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I came across the article about burnout again, and I have again... No, it didn't. The usual disappointment came. I still hope to find a ready-made answer to the question "what do I not want, and how to deal with it", but hopes, alas, are not reliable.
The vast majority of popularizing articles have the same skeleton: "here are my regalia to give credibility, a contextual definition, an insider about the most important reason, a magic pill, an example of success, be healthy and subscribe to my channel." All you have to do is pour some water, add an alarming illustration and publish it – it's that simple. Simplicity attracts many, and the number of these many is about the same as the number of straws in a haystack in which I look for a needle of use.
The authors of most articles on burnout popularize the superficial approach. For example, they say that this is only a manifestation of fatigue, and it does not matter what is hidden behind the usual word, you just need to rest more often. Or that burnout happens due to stress, which has turned from "non-specific adaptive reactions" into something harmful. Either the rewards are insufficient, or the vocation is different, or the boss is rude, or there is not enough knowledge about the Pomodoro method, or... Sound familiar?
I am disappointed by the popularity of the primitive approach. I suggest that we distract ourselves from the same type of articles and take a closer look at the subject of study. I want to illuminate this dark corner with burnout, where many see banal laziness, stress, fatigue, lack of planning skills or fresh gingerbread. Or ash with the need to throw firewood. We'll need a flashlight, a grunt with a shovel, and respect for our brains.
Many people find it difficult to understand the essence of burnout, because they have not faced this problem themselves. It is difficult for them to even imagine that this is possible. If the hand is healthy, then there should be no problem pressing the button, what are you talking about? If the hand is tired, then just rest, and the problem will be solved. If the problem is the reward for pressing the button, then look at the unemployed and rejoice, because they don't even have a button. If the problem is a lack of pleasure, then just change your job or compensate for your dissatisfaction with traveling. You can immediately come up with many simple recipes aimed at eliminating the false cause.
The so-called 'burnout' would be more correctly called 'paralysis' or 'barrier'. There are hands, the work is clear, but an outwardly healthy hand does not rise to press the necessary and important button – a sound thought does not turn into a useful action, despite the efforts. It was not the "burning" that ended, but an invisible wall appeared, which is becoming more and more difficult to break down day by day.
The barrier is not visible from the outside, so healthy viewers do not believe in the reality of the problem at all: this is not a fracture that can be highlighted by X-rays. Somewhere inside, when faced with a problem, when trying to overcome his reluctance, there is a physically felt disgust and a desire to escape, but the feelings are not visible from the outside and therefore are not understandable to the audience.
If you used to do something useful and enjoyed it, burned with enthusiasm, and then you can't bring yourself to do the same, then there is a feeling that some fuel has run out, and therefore the false term "burnout" has arisen – it caught fire, burned and burned out. But the notorious burning is not at all a necessary symptom of 'burnout', the barrier may well arise without the previous stage of infatuation. You don't have to have a big plus to go into a big minus, you can start a drop in motivation from scratch.
If we are not talking about a serious illness and not about unloading wagons manually, then the recommendations "overwork less and rest more" do not work - there is no "fuel" whose reserves allegedly need to be restored by injections of rest and pleasure. Strength appears under desire, when there is motivation and purpose.
In the erroneous description of the problem "there is no strength to follow the desire", it is more correct to put the cause in the first place – "there is no desire for the strength to be released and felt". If you need to regain motivation, then stop looking for strength and start making desires that have begun to stumble over something.
For a while, you manage to convince yourself, force and intimidate yourself, promise more and more horrors and more and more rewards in order to break through the invisible wall, but every day the barrier becomes stronger, the effectiveness of incentives decreases, and as a result, a person loses a promising job and joy, gaining a sense of guilt and fear in return, which leads to even greater problems.
The more often and more strongly you encounter a barrier, the higher and stronger it becomes, so the advice to "just fight laziness" does not work – an attempt to train willpower during burnout leads to a worsening of the situation. Of course, when it comes to burnout, in other cases it is useful to exercise will and discipline.
The most striking examples of such walls can be found in yesterday's children, for whom the "educators" discouraged them from cleaning, washing dishes, brushing their teeth, eating and exercising, reading, thinking, developing, creating - they have been "burned out" since childhood. Natural needs are suppressed, a blocking rejection has accumulated, which has to be compensated or sublimated indefinitely in order to somehow continue to live.
The elderly laugh at the "snowflakes", believing that something is missing in their brains, so they are just stupid. In fact, they do not have a lack of useful things, but an excess of internal conflicts that prevent people from satisfying their natural needs for growth and realizing themselves fully (fully human).
The problem is complicated by the fact that the emergence of a "barrier" can have very different causes. The complex mechanism of desires can be broken in dozens of different ways, so different recipes help different people, and therefore there can be no universal recipes, contrary to the words of "popularizers".
But the topic is popular, which means that in hundreds of regular articles we will come across the same recipes again and again - many people have helped, so it will help you, listen to smart people with the popularization of the popular. And the audience will continue to not understand what it is about.
The difficulty lies in the fact that the term "burnout" often means very different processes and their manifestations.
A dozen examples that illustrate the variety of phenomena united under the term 'burnout':
Why popularize a new, vague and deceptive term "burnout" at all, if it would be possible to make do with existing words that more accurately convey the essence of the problem and therefore allow you to more accurately determine the right path to the solution? I can assume only one reason – an article about burnout will attract more views than an article about exhaustion. Popularizers love their popularity.
Doubts about the expediency of the term lead us to an important question: what exactly did scientists want to convey by introducing it? Perhaps a return to the roots will add clarity.
In 1974, psychologist Herbert Freudenberger introduced the term "burnout syndrome", which was designed to show not the final state, but the presence of a long process of transformation of motivation into its opposite. Burnout is not just a dislike for work, but a long process during which this dislike accumulates and begins to interfere with work. The syndrome denotes the signs of such a process.
In 1978, Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson presented a multifactorial model, where empathic burnout was called emotional, added a personal variety and a sense of their own professional incompetence. The emphasis has shifted from the process to the state.
Freudenberger drew attention to the decrease in empathy and the appearance of irritability in the professional activities of medical workers. Subsequently, teachers, housewives and managers were added to them. Next, emergency workers, representatives of creative professions, programmers and others pulled up. Symptoms of cynicism, emotional imbalance and fatigue were added to the syndrome.
Soon after that, the term was popularized by psychologists and nearby popularizers, and then the interpretation became completely arbitrary, limited only to the imagination of the retellers.
Today, scientists reduce burnout to the consequences of chronic stress in the process of work, but for some reason, popularizers talk about emotional burnout, not noticing the difference. Literally, they write "science has recognized emotional burnout", referring to ICD-11 (QD85 and QF27), which does not have the word "emotional" and specifically says "applies only to phenomena in a professional context and should not be applied to the description of experiences in other areas of life".
If Freudenberger spoke of emotional tension in her examples, then Maslachs pointed to emotional depression. In other works, the concepts of emotional dullness and emotional inadequacy are also found. Speaking specifically about emotional burnout, which of these different processes do you have in mind?
When you talk about "burnout", what are you talking about – a feeling of irritation, fatigue, indifference, hatred, disappointment, weakness of will, disgust with work, loss of colors of life or loss of life guidelines?
Yes, different types of burnout often appear side by side, act in groups – here burned out and over there, and here and there it is still holding on. But the presence of several different breakdowns does not reduce, but increases the number of tools that are needed to fix it.
Do not be satisfied with substitutions and generalizations. Accuracy in understanding and identifying burnout is key to effectively solving the problem.
Procrastination is one of the possible consequences of a process that pushes you away from the right things. Not a cause, but a manifestation or effect.
And procrastination can be caused by various reasons, it does not necessarily indicate the presence of burnout. And burnout can lead not to a desire to grasp at small or pleasant things, but to a complete lack of desire to do at least something (apathy).
