What to do about burnout?

Burnout is a state of exhaustion that can have emotional, physical, or mental components. It’s caused by excessive and prolonged stress. Burnout happens when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet the demands in your life.

We can’t always change our immediate environments to avoid excessive stressors. There are, however, practices that can be applied in everyday life to fundamentally impact how we manage stress within challenging environments. One approach in therapy is applying cognitive behavioural skills and practices. It might look like this:

Explore phase

Therapy would start by assessing and identifying triggers such as:

• Organizational-related challenges (budget cuts, system gaps)
• Client-related challenges (vicarious trauma, challenging population)
• Personal challenges (emotional demands)
• Workplace-related challenges (high caseload, dangerous work environments)

By identifying some of these stressors, we will be able to target what is challenging us most at work, at home, and in our relationships so we can adapt and respond appropriately. Although we won’t be able to change all the factors contributing to burnout, identifying some risk factors will help us narrow the focus and single out areas where we can make changes.

Identify phase

The next stage involves cognitive restructuring, which means identifying our moods, thoughts, physical sensations, and behaviours. We may consider:

• Which specific situations, or what types of situations, trigger emotions related to burnout?
• What are the thoughts and beliefs tied to these situations?
• Which feelings and emotions are prevalent?
• What behaviours are present (lack of concentration, inability to sleep) and how are these situations triggering “dysfunctional thinking?”

By first identifying these triggers, we can then look inwards and highlight dysfunctional thinking that causes us greater challenges. Therefore, therapy would try to assess:

• The advantages and disadvantages of our thought patterns
• The impacts our thoughts are having on our emotions
• The implicit rules and assumptions we carry

This information can then be used to generate alternative viewpoints.

Armour phase

The last stage would be to assist in dealing with burnout by enhancing protective factors. This phase can involve, but is not limited to:

• Exploring areas of “purposeful” self-care
• Exploring self-regulation skills, such as deep breathing, meditation, or grounding exercises

This isn’t the only way therapy for burnout can be structured, but it’s one way it can be used to assist those affected by burnout. The goal is to build a strong self so that we are better able to take care of ourselves and those that we assist in our careers, families, and relationships.

This article is brought to you by Maple in partnership with Shift Collab.