Four years ago, Andrew Wilford, in his 40s, was living on pure adrenalin. As the program manager contracted to oversee the maintenance of F-111 fighter jets for the Australian Defence Force, a project worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he recalls working 13 to 15 hours a day.
He remembers one day in particular when he got home from work just before 2am, only to have to get up two-and-a-half hours later to catch a flight to Melbourne. He was hardly sleeping and was sustained by a diet of chips and chocolate. He was a man literally living to work. “I went into a mild mania, really, just to keep up with all the things that were fraying at the edges,” he says. “I had very unrealistic expectations of myself to be able to hold all that together.”
Then he reached a turning point: he got married. It was a beach ceremony with a reception in the rainforest north of Noosa, Queensland. Wilford’s wife had booked them both into a tantric yoga retreat deep in the rainforest for their honeymoon. “I finally began to unwind at the retreat. I unwound very deeply. I had an amazing sense of peace and connectedness,” he remembers. When it was time to return to the corporate world something had changed. “I went back to work and it just washed me away,” he says.
Wilford had always maintained
a fairly high tolerance for stress but
work had simply become too much.
“It was a bit of a roller-coaster, emotionally and spiritually,” he says.
“I ended up in a psych ward for a while. I’ve had to rebuild from that.”
BURNOUT OR OVERWORK?
Psychological exhaustion, being at the end of your tether, burning the candle at both ends – whatever you want to call it, many people find their work impossible to leave behind at the end of the day. It’s not simply a case of executives pushed to their limits; burnout can happen in any job.
“There’s very clear evidence we’re working longer hours and we’re spending more time travelling to and from work, which means less time for leisure activities, friends and family,” says
Dawn O’Neil, CEO of Lifeline Australia, a free telephone support service. A poll recently commissioned by Lifeline found that 91 per cent of Australians feel stress in at least one area of their life; 72 per cent of respondents identified work as
the source of their stress.
Professor Christina Maslach of UC Berkeley is a leading expert on professional burnout. She believes we often underestimate the huge impact that work has on our lives. In her book, Banishing Burnout, she says, “Your relationship with your job is a major part of your life. Your sense of identity and self-esteem may be completely wrapped up in what you do [for work].” She says avoiding or overcoming burnout should be treated like any other health issue. “In a world of health fanaticism – diets, exercise programs, massage therapy, yoga – there has to be some way of developing a healthier, less exhausting lifestyle.”
Burnout is different from overwork, though sometimes the two go hand in hand. Overwork is the result of working too many hours, a kind of physical exhaustion that can usually be diffused by simply going on holidays or sitting on a beach, whereas burnout happens at
a deeper psychological level.
Barbara Miller, an organisational psychologist and life coach who works with corporate high-flyers, says most people don’t even know when they’re suffering from burnout. “It becomes a problem when they’re exhausted and they push on regardless, ignoring the problem and being in denial until something dramatic happens,” she says. “Dramatic” can mean anything from hitting the wall emotionally to developing a stress-related disease – or worse. “I had one client in
a high-level position who was suicidal
��� just because of the demands of her job.”
ASK YOURSELF
Professor Maslach developed a questionnaire to help diagnose burnout, including questions such as “Do you find that you are less sympathetic with people than perhaps they deserve?” and “Do you find yourself getting easily irritated by small problems or by your co-workers and team?” Other symptoms include being unable to wind down from work on the weekend, having trouble sleeping, and experiencing mood swings. Professor Maslach developed a system called the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which suggests burnout relies on three key contributors: depersonalisation, emotional exhaustion and low job satisfaction.
Certain professions seem to be more prone to burnout. Research shows that doctors, nurses, teachers and social workers are all more likely to suffer from it. While some jobs are undoubtedly more stressful than others, it may not be the work itself that creates the problem.
“I work with NSW Police and I would have thought the work they do would give them the potential for burnout and even post-traumatic stress,” Miller says, “but that’s not necessarily the case. For many of them, their potential for burnout is to do with organisational policy.”
Workplace policy, bureaucracy and office politics can be far more stressful than any job on its own. Coming up against a set of rules and regulations is invariably depersonalising – one of the key contributors to burnout.
Emotions sit fairly awkwardly in the workplace. To be professional is, by definition, to be coolly detached – like an actor who replays a scene over and over without complaint, or a manager who is always distantly authoritative. Characteristics we consider admirable at the office, such as detachment, might be considered slightly odd, even repressive, in our private lives. “A lot of people disconnect from their emotions in the workplace,” says Miller. “It’s not appropriate, for example, to express negative emotions at work.”
Of course, it’s necessary to maintain professional neutrality to be able to function productively with the range of personalities that inhabit every workplace, but as we spend an increasing amount of time at work, the outlet for our real emotions grows ever smaller. “We often put a lid on what we’re truly feeling, which leads to lack of assertiveness,” Miller says. “When you suppress emotions, they build up – and that’s the root of burnout.”