Authors of popular articles often write down the accompanying unnecessary symptoms as causes of burnout. For example:
Many factors can contribute to creating the conditions for burnout, but ultimately, burnout has only one key symptom – not wanting to do something necessary. I don't want it so much that I can't even force myself to do something understandable and important, useful and even necessary. That's all Folks.
Whenever I see an article where the author convincingly talks about the "real cause" of procrastination or burnout, I immediately know that the author of the article is wrong. And it doesn't matter what exactly the article presents as the reason – the rebellion of the inner child against the inner adult, a breakdown in the system of restoring mythical mental energy, or a systematic failure in the unscientific system of "hormones of joy".
If only one reason is suggested, then it is a mistake. No matter how convincing the version is, no matter what scientific terms and theories it is embellished, argued and supported. And talking about two or three reasons is also a mistake. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of possible causes.
In the complex mechanism of desires, each component is important, and therefore it can be broken in different ways (the instructions are also lost). Burnout can have very different causes. Talking about any one of them as the most common, strong, or justified is a mistake, even if this reason looks like the most brilliant and understandable candidate for the throne.
Take a closer look at how burnout works – the desired action is evaluated as unacceptable and therefore blocked. Desire does not turn into action because of some internal obstacle. The desire to "act" is opposed by the desire "not to act".
All desires are based on needs. Examples of blocking or barrier needs: to get away from an unpleasant, frightening, strained, coercive, to stop an unpleasant, useless, untimely action. How exactly is a blocked action evaluated in the unconscious part of the mind?
And in addition to barrier reasons, there can be "secondary" ones with their own subgroups: attention deficit, fixation on goals, loss of orientation, repressed emotions, the habit of postponing... How many possible reasons do you know, for example, for attention deficit?
If there are opposing desires in the psyche, then we can talk about an internal conflict – a contradiction between competing healthy mechanisms of the psyche, be it attitudes, needs or self-perception. Internal conflicts can arise due to undigested traumatic experiences, failed expectations, stuck emotions, anxious fears, old needs, resentments, and everything else that pulls the psyche in different directions.
Here, for example, are a hell of a dozen possible causes of "burnout" that can send the psyche on an emotional vacation:
When I hear "just relaxation, healthy lifestyle and hobbies" again, I understand that someone just doesn't want to think about the magnificent complexity of the world. And this symptom of "excessive desire for simplicity" also has some reasons.
– Colleagues, we have half an hour before the start of serious business, I suggest a topic for informal discussion – burnout. Who has interesting examples and assumptions about the causes?
– I have a great example. A certain teenager loved to go to the pool, for several years he traveled across half the city, learned to swim in different styles and could swim under water for fifty meters. Everything would be fine, but he noticed that it was becoming more and more difficult for him to enter the water. The first contact after jumping into the water from the side gave an unpleasant scorching sensation of cold water, it felt like ice. This feeling instantly passed, the water was of normal temperature, and you could swim for at least an hour, but the need to take a step into the water became more and more unpleasant. The teenager tried to warm up, temper himself, strain his will - nothing helped. Six months later, he noticed that he had been treading water on the edge of the pool for half an hour, gathering his courage. As a result, the pool had to be abandoned. The teenager grew up, many years later he began to go to the sea and there he again faced the reluctance to go into the water. And what should he do?
– It is curious that you have chosen an example with water for the topic of "burning". How does the described case with a teenager relate to burnout in general?
– And, in my opinion, the classics – they used to do something with pleasure, but then they can't bring themselves to do the same. Increased rejection over the course of months is another characteristic sign of a gradual "burnout" of motivation.
– I believe that this can be explained by an attempt at suppression and dissociation – the teenager tried to ignore the feeling of unpleasant contact, denied it, separated it from himself. The body does not tolerate such an attitude, so it strengthened the signal that it considered useful. Accordingly, now at sea it is better to practice gratefully accepting this signal, convincing yourself of the success of the reception, so that the body mejects the alarm.
- Colleague, for the sake of my peace of mind, I ask you to use phrases like "the body endures" or "the body decided" less often, find a more scientific formulation.
– I will try to give an example closer to professional burnout. A student dropped out of the institute because he had accumulated too many tails. I didn't pass too many laboratory papers. Because it was unpleasant for him to draw them up - it was necessary to comply with GOSTs, teachers often found fault and forced to redo them, and the student, although smart, did not require intelligence in that work, and following the instructions was appreciated. The aversion to completing tasks and drawing up reports also accumulated for many months in a row, until it became insurmountable.
"There is not enough data for analysis, and guesswork will be taken aside. And the fault-finding of the professors could not be the reason, but the reason or rationalization. Was the student fond of girls, drinking, sports or games? Details like these can have a significant impact on understanding the changes in his motivation. And the most useful answer would be to the following question – what kind of relationship has he developed with accuracy, does a similar problem manifest itself in later life?
– By the way, about games. Someone was fired from work because of absenteeism - he could not bring himself to go to work. It seemed more and more meaningless to him, although he needed money. But at the same time, he became interested in computer games, they were new to everyone then, not everyone had access to a computer. Can we say that interest in the bright world has displaced interest in the real world?
"You can say, but it will be a finger aim at the sky. In another similar situation, the important thing was that the job consisted of communicating with deadly people, so a change in the type of activity helped, third-party hobbies left the center of interest. When displacing what is necessary, both sides should always be considered interesting – one repels or the other attracts. And the presence of an attractive side is not at all necessary, the repulsion can increase out of the blue.
"But it should be noted that the presence of a super-valuable idea can be a sufficient reason for burnout. Sometimes it comes to the point of absurdity – for example, someone wanted to buy his own apartment so badly that he could not concentrate on work, although it was a successful career that could allow him to acquire a home.
– Colleagues, I propose to change the format of the conversation. For every description of the situation, we can say that it is not complete enough. I suggest sharing not descriptions of problems, but descriptions of the solutions found.
– That is, we take the abstract situation of "it is increasingly difficult to make yourself work"? What about other types of burnout?
"If you managed to find a solution for another species, then why not tell it. For example, cognitive burnout – a person has lost the ability to solve complex problems. And I felt rejection of any need to delve into something new and make a decision. First of all, he decided to check his physical health. I began to work on the posture and ergonomics of the workplace, underwent an examination with dozens of analyses, X-rays and tests, plus drank different vitamins - zero effect, so I decided to look for other specialists. And I looked - he had bags under his eyes, breathing was heavy, he could not sit in one position for a minute, he was constantly warming up. And the word 'under-examination' is on my mind. The body is clearly constantly overstrained, and an attempt to strain more for a new difficult task causes protest. Feedback and all that.
– The primacy of tension can be controversial – does the psyche make you strain and disrupt the metabolism, or has the body caught a failure and affects the psyche? And it is not always easier to check the body, we still do not know much. So this person can be recommended both to continue the examination of physics in search of exotic causes, and to turn to other specialists. And before a psychologist, I would turn to a somnologist, because sleep disruptions may well be a supporting factor, not reflected in the tests.
– For the mentioned cognitive burnout, there is another variant of the cause – an excess of complex interests. Someone worked as a programmer, while being fond of science and technology, wrote books, played complex games and tried to establish relationships with people - each direction is able to fully load the brain, and he tried to juggle heterogeneous tasks and complained about the exhaustion of thinking abilities, which were no longer enough for work. And there is the main difficulty in the distribution of priorities – he is interested in everything, but there is only one life. I had to learn to postpone interesting things for later.
