Deep Dive

Three Tips for Preventing & Managing Burnout

5 October, 2022 · Jennifer Moss

Award-winning journalist and workplace culture strategist Jennifer Moss shares tips for avoiding burnout to help us live happier, healthier, and more productive lives.

It’s time to level set—burnout is a serious issue.

It’s not a made-up problem for people who aren’t interested in going “above and beyond” for their organizations. It’s a sobering crisis with catastrophic consequences.

In 2019, The World Health Organization (WHO), recognizing the negative impact that burnout was waging on the global workforce, added burnout to its International Classification of Diseases. They labeled burnout as workplace or institutional stress left unmanaged, an occupational phenomenon, distinct from stress caused from experiences in life.

The three major signs of burnout include:

1. Exhaustion and increased levels of depletion
2. Emotional distance from one’s job (disengagement) and increased cynicism
3. Lack of self-efficacy (feelings of not being able to do one’s job well or at all)

It’s important for everyone to hold the same definition of burnout or it will continue to be delegitimized. Only when we all agree that burnout is a real issue that requires real solutions will we be able to address it.

Before I dive into strategies, I want to be clear, burnout cannot be solved with self-care alone. Of course, it’s critical that leaders model self-care for their teams, and for individuals to prioritize mental health, but burnout is an all-hands-on-deck problem to solve.

If you prefer video, here’s a short overview of the tips to get you thinking and drive the conversation forward. Keep reading for more detail.

Tip 1: Self-Assess for Signs of Burnout

First, we need to be able to determine whether we or one of our peers, may be burning out.

For the next few weeks, start documenting how often you experience any of the three signs of burnout described above. Here are ways to tell if you could be at risk:

1. Exhaustion and feelings of depletion
   • Can’t seem to motivate yourself to get going in the morning
   • You’re tired all day at work and feel checked out earlier than usual
   • You’ve stopped engaging in things that make you happy in life
   • You’re using more stimulants (e.g. caffeine) to stay alert at work and using depressants (e.g. alcohol) to wind down after work
   • You feel completely worn out even when you get enough sleep
2. Disengagement and cynicism
   • You feel disconnected from the work and the mission and/or your coworkers
   • You don’t really care about what you’re producing
   • Feeling an almost complete lack of inspiration
   • Feeling hopeless that your experience at work will improve 
3. Lack of Self-efficacy
   • Feeling like you don’t have the resources to do your job
   • You don’t believe you add value in your role
   • Questioning if you’re good at your job or that you should still be in this career/field

After analyzing if you’ve experienced any of these signs of burnout, start to assess how frequently they’re showing up. Two to three times per week signals that you are at risk.

Now you want to determine if these symptoms are showing up more frequently because of a compressed workload, a looming deadline, or some big project that is increasing your stress. If the answer is yes, then the symptoms might go away when the workload is reduced. However, if instead you find that these symptoms are part of your day-to-day experience on the job, then you’re at an even higher risk of burning out.

To assess whether others may be at risk of burnout, look for the following signs:

• Signs of exhaustion
• Withdrawing
• Irritability/emotional volatility (higher ups and downs)
• More conflict-oriented
• Increased late/sick days
• Disengaged
• Distracted
• Missing deadlines that were normally easy to meet or completing typical job requirements

“The More You Know” isn’t just one of my favorite PSAs from the 90s, it rings true in the case of preventing burnout. Increased knowledge and self-awareness may be the difference between getting help or hitting the wall.

Tip 2: Stop Toxic Productivity

I remember at the start of the pandemic, all I felt was this expectation to be always on and hyper-productive. Everything felt urgent. Despite being in lockdown with three kids, thrust into a new role as teacher, stay-at-home-caregiver, and full-time launderer – I was still supposed to work endlessly while writing a book about (#irony) burnout.

People were tweeting photos of their fresh-from-the-oven homemade bread thanks to their new hobby of growing their own yeast. Some were Marie Kondo-ing their kitchen and learning Italian on Duolingo – with all their spare time. I could barely load and unload the dishwasher.

This sense of urgency and a need to fill every gap in our “extra time” has stuck. Commuting isn’t fun – most people hate it.  Instead of giving ourselves that time back – we just started working during those hours.

And now, we are working three more hours per day on average and still only meeting our pre-covid goals. Americans work more hours than any of their peer nations. And 488 million workers globally are overworking, despite data from the WHO and the International Labor Organization that found 700,000 people die from overwork annually.

