore, if we want to address the cause of burnout and to develop a healthier response beyond a “strategy”, then this requires CHANGE – change at the personal (intra-psychic) level and indeed change at the level of the ‘work system’ (the organisation, profession, sector). Change in the latter is complex for many reasons, but relates particularly, in my view, to the normalisation of extraordinary performance and our relationship to money. In addition, the damaging notion that the ‘system’ can remain the same, but somehow we can all feel better about it.
But a person can explore psychological change for themselves (a personal choice, of course) – this is often hard to achieve as this requires engagement and ‘working through’ over time, involving often difficult processes of reflection, identification of repetitive patterns, recognition of complexity, loss, acceptance, boundaries/limits, meaning-making, (personal) history-making, creative imagination and exploration of values and unmet needs, requiring both cognitive and emotional ‘processing’ and regulation – and this process is called depth psychotherapy.
It is an experience i.e. it is felt. It is relational – it needs another person to do it with and it is about how we relate (to ourselves and to others), which will include our relationship to work - and much more besides. It is something we do for ourselves, but not by ourselves. The experience is personal and individual.
So, if the strategies outlined above are providing support, then of course we can continue employing them. But if we have the experience that our coping strategies are ‘not coping’, then this may indicate change could be helpful and we might wish to consider psychotherapy. I would recommend looking out for “depth psychology”, “depth psychotherapy”, psychodynamic psychotherapy or psychoanalytic psychotherapy. And no, there are no quick fixes or life-hacks.
Jonathan Moult is a psychotherapist practising from our Twickenham centre