"He is also lucky that his interests are bright, in plain sight. It's worse when burnout hits the meaning of life. For example, one person coped well with several difficult jobs, helping subcontractors, read puzzle books, and then bought an apartment, a car, expensive computers, tried all the delicious food, traveled abroad and lost the point of straining at work. And smart books do not please, and toys are boring. He has everything he can want, and what he wants next is a question of questions. There was no target left, and strangers did not attract them. Consumer goals were a surrogate for life guidelines, so when they are achieved, there is no switch to something more reliable. Something is getting in the way.
– I will add that a crisis of driving goals can occur not only when consumer needs are satisfied, but also when disappointment in a great cause occurs. For example, he aspired to become an athlete, and an accidental injury crossed out hopes for victories. He dreamed of making a discovery, but realized that he could not even repeat someone else's achievements. He wanted to save the world, but he was proven that his ideas were nonsense. Many discoverers were knocked off their feet by a wave of devaluing criticism. And when the "flame goes out", a person begins to go with the flow, only sluggishly reacting to everyday problems.
– Isn't there the notorious midlife crisis? Which has the same symptoms as burnout – it hits emotions and performance. Typical existential burnout. The repository of values and goals is empty. An attempt to look for them in the past only adds to the disappointment - the child dreamed of different things, and the adult is no longer interested, other habits have developed. Does not want anything – a noticeable depression of the needs for development and self-realization, which usually indicates insufficient elaboration of some other needs. You need to dig into the list, look for the lost.
– Colleagues, if the conversation turns to needs, then I earnestly ask you – not a word about Maslow. Give the old man a rest.
"Two old men, hehe. I support, it is better to choose someone with a more substantiated and complete version of the list instead of a bare idea of priorities.
"Okay, I'll offer another example. Someone was classically burned out, he could not even put his hand on the mouse to open the window of the work program. We dug in different directions until we came across a family question. It turned out that all the other members of his family were not tidy enough, to put it very mildly. They do not clean up after themselves, do not wash dishes, rummage through the personal belongings of a hard-working person, interfere with sleep, and something else. And for several years, the man worked a lot and with pleasure for the benefit of the family, but over time, his enthusiasm began to fade, and then turned into his opposite. On the basis of this example, I would like to remind you that man is a social animal. Our minds are designed by evolution to calculate the relationships in the pack, not to count money. And the behavior of loved ones has a particularly strong influence on attitudes, including value attitudes. Man has not become less careful, but his landmarks have suffered.
– Is there any point in being careful if the example of loved ones discourages you? Is a bad example contagious? First, your version creates an excuse: I became lazy because you are all lazy, it's your fault. Rationalization and projection will work, plus spilling out irritation into reproaches. At the very least, this is fraught with a deterioration in relations without solving the main problem. Secondly, it is unlikely, since an adult usually defends his habits. Yes, it is natural for a person to adopt certain features of the group, but it is unlikely that the strength of this mechanism is sufficient for full-fledged burnout. And the attitude to work tasks is more likely to be influenced by the example of colleagues, not relatives.
– Perhaps it's not only about the affected values, but also about the accumulated resentment, which in itself can create a barrier – at the level of consciousness, a person may believe that everything suits him, and the unconscious requires change. In this case, it is not so much a revaluation of values that comes to mind, but a revision of expectations and work on completing emotions.
"As an option, fears settled in expectations. They will interfere, wake up, make a mess and other threats are not the best seasoning for relationships and a source of significant tension.
– I will add another possible factor from similar situations – loneliness. If the values of loved ones are not shared, and only formal relationships at work are added to this, then a person simply has no one to talk to about what he is interested in. Yes, now you can chat with someone on the Internet, but this is not an intimate, a surrogate. Lack of like-minded people. Isolation from one's own kind. If you have a family. It's sad, but it often happens. If a change in marital status is not desired, the ego can be developed so that it can butt heads with the superego.
– Well, I will add another factor – the lack of a sense of home, which is associated with many factors, including safety, support, acceptance, prospects. If the house is a mess, then it's not really a house. And a person needs a place that he could consider his lair, where he could relax. If there is no such place, then the processes that the popular press are accustomed to call chronic stress increase. In the recommendations, the ability to agree on borders is in the first place.
– By the way, about borders. Someone burned out for several years after losing the ability to ride around the world due to the closure of borders in the country. Deprivation of one of the freedoms can hurt the psyche. The presence of restrictions in the outside world is easily experienced only by those who are accustomed to these restrictions. And if a person is used to enjoying traveling, then the loss of the source of joy can lead to the accumulation of tension, irritation and other unpleasant processes. And traveling on the Internet will not help, you need to walk with your feet. We need to look for new outlets somehow.
– The closure of borders in the country... Ahem. If I understood correctly, it is not a deprivation of liberty, but rather a fear of war. A person can swagger, consider himself stable and brave, but suppressed fear is no better than overt fear. Displaced processes are known resource hogs. At least because of the growth of anxiety.
– As for wars, I will add one more possible factor – the rejection of a dangerous peace. If you are used to considering the environment as a field of pleasant opportunities, and then the charm is destroyed, then fear can give rise to rejection, and a global one. With the activation of many defense mechanisms of the psyche. And this someone of yours should be checked not only for anxiety, but also for the level of depression.
– I suppose that in this case, an important role is also played by the increase in the load on the psyche due to the need to combine two different worlds – behind the usual picture of flowering trees and beautiful women, there is a threatening layer. And you need to constantly switch between them without going crazy. And if you do not switch, then you may not have time to react to the threat on the pleasant layer or fall into hopeless despondency without reinforcements on the unpleasant layer.
– I will add one more example on a similar topic. Someone is faced with the fact that he does not agree with the opinion of others, but the situation is such that he cannot argue with anyone - this is fraught with getting into unpleasant places. You have to carefully filter what is said, pretend to be loyal or at least indifferent. The inability to take off the mask, the lack of openness is tiring, not everyone can stand it. And social activity does not make life easier, but adds to the load. Compensations will help, of course, but if you have several years of such a life, then it is better to look for some less harmful means of maintaining tone. To do physical education, at least.
"You've filtered out the words so carefully that I can hardly understand what you're talking about. Several options fall under the description at once. Is it still about burnout?
– Yes, the constant wearing of a thick mask, as well as any situation of increased stress on the psyche, definitely complicates the performance of difficult or people-related work, and also contributes to the growth of anxiety and rejection, which directly leads to a loss of efficiency.
– Colleagues, I suggest that we return from theories to practice. Here's a very different example of burnout – someone discovers that their problem is rooted in the overly abstract nature of their work. He was obliged by his position to deal with statistics, and on an abstract and personally uninteresting topic. A few years of such work, and the disgust became insurmountable. Because the unconscious part of the mind did not consider this work to be the most important and did not want to allocate the necessary resources for it. The addition of sensory experience helped - visible and tangible goals, finishing ribbons and rewards for success. Careful work on tying the activity to reality helped to dispel the accumulated rejection. And please do not confuse this with the reward system - we are not talking about training with reinforcements, there is a different mechanism.
"And I'm still thinking about going into the pool from the first story. An analogy suggests itself here. As far as I have noticed, people often have a problem not in work, but at the beginning of work. It is difficult to jump into cold water, and after the jump it turns out to swim normally and even with pleasure. There is a smell of some kind of programming of attitudes for the complexity of the upcoming work. If it is difficult to start performing work duties, then you can try to somehow reprogram the settings in the unconscious, take auto-training, or whatever it is called now. Not to increase the importance of work by adding sensory experience, but on the contrary – to reduce the importance and complexity of the upcoming actions in evaluations.
– Auto-training is now part of psycho-correction. Colleague, have you decided to seize on one of the popular methods and extol it higher? It will not help someone who feels the need to escape from a stressful situation soon after starting work.