To avoid burning out from false urgencies, take a pause and assess your priorities. Start by asking yourself;

1. What are my priorities at work?
2. What are my priorities in life?
3. What would be my deathbed regret(s)?

Now review and determine how you can align both so that you don’t end up with any number three. It sounds simplified or trite, but this is actually a profoundly helpful way to create a decision tree to determine if something is a real or false urgency.

Example: Death bed regret: Losing precious time with my kids and my family.

• Decision option 1: “I just need to send this one last email before I sit down for dinner with the family. It won’t take too long. I should have enough time.”
• Decision option 2: “If I really consider how long it will take me to prepare and send this email, I risk missing dinner with my family. No one will die if I don’t send out this email.” 

Number three just saved the day! You made it to dinner and now you stand a better chance of bonding with your family.

And yet, work doesn’t need to be deprioritized to eliminate deathbed regrets. This isn’t a one-must-be-sacrificed-for-the-other kind of scenario here. This kind of self-awareness just helps us to keep from going all-in on one or the other.

Tip 3: More JOMO less FOMO

During the pandemic, the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) was a distant emotion from the before times. How can you miss out on something that doesn’t exist? But, as Covid-19 protocols loosened and we came into a post-lockdown life, an urgency to see and do it all returned.

Wrongly or rightly, the pandemic changed us in lasting ways. With my expertise related to workplace culture, I tend to focus on the way the workforce shifted. However,  in my other role as a well-being strategist, I remind everyone, especially leaders, that our lives were fundamentally and permanently transformed during the pandemic. And, since we don’t bifurcate mentally between 9-5 like we did before technology changed all that, this is an important understanding.

Covid triggered and nurtured a deep sense of survivalism that still lingers. It’s making us react like we have to jump into surge capacity at every stressor. We also feel like we need to commit to more in life and at work. We need to get out and travel and escape our homes. Our kids need to get back into all the extras because they’ve missed out for so long. We can’t say no to anything, because we faced our mortality – we’ve been reminded that life is short.

That feeling that we need to make up for lost time isn’t sustainable. Even after we watched Armageddon play out at airports around the world, that didn’t stop us from booking all the flights. It’s as if nothing could keep us at home.

This return to FOMO is tiring and it’s making it harder to stay healthy at work. Taking breaks is important;  just because you can be doing something, doesn’t mean you should.

We need to change the language related to rest. Rest isn’t a break from being productive, it is in itself a type of productivity. Rest is restorative. It gives us the capacity to take on more with increased efficiency. We make less mistakes, we’re less distracted, and we enjoy our work that much more.

All of this emphasizes why it’s even more important than ever to engage in JOMO, the “joy of missing out”.

Practicing JOMO sounds easy, but it’s incredibly hard for high-performing, Type A, exceptionally busy people. Taking time to do nothing is maybe the hardest action for people like us. However,  if we start to see that rest is productive, then maybe we can convince our brains to participate.

Here are a few simple ways to start the JOMO habit:

• “Frivolous 15.” Set a calendar appointment for a 15-minute meeting each day. During this meeting do nothing, take a bath, go for a walk, read a book – whatever relaxes you and gives you joy but it must be offline. Unplug for 15 and then try to add more of these productive rests in your day.
• Spend 10 minutes in nature. Adding in daily “moments of awe” boosts our moods and increases happiness.
• Set a bedtime and have your phone shut off for specific periods of time every day.
• Use the Moment app to remind you when you’re overusing social media.
• When making plans, consider if this is something you really want to do or feel an obligation to attend. If it’s the latter, start to practice declining requests politely and instead, commit to spending time with someone that you’re always up for seeing.

Although leveraging these strategies won’t solve for burnout entirely, they are known to help. When we’re dealing with a massive problem, sometimes it’s just zoning in on what we can control versus what we can’t, that makes it all seem possible.

Embedding these decision-making strategies into our daily practice makes it easier to turn conscious acts into subconscious characteristics of our personality. Overall, we want to engrain patterns of healthy behavior into our lives – both at work and at home – to prevent burnout.

Jennifer Moss

An international authority on workplace culture, Jennifer's passion and energy engage audiences with relatable storytelling, data, and research, confirming that healthy and happy workforces are higher-performing ones. Attendees leave inspired and motivated to act on what they've learned.