Miller believes she suffered burnout in her 40s, when she was working for a multinational company, but didn’t recognise the symptoms at the time. She was a marketing manager and felt overworked, but it wasn’t until she had
a health scare that she was forced to
re-evaluate her priorities. “I developed
a tumour in my neck,” she says.
“I thought I was coping with all that stress and I found out I wasn’t.”
The heart of the problem, she realised, was she simply wasn’t satisfied with her job. “I realised it was a conflict of values: I wasn’t driven by the bottom line; I didn’t have the temperament
for it. I realised I had all this stress and
I decided to leave the corporate life.”
Values are important in the workplace. If you disagree with the principles of the company or the way
it’s being run, it’s unlikely you’ll find
the work satisfying, which makes you
a potential candidate for burnout.
Another issue is the expectations you have of your job and yourself. Some people have high expectations of themselves that they can’t possibly reach; others find the job isn’t what they thought it would be or that they can’t keep up with the relentless demands
of a manager.
“The gap between the expectation and the reality of the job can be difficult for some people,” Miller says. “Some people are rigid perfectionists who believe that if they work really hard anything is possible. They are more likely to suffer burnout. You can’t please all people all the time.”
BURNOUT MANAGEMENT
When Miller started running courses on building resilience in the workplace, the seminars were so packed that attendees were sitting in the aisles. However, when she was commissioned to run a series of lunchtime courses on stress management no one turned up. “People don’t like admitting they’re stressed,” she says.
“It’s seen as you’re not coping very well.”
Stress and burnout are not signs of weakness and neither are going to kill your career. Australia’s current and first female governor-general, Quentin Bryce,
told the ABC last year how she experienced burnout in her mid-20s.
Finding it difficult to manage marriage, three young children and a career, she suffered a psychological breakdown.
“It was a time in my life that taught me a very important lesson about the need for women in their families to put themselves on the top of the family agenda,” she says. “I became quite ill because I’d neglected my health and
I ended up with quite serious pneumonia.
“I’ve been saying to young women, ‘You can have it all but not all at the same time,’ and how important it is to take very good care of yourself, of your mental and physical and spiritual wellbeing…’ It’s hard to do. It’s easier to be a workaholic than to have a truly balanced life. It’s very tough for a lot of women teetering on that tightrope of balancing too many responsibilities.”
GETTING HELP
“Seeking help is important,” says Lifeline’s O’Neil. “Don’t try to tough it out on
your own.”
Miller, too, finds that many people simply need the opportunity to debrief
to release the array of emotions they’ve had to keep in check at work. “Reaching out for help is one of the hardest things to do,” she says. “Some people just need to talk. I have clients who come in and talk 90 per cent of the time and at the end of the session they say how much better they feel.”
Suffering from burnout is a sign that you need to re-evaluate your work life. For some, that means taking more time to debrief; for others that could mean moving to a different company, branching out on their own or even changing professions.
Miller runs a three-phase model with her clients to evaluate their professional life, first assessing their emotional intelligence (EQ). “I’ve worked with senior people in the military and when it comes down to what makes them tick, we find out they’re not a rationalist but an idealist.” Knowing what sort of person you are can help you find a job that suits you.
The next step is assessing a person’s strengths. “People are so much happier when they understand and use their strengths,” Miller says.
Finally, she coaches people to set goals and make a commitment to change. Feeling good about your work is all about harmonising your values, expectations and strengths with the right job. “The first thing to do is find an organisation that matches your values,” Miller says, “and then find a profession where you can utilise your strengths.”
It sounds simple, which it is. However, when you’re emotionally exhausted
it can be hard to know where to start.
This is when Miller uses what she calls her “miracle question”.
“Imagine you go to bed tonight and
a miracle occurs,” she says. “You wake
in the morning and you’re doing
a job that matches your personality and temperament and you’re happy and fulfilled. What would you be doing?
“When I recently asked a client the miracle question, she said she’d wake up and be teaching English as a second language in South America. I said, ‘Why is that such a miracle?’ So we talked and realised that it’s not – it’s something she really can do.”
Wilford left his corporate job for an academic career as an associate professor of project management at Bond University, Queensland. He’s written a short book on his experiences called Hitting Rock Bottom: The Savage Toll
of Burnout and is much happier with
the balance between his work and his
life. He now takes time out to play
soccer, sings in a band and is involved
in sustainable development projects.
When Wilford speaks about his experience of burnout, he uses words such as “transformative” and “life-changing”. He believes something profound happened to him and, painful as it was, changed him for the better. “I don’t
think I would have learnt the lessons
I needed to learn unless I had reached that point.” And what did he learn?
“That I am human,” he says emphatically, “and don’t take yourself so seriously.”