– You underestimate the popular. Imagine that someone burned out at work, classically. And he began to try different ways to increase productivity, fight procrastination and prevent burnout. By the way, here we need some new term like "integrated management of personal performance", so as not to list directions. So this burned-out man collected a collection of hundreds of techniques and complained that not a single method helped him. And when I began to ask questions, it turned out that when finding a new method, a person wrote down what he found in a collection, memorized, studied the features and did not apply it in practice. He did not try to practice what he found day after day for at least two weeks. If there is no quick result, then it does not work, we are looking for the following. Needless to say, this person is unlikely to find the cause of his trouble.
– I don't underestimate it. Of course, it's not about choosing the opposite extreme, but about balance. When buying an apartment, our favorite IT specialist does not study the history of architecture and the possibilities of modern technologies, but chooses a solution from popular ones. And when visiting a therapist in the hospital, he gets what the therapist considers relevant, that is, doctors also choose from what is popular in their environment, they do not start with exotics. Popular is popular for a reason, it may well be useful. I only warn against choosing any method of correction without clarifying the diagnosis. When choosing, you still need to choose, and not grab the first thing you come across.
– By the way, about doctors and methods of correction. There is an analogy with rehabilitation after an injury. Someone burned out and quit tried to rest for a long time, but even after six months the feeling of disgust for work did not go away. He tried to go into a hobby, but even there he could not strain his brain for more or less complex tasks, there were not enough resources. The balance between doing nothing and making an effort helped. So in sports, if you have injured a leg or arm, then it is equally harmful to be inactive and overexerted, there you need to start moving little by little and smoothly increase efforts to restore the functionality of the recovering limb. Therefore, the problem is not always in the choice of method, sometimes the dosage plays a decisive role. Paracelsus will not let you lie.
"Dzyn-dzyn. Colleagues, unfortunately, the leisure time is coming to an end. Thank you all for your clever words. It's time to work.
Of those who really burned out, many had enough popular articles suggesting the exploitation of the defense mechanisms of the psyche: compensation, sublimation, affiliation, and so on (a separate large topic for study).
But for some of the burned-out, popular recipes don't help, and they face the challenge of finding a solution. These few people wonder how to clarify their personal diagnosis if popular solutions have not helped. Life is going downhill, something needs to be done, but what exactly when the reaction to the "must" is broken? Where exactly is the breakdown hidden?
Fortunately, burnout is not a mass phenomenon. Unfortunately, rarity does not make it easier for those who are faced with its complexity. And what should those who are faced do?
I have too many different answers to the question "who is to blame" and therefore there is no answer to the question "what to do". In this article, you will not find a magic pill.
Behind the vague term there are many very different processes, and you need to somehow understand which of them is going on in your personal head. Probably, you need to conduct tests. You can test: yourself, the barrier, tasks.
You can look for weaknesses in yourself, take a closer look at the disappeared emotions, go through the list of needs in search of unsatisfied ones, rewrite trigger situations.
You can listen to the barrier – what exactly does it feel when trying to overcome reluctance, and in what part of the body does this sensation occur? Either anxiety jumps, or the smell is repulsive, or the brain offers to run somewhere else to do something else, or there are spikes on the barrier that cause pain...
You can take a closer look at the tasks that you used to like, but now are not just boring, but have become unpleasant. Are these the same tasks, processes, and activities as before, or has something significant changed?
Testing can be supplemented by rocking the situation – shifting the time and place of work, starting and ending the working day differently, changing tools and relationships, while learning about changes in your reactions.
And yes, testing can be accompanied by attempts to apply popular methods to improve efficiency. But not with the hope of being cured, but to get a more complete picture of their crisis. To figure out the real cause.
By finding the true cause, you can find a truly effective solution, and not just temporarily hide the symptoms.
I don't know exactly what to do in an overly generalized case of so-called "burnout." But I know exactly what not to do.
There is no need to say that you know what burnout is. There is no generalizing burnout in the psyche, there are some specific internal conflicts, defense mechanisms of the psyche, suppressed emotions, unrealistic expectations, barrier needs, stopping reactions and aspirations, causes of anxiety, bad habits and other processes. Find out the name of your demon to gain power over it.
Don't say you know the root cause of burnout, and don't offer the most powerful and best way to eliminate burnout. Such a statement is like knowing the main cause of a car breakdown and the best way to repair it. If the wheels slip, then just fill up the fuel tank, I always do this, it helps great. And if the engine overheats, then just turn on the air conditioner at full power (this is sarcasm).
And don't say that the psyche is simple. Reductionism is popular but deceptive as a cognitive delusion. Examples of oversimplification:
Source
The vast majority of popularizing articles have the same skeleton: "here are my regalia to give credibility, a contextual definition, an insider about the most important reason, a magic pill, an example of success, be healthy and subscribe to my channel." All you have to do is pour some water, add an alarming illustration and publish it – it's that simple. Simplicity attracts many, and the number of these many is about the same as the number of straws in a haystack in which I look for a needle of use.
The authors of most articles on burnout popularize the superficial approach. For example, they say that this is only a manifestation of fatigue, and it does not matter what is hidden behind the usual word, you just need to rest more often. Or that burnout happens due to stress, which has turned from "non-specific adaptive reactions" into something harmful. Either the rewards are insufficient, or the vocation is different, or the boss is rude, or there is not enough knowledge about the Pomodoro method, or... Sound familiar?
I am disappointed by the popularity of the primitive approach. I suggest that we distract ourselves from the same type of articles and take a closer look at the subject of study. I want to illuminate this dark corner with burnout, where many see banal laziness, stress, fatigue, lack of planning skills or fresh gingerbread. Or ash with the need to throw firewood. We'll need a flashlight, a grunt with a shovel, and respect for our brains.
A deceptive term
The primitive interpretation of "burned out means tired" leads to bewilderment, because there are examples of much stronger fatigue and much smaller rewards in the complete absence of burnout. After a distorted interpretation, a logical conclusion suggests itself: people are lazy, funny, have not seen real problems, they are mad with fat.Many people find it difficult to understand the essence of burnout, because they have not faced this problem themselves. It is difficult for them to even imagine that this is possible. If the hand is healthy, then there should be no problem pressing the button, what are you talking about? If the hand is tired, then just rest, and the problem will be solved. If the problem is the reward for pressing the button, then look at the unemployed and rejoice, because they don't even have a button. If the problem is a lack of pleasure, then just change your job or compensate for your dissatisfaction with traveling. You can immediately come up with many simple recipes aimed at eliminating the false cause.
The so-called 'burnout' would be more correctly called 'paralysis' or 'barrier'. There are hands, the work is clear, but an outwardly healthy hand does not rise to press the necessary and important button – a sound thought does not turn into a useful action, despite the efforts. It was not the "burning" that ended, but an invisible wall appeared, which is becoming more and more difficult to break down day by day.
The barrier is not visible from the outside, so healthy viewers do not believe in the reality of the problem at all: this is not a fracture that can be highlighted by X-rays. Somewhere inside, when faced with a problem, when trying to overcome his reluctance, there is a physically felt disgust and a desire to escape, but the feelings are not visible from the outside and therefore are not understandable to the audience.
If you used to do something useful and enjoyed it, burned with enthusiasm, and then you can't bring yourself to do the same, then there is a feeling that some fuel has run out, and therefore the false term "burnout" has arisen – it caught fire, burned and burned out. But the notorious burning is not at all a necessary symptom of 'burnout', the barrier may well arise without the previous stage of infatuation. You don't have to have a big plus to go into a big minus, you can start a drop in motivation from scratch.
If we are not talking about a serious illness and not about unloading wagons manually, then the recommendations "overwork less and rest more" do not work - there is no "fuel" whose reserves allegedly need to be restored by injections of rest and pleasure. Strength appears under desire, when there is motivation and purpose.
In the erroneous description of the problem "there is no strength to follow the desire", it is more correct to put the cause in the first place – "there is no desire for the strength to be released and felt". If you need to regain motivation, then stop looking for strength and start making desires that have begun to stumble over something.
For a while, you manage to convince yourself, force and intimidate yourself, promise more and more horrors and more and more rewards in order to break through the invisible wall, but every day the barrier becomes stronger, the effectiveness of incentives decreases, and as a result, a person loses a promising job and joy, gaining a sense of guilt and fear in return, which leads to even greater problems.
The more often and more strongly you encounter a barrier, the higher and stronger it becomes, so the advice to "just fight laziness" does not work – an attempt to train willpower during burnout leads to a worsening of the situation. Of course, when it comes to burnout, in other cases it is useful to exercise will and discipline.
The most striking examples of such walls can be found in yesterday's children, for whom the "educators" discouraged them from cleaning, washing dishes, brushing their teeth, eating and exercising, reading, thinking, developing, creating - they have been "burned out" since childhood. Natural needs are suppressed, a blocking rejection has accumulated, which has to be compensated or sublimated indefinitely in order to somehow continue to live.
The elderly laugh at the "snowflakes", believing that something is missing in their brains, so they are just stupid. In fact, they do not have a lack of useful things, but an excess of internal conflicts that prevent people from satisfying their natural needs for growth and realizing themselves fully (fully human).
The problem is complicated by the fact that the emergence of a "barrier" can have very different causes. The complex mechanism of desires can be broken in dozens of different ways, so different recipes help different people, and therefore there can be no universal recipes, contrary to the words of "popularizers".
But the topic is popular, which means that in hundreds of regular articles we will come across the same recipes again and again - many people have helped, so it will help you, listen to smart people with the popularization of the popular. And the audience will continue to not understand what it is about.
Very different species
Before talking about the causes of the problem, it is necessary to clarify the problem itself and its signs in order to understand what exactly we are talking about.The difficulty lies in the fact that the term "burnout" often means very different processes and their manifestations.
A dozen examples that illustrate the variety of phenomena united under the term 'burnout':
- Physical burnout is the symptoms of fatigue, lack of sleep or an incipient disease felt in the body in the absence of visible reasons for this. He used to be cheerful, but now he is a ruin.
- Emotional burnout is fatigue from emotional experiences. You don't want to watch dramas and horror films, the experiences become painful. Plus the imbalance in feelings - joys have decreased, fears have become more frequent. I want peace of mind.
- Empathic burnout is fatigue from people, growing indifference to cynicism. It occurs in people who work in fields that constantly require care for others, such as medical professionals and psychologists. If you search for "famous misanthropes", you can find other professions that contribute to the appearance of calluses on empathy.
- Social burnout is relationship fatigue caused by difficulties in interpersonal relationships and the social environment. A person may strive for social isolation, up to seclusion.
- Cognitive burnout is a depletion of mental resources, manifested in difficulties with concentration, decision-making and information processing. Difficult tasks become overwhelming and disgusting. Impostor syndrome may be added.
- Academic burnout is a dislike for the search for something new, which is traditionally associated with learning and academic activities. It occurs in students, teachers or researchers, but can also be attributed to other cases in which developmental needs are suppressed or goals are not accepted.
- Creative burnout is difficulties in the creative process, loss of inspiration and motivation for creativity. The creative streak burned out.
- Volitional burnout is the depletion of some volitional resources that are necessary for self-regulation, perseverance and management of one's own actions and goals. You can't force yourself to do the right thing.
- Personal burnout is the suppression of personal needs, including the loss of self-identification and self-determination. I don't want to be someone, make decisions and be responsible. In behavior, infantilism and conciliation increase, and the need for care grows.
- Spiritual or existential burnout is the loss of goals or the meaning of life, a crisis of faith or spiritual disorientation, disappointment in former values without the emergence of new ones.
Why popularize a new, vague and deceptive term "burnout" at all, if it would be possible to make do with existing words that more accurately convey the essence of the problem and therefore allow you to more accurately determine the right path to the solution? I can assume only one reason – an article about burnout will attract more views than an article about exhaustion. Popularizers love their popularity.
Doubts about the expediency of the term lead us to an important question: what exactly did scientists want to convey by introducing it? Perhaps a return to the roots will add clarity.
In 1974, psychologist Herbert Freudenberger introduced the term "burnout syndrome", which was designed to show not the final state, but the presence of a long process of transformation of motivation into its opposite. Burnout is not just a dislike for work, but a long process during which this dislike accumulates and begins to interfere with work. The syndrome denotes the signs of such a process.
In 1978, Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson presented a multifactorial model, where empathic burnout was called emotional, added a personal variety and a sense of their own professional incompetence. The emphasis has shifted from the process to the state.
Freudenberger drew attention to the decrease in empathy and the appearance of irritability in the professional activities of medical workers. Subsequently, teachers, housewives and managers were added to them. Next, emergency workers, representatives of creative professions, programmers and others pulled up. Symptoms of cynicism, emotional imbalance and fatigue were added to the syndrome.
Soon after that, the term was popularized by psychologists and nearby popularizers, and then the interpretation became completely arbitrary, limited only to the imagination of the retellers.
Today, scientists reduce burnout to the consequences of chronic stress in the process of work, but for some reason, popularizers talk about emotional burnout, not noticing the difference. Literally, they write "science has recognized emotional burnout", referring to ICD-11 (QD85 and QF27), which does not have the word "emotional" and specifically says "applies only to phenomena in a professional context and should not be applied to the description of experiences in other areas of life".
If Freudenberger spoke of emotional tension in her examples, then Maslachs pointed to emotional depression. In other works, the concepts of emotional dullness and emotional inadequacy are also found. Speaking specifically about emotional burnout, which of these different processes do you have in mind?
When you talk about "burnout", what are you talking about – a feeling of irritation, fatigue, indifference, hatred, disappointment, weakness of will, disgust with work, loss of colors of life or loss of life guidelines?
Yes, different types of burnout often appear side by side, act in groups – here burned out and over there, and here and there it is still holding on. But the presence of several different breakdowns does not reduce, but increases the number of tools that are needed to fix it.
Do not be satisfied with substitutions and generalizations. Accuracy in understanding and identifying burnout is key to effectively solving the problem.
Deceptive symptoms
If you do not want to do something useful, there is a desire to avoid a stressful situation. This leads to doing something else, more interesting or enjoyable, and this is how the notorious procrastination appears – constantly postponing important things indefinitely for the sake of other less important, but more attractive activities.Procrastination is one of the possible consequences of a process that pushes you away from the right things. Not a cause, but a manifestation or effect.
And procrastination can be caused by various reasons, it does not necessarily indicate the presence of burnout. And burnout can lead not to a desire to grasp at small or pleasant things, but to a complete lack of desire to do at least something (apathy).
Authors of popular articles often write down the accompanying unnecessary symptoms as causes of burnout. For example:
- Hormones, stress, depression, chronic fatigue – under scientific, but superficial explanations and vague terms, there are not causes, but various symptoms of different causes and unfounded assumptions.
- An excess of physical, informational or emotional stress is not the basis, but only intensifying factors that exacerbate internal conflicts that generate barriers in the way of desires.
- Bad relationships with upsetting loved ones, annoying colleagues, or unfair bosses are different consequences due to different reasons.
- Emotional vulnerability, irascibility, muffled or distorted (imbalance) of emotions are different consequences of different causes.
- Carelessness, perfectionism, poor work-life balance are different symptoms and consequences of different causes.
Many factors can contribute to creating the conditions for burnout, but ultimately, burnout has only one key symptom – not wanting to do something necessary. I don't want it so much that I can't even force myself to do something understandable and important, useful and even necessary. That's all Folks.
Many reasons
In practice, the most popular solutions are often sought. As I have said and written many times, this is not the most logical approach if the problem is defined in general, without taking into account the context and specifics. Any repair or treatment should begin with a diagnosis, to choose a solution, you need to study the symptoms and determine the real roots of the problem.Whenever I see an article where the author convincingly talks about the "real cause" of procrastination or burnout, I immediately know that the author of the article is wrong. And it doesn't matter what exactly the article presents as the reason – the rebellion of the inner child against the inner adult, a breakdown in the system of restoring mythical mental energy, or a systematic failure in the unscientific system of "hormones of joy".
If only one reason is suggested, then it is a mistake. No matter how convincing the version is, no matter what scientific terms and theories it is embellished, argued and supported. And talking about two or three reasons is also a mistake. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of possible causes.
In the complex mechanism of desires, each component is important, and therefore it can be broken in different ways (the instructions are also lost). Burnout can have very different causes. Talking about any one of them as the most common, strong, or justified is a mistake, even if this reason looks like the most brilliant and understandable candidate for the throne.
Take a closer look at how burnout works – the desired action is evaluated as unacceptable and therefore blocked. Desire does not turn into action because of some internal obstacle. The desire to "act" is opposed by the desire "not to act".
All desires are based on needs. Examples of blocking or barrier needs: to get away from an unpleasant, frightening, strained, coercive, to stop an unpleasant, useless, untimely action. How exactly is a blocked action evaluated in the unconscious part of the mind?
And in addition to barrier reasons, there can be "secondary" ones with their own subgroups: attention deficit, fixation on goals, loss of orientation, repressed emotions, the habit of postponing... How many possible reasons do you know, for example, for attention deficit?
If there are opposing desires in the psyche, then we can talk about an internal conflict – a contradiction between competing healthy mechanisms of the psyche, be it attitudes, needs or self-perception. Internal conflicts can arise due to undigested traumatic experiences, failed expectations, stuck emotions, anxious fears, old needs, resentments, and everything else that pulls the psyche in different directions.
Here, for example, are a hell of a dozen possible causes of "burnout" that can send the psyche on an emotional vacation:
- A set of ignorance – the need to use unfamiliar tools or "magic" breeds uncertainty. Loss of control includes several inhibitory processes at once.
- A set of project expertise – too many details need to be taken into account to make the next change. Possible errors cause anxiety and fear (typical for working with legacy code). It can be strengthened by high self-esteem or the burden of responsibility.
- An excess of distractions leads to an increase in anxiety, as well as to a delay in solving, which is why the "active" network of the brain unsuccessfully tries to solve complex problems instead of the "default" one. Failures generate a sense of lack of resources and rejection.
- Fixating on distant goals removes the pleasure of the process and makes it difficult to switch between tasks, which is why the aversion to distractions grows, and all resource-intensive processes become unpleasant.
- When false goals replace true ones (supporting goals are replaced by instrumental ones), this causes a feeling that any actions are devoid of perspective. Loss of orientation leads to frequent stops.
- Hopelessness is exacerbated by hopelessness, which is caused by debilitating loads, the cause of which may lie in the lack of skills of humility, delegation and the skill (not time) of rest.
- The habit of devaluation and patience, as well as compensation, transference, and dreams, allows you to repress into the unconscious and accumulate unpleasant emotions there, which is why internal resources are no longer enough for any difficult tasks.
- Long-standing dissatisfaction of some need (especially a personal one) leads to a loss of awareness with a simultaneous increase in its priority, which leads to congestion in the mechanism of choice.
- Attempts to force yourself to do something unpleasant regularly lead to an increase in internal resistance (rebellion of the "child"), and not to the training of willpower. It can be aggravated by low self-esteem and self-doubt, which have their own reasons.
- Tension accumulated in the muscles, caused by a failure of the movement program (muscle clamps or blocks), especially near the spine, may not be felt due to its familiarity, but leads to a constant feeling of fatigue and a desire to escape from any stressful situation.
- Diligent holding on to the social mask can turn it into a deaf cocoon, leading to a lack of resources with a growing sense of helplessness and a lack of freedom with a constantly unmet need to overcome limitations.
- Habitual running away from problems changes the value of different roles, so that the role of the working specialist is not included, it is suppressed by the role of the one who receives pleasure. It is strengthened by the presence of self-respect (surprise).
- The fascination with watching news feeds and entertaining videos leads to an attachment to observing the impressive and sometimes disturbing world around you. Learning that has become an end in itself displaces urgent tasks like boring work. Running away becomes a habit.
When I hear "just relaxation, healthy lifestyle and hobbies" again, I understand that someone just doesn't want to think about the magnificent complexity of the world. And this symptom of "excessive desire for simplicity" also has some reasons.
Illustration
(characters are fictional, coincidences are accidental)– Colleagues, we have half an hour before the start of serious business, I suggest a topic for informal discussion – burnout. Who has interesting examples and assumptions about the causes?
– I have a great example. A certain teenager loved to go to the pool, for several years he traveled across half the city, learned to swim in different styles and could swim under water for fifty meters. Everything would be fine, but he noticed that it was becoming more and more difficult for him to enter the water. The first contact after jumping into the water from the side gave an unpleasant scorching sensation of cold water, it felt like ice. This feeling instantly passed, the water was of normal temperature, and you could swim for at least an hour, but the need to take a step into the water became more and more unpleasant. The teenager tried to warm up, temper himself, strain his will - nothing helped. Six months later, he noticed that he had been treading water on the edge of the pool for half an hour, gathering his courage. As a result, the pool had to be abandoned. The teenager grew up, many years later he began to go to the sea and there he again faced the reluctance to go into the water. And what should he do?
– It is curious that you have chosen an example with water for the topic of "burning". How does the described case with a teenager relate to burnout in general?
– And, in my opinion, the classics – they used to do something with pleasure, but then they can't bring themselves to do the same. Increased rejection over the course of months is another characteristic sign of a gradual "burnout" of motivation.
– I believe that this can be explained by an attempt at suppression and dissociation – the teenager tried to ignore the feeling of unpleasant contact, denied it, separated it from himself. The body does not tolerate such an attitude, so it strengthened the signal that it considered useful. Accordingly, now at sea it is better to practice gratefully accepting this signal, convincing yourself of the success of the reception, so that the body mejects the alarm.
- Colleague, for the sake of my peace of mind, I ask you to use phrases like "the body endures" or "the body decided" less often, find a more scientific formulation.
– I will try to give an example closer to professional burnout. A student dropped out of the institute because he had accumulated too many tails. I didn't pass too many laboratory papers. Because it was unpleasant for him to draw them up - it was necessary to comply with GOSTs, teachers often found fault and forced to redo them, and the student, although smart, did not require intelligence in that work, and following the instructions was appreciated. The aversion to completing tasks and drawing up reports also accumulated for many months in a row, until it became insurmountable.
"There is not enough data for analysis, and guesswork will be taken aside. And the fault-finding of the professors could not be the reason, but the reason or rationalization. Was the student fond of girls, drinking, sports or games? Details like these can have a significant impact on understanding the changes in his motivation. And the most useful answer would be to the following question – what kind of relationship has he developed with accuracy, does a similar problem manifest itself in later life?
– By the way, about games. Someone was fired from work because of absenteeism - he could not bring himself to go to work. It seemed more and more meaningless to him, although he needed money. But at the same time, he became interested in computer games, they were new to everyone then, not everyone had access to a computer. Can we say that interest in the bright world has displaced interest in the real world?
"You can say, but it will be a finger aim at the sky. In another similar situation, the important thing was that the job consisted of communicating with deadly people, so a change in the type of activity helped, third-party hobbies left the center of interest. When displacing what is necessary, both sides should always be considered interesting – one repels or the other attracts. And the presence of an attractive side is not at all necessary, the repulsion can increase out of the blue.
"But it should be noted that the presence of a super-valuable idea can be a sufficient reason for burnout. Sometimes it comes to the point of absurdity – for example, someone wanted to buy his own apartment so badly that he could not concentrate on work, although it was a successful career that could allow him to acquire a home.
– Colleagues, I propose to change the format of the conversation. For every description of the situation, we can say that it is not complete enough. I suggest sharing not descriptions of problems, but descriptions of the solutions found.
– That is, we take the abstract situation of "it is increasingly difficult to make yourself work"? What about other types of burnout?
"If you managed to find a solution for another species, then why not tell it. For example, cognitive burnout – a person has lost the ability to solve complex problems. And I felt rejection of any need to delve into something new and make a decision. First of all, he decided to check his physical health. I began to work on the posture and ergonomics of the workplace, underwent an examination with dozens of analyses, X-rays and tests, plus drank different vitamins - zero effect, so I decided to look for other specialists. And I looked - he had bags under his eyes, breathing was heavy, he could not sit in one position for a minute, he was constantly warming up. And the word 'under-examination' is on my mind. The body is clearly constantly overstrained, and an attempt to strain more for a new difficult task causes protest. Feedback and all that.
– The primacy of tension can be controversial – does the psyche make you strain and disrupt the metabolism, or has the body caught a failure and affects the psyche? And it is not always easier to check the body, we still do not know much. So this person can be recommended both to continue the examination of physics in search of exotic causes, and to turn to other specialists. And before a psychologist, I would turn to a somnologist, because sleep disruptions may well be a supporting factor, not reflected in the tests.
– For the mentioned cognitive burnout, there is another variant of the cause – an excess of complex interests. Someone worked as a programmer, while being fond of science and technology, wrote books, played complex games and tried to establish relationships with people - each direction is able to fully load the brain, and he tried to juggle heterogeneous tasks and complained about the exhaustion of thinking abilities, which were no longer enough for work. And there is the main difficulty in the distribution of priorities – he is interested in everything, but there is only one life. I had to learn to postpone interesting things for later.
"He is also lucky that his interests are bright, in plain sight. It's worse when burnout hits the meaning of life. For example, one person coped well with several difficult jobs, helping subcontractors, read puzzle books, and then bought an apartment, a car, expensive computers, tried all the delicious food, traveled abroad and lost the point of straining at work. And smart books do not please, and toys are boring. He has everything he can want, and what he wants next is a question of questions. There was no target left, and strangers did not attract them. Consumer goals were a surrogate for life guidelines, so when they are achieved, there is no switch to something more reliable. Something is getting in the way.
– I will add that a crisis of driving goals can occur not only when consumer needs are satisfied, but also when disappointment in a great cause occurs. For example, he aspired to become an athlete, and an accidental injury crossed out hopes for victories. He dreamed of making a discovery, but realized that he could not even repeat someone else's achievements. He wanted to save the world, but he was proven that his ideas were nonsense. Many discoverers were knocked off their feet by a wave of devaluing criticism. And when the "flame goes out", a person begins to go with the flow, only sluggishly reacting to everyday problems.
– Isn't there the notorious midlife crisis? Which has the same symptoms as burnout – it hits emotions and performance. Typical existential burnout. The repository of values and goals is empty. An attempt to look for them in the past only adds to the disappointment - the child dreamed of different things, and the adult is no longer interested, other habits have developed. Does not want anything – a noticeable depression of the needs for development and self-realization, which usually indicates insufficient elaboration of some other needs. You need to dig into the list, look for the lost.
– Colleagues, if the conversation turns to needs, then I earnestly ask you – not a word about Maslow. Give the old man a rest.
"Two old men, hehe. I support, it is better to choose someone with a more substantiated and complete version of the list instead of a bare idea of priorities.
"Okay, I'll offer another example. Someone was classically burned out, he could not even put his hand on the mouse to open the window of the work program. We dug in different directions until we came across a family question. It turned out that all the other members of his family were not tidy enough, to put it very mildly. They do not clean up after themselves, do not wash dishes, rummage through the personal belongings of a hard-working person, interfere with sleep, and something else. And for several years, the man worked a lot and with pleasure for the benefit of the family, but over time, his enthusiasm began to fade, and then turned into his opposite. On the basis of this example, I would like to remind you that man is a social animal. Our minds are designed by evolution to calculate the relationships in the pack, not to count money. And the behavior of loved ones has a particularly strong influence on attitudes, including value attitudes. Man has not become less careful, but his landmarks have suffered.
– Is there any point in being careful if the example of loved ones discourages you? Is a bad example contagious? First, your version creates an excuse: I became lazy because you are all lazy, it's your fault. Rationalization and projection will work, plus spilling out irritation into reproaches. At the very least, this is fraught with a deterioration in relations without solving the main problem. Secondly, it is unlikely, since an adult usually defends his habits. Yes, it is natural for a person to adopt certain features of the group, but it is unlikely that the strength of this mechanism is sufficient for full-fledged burnout. And the attitude to work tasks is more likely to be influenced by the example of colleagues, not relatives.
– Perhaps it's not only about the affected values, but also about the accumulated resentment, which in itself can create a barrier – at the level of consciousness, a person may believe that everything suits him, and the unconscious requires change. In this case, it is not so much a revaluation of values that comes to mind, but a revision of expectations and work on completing emotions.
"As an option, fears settled in expectations. They will interfere, wake up, make a mess and other threats are not the best seasoning for relationships and a source of significant tension.
– I will add another possible factor from similar situations – loneliness. If the values of loved ones are not shared, and only formal relationships at work are added to this, then a person simply has no one to talk to about what he is interested in. Yes, now you can chat with someone on the Internet, but this is not an intimate, a surrogate. Lack of like-minded people. Isolation from one's own kind. If you have a family. It's sad, but it often happens. If a change in marital status is not desired, the ego can be developed so that it can butt heads with the superego.
– Well, I will add another factor – the lack of a sense of home, which is associated with many factors, including safety, support, acceptance, prospects. If the house is a mess, then it's not really a house. And a person needs a place that he could consider his lair, where he could relax. If there is no such place, then the processes that the popular press are accustomed to call chronic stress increase. In the recommendations, the ability to agree on borders is in the first place.
– By the way, about borders. Someone burned out for several years after losing the ability to ride around the world due to the closure of borders in the country. Deprivation of one of the freedoms can hurt the psyche. The presence of restrictions in the outside world is easily experienced only by those who are accustomed to these restrictions. And if a person is used to enjoying traveling, then the loss of the source of joy can lead to the accumulation of tension, irritation and other unpleasant processes. And traveling on the Internet will not help, you need to walk with your feet. We need to look for new outlets somehow.
– The closure of borders in the country... Ahem. If I understood correctly, it is not a deprivation of liberty, but rather a fear of war. A person can swagger, consider himself stable and brave, but suppressed fear is no better than overt fear. Displaced processes are known resource hogs. At least because of the growth of anxiety.
– As for wars, I will add one more possible factor – the rejection of a dangerous peace. If you are used to considering the environment as a field of pleasant opportunities, and then the charm is destroyed, then fear can give rise to rejection, and a global one. With the activation of many defense mechanisms of the psyche. And this someone of yours should be checked not only for anxiety, but also for the level of depression.
– I suppose that in this case, an important role is also played by the increase in the load on the psyche due to the need to combine two different worlds – behind the usual picture of flowering trees and beautiful women, there is a threatening layer. And you need to constantly switch between them without going crazy. And if you do not switch, then you may not have time to react to the threat on the pleasant layer or fall into hopeless despondency without reinforcements on the unpleasant layer.
– I will add one more example on a similar topic. Someone is faced with the fact that he does not agree with the opinion of others, but the situation is such that he cannot argue with anyone - this is fraught with getting into unpleasant places. You have to carefully filter what is said, pretend to be loyal or at least indifferent. The inability to take off the mask, the lack of openness is tiring, not everyone can stand it. And social activity does not make life easier, but adds to the load. Compensations will help, of course, but if you have several years of such a life, then it is better to look for some less harmful means of maintaining tone. To do physical education, at least.
"You've filtered out the words so carefully that I can hardly understand what you're talking about. Several options fall under the description at once. Is it still about burnout?
– Yes, the constant wearing of a thick mask, as well as any situation of increased stress on the psyche, definitely complicates the performance of difficult or people-related work, and also contributes to the growth of anxiety and rejection, which directly leads to a loss of efficiency.
– Colleagues, I suggest that we return from theories to practice. Here's a very different example of burnout – someone discovers that their problem is rooted in the overly abstract nature of their work. He was obliged by his position to deal with statistics, and on an abstract and personally uninteresting topic. A few years of such work, and the disgust became insurmountable. Because the unconscious part of the mind did not consider this work to be the most important and did not want to allocate the necessary resources for it. The addition of sensory experience helped - visible and tangible goals, finishing ribbons and rewards for success. Careful work on tying the activity to reality helped to dispel the accumulated rejection. And please do not confuse this with the reward system - we are not talking about training with reinforcements, there is a different mechanism.
"And I'm still thinking about going into the pool from the first story. An analogy suggests itself here. As far as I have noticed, people often have a problem not in work, but at the beginning of work. It is difficult to jump into cold water, and after the jump it turns out to swim normally and even with pleasure. There is a smell of some kind of programming of attitudes for the complexity of the upcoming work. If it is difficult to start performing work duties, then you can try to somehow reprogram the settings in the unconscious, take auto-training, or whatever it is called now. Not to increase the importance of work by adding sensory experience, but on the contrary – to reduce the importance and complexity of the upcoming actions in evaluations.
– Auto-training is now part of psycho-correction. Colleague, have you decided to seize on one of the popular methods and extol it higher? It will not help someone who feels the need to escape from a stressful situation soon after starting work.
– You underestimate the popular. Imagine that someone burned out at work, classically. And he began to try different ways to increase productivity, fight procrastination and prevent burnout. By the way, here we need some new term like "integrated management of personal performance", so as not to list directions. So this burned-out man collected a collection of hundreds of techniques and complained that not a single method helped him. And when I began to ask questions, it turned out that when finding a new method, a person wrote down what he found in a collection, memorized, studied the features and did not apply it in practice. He did not try to practice what he found day after day for at least two weeks. If there is no quick result, then it does not work, we are looking for the following. Needless to say, this person is unlikely to find the cause of his trouble.
– I don't underestimate it. Of course, it's not about choosing the opposite extreme, but about balance. When buying an apartment, our favorite IT specialist does not study the history of architecture and the possibilities of modern technologies, but chooses a solution from popular ones. And when visiting a therapist in the hospital, he gets what the therapist considers relevant, that is, doctors also choose from what is popular in their environment, they do not start with exotics. Popular is popular for a reason, it may well be useful. I only warn against choosing any method of correction without clarifying the diagnosis. When choosing, you still need to choose, and not grab the first thing you come across.
– By the way, about doctors and methods of correction. There is an analogy with rehabilitation after an injury. Someone burned out and quit tried to rest for a long time, but even after six months the feeling of disgust for work did not go away. He tried to go into a hobby, but even there he could not strain his brain for more or less complex tasks, there were not enough resources. The balance between doing nothing and making an effort helped. So in sports, if you have injured a leg or arm, then it is equally harmful to be inactive and overexerted, there you need to start moving little by little and smoothly increase efforts to restore the functionality of the recovering limb. Therefore, the problem is not always in the choice of method, sometimes the dosage plays a decisive role. Paracelsus will not let you lie.
"Dzyn-dzyn. Colleagues, unfortunately, the leisure time is coming to an end. Thank you all for your clever words. It's time to work.
Main task and complexity
Many of those who faced burnout mistakenly considered the usual manifestations of household fatigue or laziness, which disappear in a week or two without any treatment, to be a problem.Of those who really burned out, many had enough popular articles suggesting the exploitation of the defense mechanisms of the psyche: compensation, sublimation, affiliation, and so on (a separate large topic for study).
But for some of the burned-out, popular recipes don't help, and they face the challenge of finding a solution. These few people wonder how to clarify their personal diagnosis if popular solutions have not helped. Life is going downhill, something needs to be done, but what exactly when the reaction to the "must" is broken? Where exactly is the breakdown hidden?
Fortunately, burnout is not a mass phenomenon. Unfortunately, rarity does not make it easier for those who are faced with its complexity. And what should those who are faced do?
I have too many different answers to the question "who is to blame" and therefore there is no answer to the question "what to do". In this article, you will not find a magic pill.
Behind the vague term there are many very different processes, and you need to somehow understand which of them is going on in your personal head. Probably, you need to conduct tests. You can test: yourself, the barrier, tasks.
You can look for weaknesses in yourself, take a closer look at the disappeared emotions, go through the list of needs in search of unsatisfied ones, rewrite trigger situations.
You can listen to the barrier – what exactly does it feel when trying to overcome reluctance, and in what part of the body does this sensation occur? Either anxiety jumps, or the smell is repulsive, or the brain offers to run somewhere else to do something else, or there are spikes on the barrier that cause pain...
You can take a closer look at the tasks that you used to like, but now are not just boring, but have become unpleasant. Are these the same tasks, processes, and activities as before, or has something significant changed?
Testing can be supplemented by rocking the situation – shifting the time and place of work, starting and ending the working day differently, changing tools and relationships, while learning about changes in your reactions.
And yes, testing can be accompanied by attempts to apply popular methods to improve efficiency. But not with the hope of being cured, but to get a more complete picture of their crisis. To figure out the real cause.
By finding the true cause, you can find a truly effective solution, and not just temporarily hide the symptoms.
Total
If someone is sick, what medicine should be recommended to him? Stupid question. The generalizing word "sick" does not say anything about what exactly is happening in the body, and therefore no method of treatment should be advised so as not to harm.I don't know exactly what to do in an overly generalized case of so-called "burnout." But I know exactly what not to do.
There is no need to say that you know what burnout is. There is no generalizing burnout in the psyche, there are some specific internal conflicts, defense mechanisms of the psyche, suppressed emotions, unrealistic expectations, barrier needs, stopping reactions and aspirations, causes of anxiety, bad habits and other processes. Find out the name of your demon to gain power over it.
Don't say you know the root cause of burnout, and don't offer the most powerful and best way to eliminate burnout. Such a statement is like knowing the main cause of a car breakdown and the best way to repair it. If the wheels slip, then just fill up the fuel tank, I always do this, it helps great. And if the engine overheats, then just turn on the air conditioner at full power (this is sarcasm).
And don't say that the psyche is simple. Reductionism is popular but deceptive as a cognitive delusion. Examples of oversimplification:
- It's all about hormones. Depression is a deficiency of serotonin. And vitamins.
- It's all about incentives, a person is a reaction machine. Change the environment.
- It has long been clear - a carrot and a stick. Add mindfulness and rewards.
- Just exercise your will, do not indulge laziness. Ancestors will not let you lie.
- An inner monkey at the helm, add rationality.
- Self-esteem has fallen, you need to praise yourself more often and keep a diary of successes.
- There is just a lack of positive thinking. Meditation with affirmations.
- Yes, it's stressful, you need to rest more often. And add a hobby.
- Maslow's pyramid has already said everything, there is not enough comfort and safety.
- Bad luck with genes. Or childhood traumas. Humble yourself, look for your calling.
- The head is a dark object. Do not self-medicate, listen to others.
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