Health and Meditation

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Suffering from stress for a prolonged period does not only take its toll on your body. Burnout can also be the result of a prolonged lack of balance in your life. A state of complete or almost complete mental exhaustion is often accompanied by a loss of interest and enthusiasm for all aspects of life. Unusual tiredness, aloofness, bitterness, cynicism, anger, disorientation, and depression are well-known manifestations of a Burnout. In this section, we will try to help you recognize what Burnout is and what role Meditation plays in helping you cope with it.

What is Burnout and How do we recognize it?

Burnout – is an exhaustion reaction of body and mind to a prolonged period of stress.

The psychoanalytic Freudenberger first introduced the term Burnout. Burnout is a process that develops in stages (Heyman: Overwrought, a practical guide to the recognizing and the preventing of Burnout, 1990). This process is characterized by a steady loss of the mentality and the zeal that is required for a qualitatively acceptable degree of practising one’s profession. The employee is less and less able to meet the requirements of the organization and him. In the case of being overwrought, the employee generally functions until he is faced with a stressful situation, after which he performs worse, both in the personal and in the professional field, for a relatively short period. Burnout is limited to work-related complaints that are the result of a prolonged period of being overwrought. The characteristics are emotional exhaustion, unusual tiredness, a decreased interest in one’s work, and a feeling of incompetence. The distinguishing difference between Burnout and stress is that when the cause is taken away, people with pressure recover quite quickly.

In contrast, in the case of Burnout, the complaints remain, and people do not promptly get well-balanced again. This does not take away the fact that everybody can recover from a Burnout. People who suddenly get a Burnout are persons who are idealistic, hard-working, between 20 and 40 years old, and with high expectations regarding their job. Burnout occurs most frequently with people who have a service-oriented profession that brings with it a lot of contact with people: teachers, nurses, doctors, caregivers, managers, employees of customer services, etcetera.

Characteristics

We have put together the most significant symptoms of Burnout (partly based on an article by S. de Vries). Awareness and acceptance of the Burnout problem are essential to be able to cope with it. When we can improve our knowledge of our stressors, the stress process and the results of our reaction can change the way we experience the stress situation. When we change the experience, we can also change the effects of stress on ourselves. Well-known symptoms of Burnout are

• Physical
  • The inability to recover from tiredness, the worsening of psychosomatic complaints, sleep disturbances, and increased use of nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol.
• Emotional
  • Feeling empty, depressed, and fearful. Suffering from panic attacks. Being easily upset. Being extremely nervous all of a sudden. Loss of confidence. A feeling of not being able to do anything anymore.
• Thoughts
  • Problems with concentration. Chaotic trains of thinking that cannot be stopped. A fixation on individual ideas. Inability to make decisions. Being absent-minded. Forgetful.
• Behaviour
  • Living and thinking like a robot, a machine. Complaining a lot. Apathy. A tendency to avoid people. Making more mistakes and accidents. Being impatient and easily irritated. An inability to relax.
• Interpersonal behaviour
  • Being mentally absent in relationships. A decreased interest in intimacy and sex. Being unreasonable. Behaviour that causes conflicts. Loss of interest in friends. Lack of tolerance. Seeing other people as burdensome. Refusing to accept help.
• Work achievements
  • A decreased degree of professionalism. A reduced quantity of work done. Avoidance of work. Making more mistakes. Perfectionism. Being obsessed with details. Avoidance of responsibility. A reduced sense of professional and ethical standards.
• Attitude towards one’s work
  • Loss of motivation. Complaining. Loss of interest, alternating with heightened zeal. Being demoralized. A cynical and critical manner. A feeling of powerlessness. A sense of failure. Apathy. Lack of confidence. Being absent from work more often. Thinking of changing one’s job.
• Attitude towards people one meets when at work
• Loss of empathy and compassion. Being careless as regards to professional limits. Creating an emotional distance. Impatience. Getting isolated. Bad communication. Conflicts. Avoidance of personal or professional help.

When we recognize quite a number of the characteristics mentioned above, it is advisable to have a good look at one’s situation. Be alert so that you will not become a victim of Burnout yourself. It is clear that all the symptoms mentioned above worsen your problem, create new stressors, and quickly get you into a vicious circle that is hard to get out of. Awareness is an essential key in the healing process of Burnout, and therefore it is good to look at the causes of Burnout.

Burnout Process – Stages

I asked for power. I got difficulties that made me strong.

I asked for wisdom. I got problems to solve.

I asked for wealth. I got brains and muscles to work with.

I asked for courage. I got dangers that I could overcome.

I asked for love. I got people in trouble that I could help.

I asked for favours, I got chances.

I never got what I wanted. I received everything I needed.

(source unknown)

In general, every person goes through the various stages of the burnout process in his or her way. Some people do not go any further than Stage 2 or 3 and then manage to escape from the situation by adapting their duties, their behaviour, or their way of relaxing. In general, recovering from Burnout takes some time. Let us look at the various Stages of the Burnout process.

• Stage 1
  • Having a hard time getting your work out of your mind in your spare time. In this stage, the employee is often unaware of the relationship between the demands made on him and his abilities to meet these demands. All the time, he is trying to get the right balance between these two.
• Stage 2
  • The employee becomes more and more aware of how hard it is for him to meet all the demands made on him. It becomes harder for him to relax, to stop worrying, and to stop feeling gloomy. This StageStage is characterized by tiredness, feeling tense, physical ailments, a flight in sex, drugs, and rock music, and not feeling fine and clear-minded.
• Stage 3
  • Changes in behaviour caused by resistance against the situation of feeling unhappy about one’s work situation. The employee becomes more aggressive, more cynical, more bitter, more rigid, more perfectionist, more aloof, and more irritated.
• Stage 4
  • The employee breaks down, reports that he is sick, is overwrought and lets himself be fired or looks for another job.
• Stage 5
  • One wants to force a recovery, but often without any result. Guilt, feelings of shame, and inferiority complex occur, sometimes accompanied by feelings of depression.
• Stage 6
  • Making up the balance. In this StageStage, people make choices as regards to work and career.
• Stage 7
  • Through relaxation, rest, and coming back to oneself, the energy reserves are gradually built up again. We often see that changes in mentality and changes in behaviour occur.
• Stage 8
• The person actively builds up a new future and a new career. He goes back to work. He now has a different view of Burnout. Often the employee has learned something from his experience, and the Burn out was the eye-opener that he needed. In this StageStage, there may be moments of regression, but the employee’s confidence grows and so does his view that if he ever gets into a temporary set back, he will easily be able to get out of it again.

The first three Stages are typical symptoms that the fight-flight reaction is triggered by one’s body to fight the threatening situation. As we can read in our article, How do our bodies and our mind react to stress? This reaction has far-reaching consequences for the state of our stress reserves. Demanding too much from one’s body and one’s mind costs a lot of energy, it harms critical physical processes, and it affects parts of our collection for a long time. It also has an essential influence on our emotional well-being. In Stages 4 to 6, we are at the height of our crisis and in the middle of our hardest time. From Stage 7, we begin to recover, and people often make a new comeback into society.

Causes of Burnout and What we can do about it

The dynamic balance in the relationship between the demands made on an employee and his abilities and skills to meet these demands often forms the cause of the development of Burnout. As we can read in the article on our site about Flow, the highest state of experience, a state of Flow occurs when the challenge and the ability to cope with the problem are well-balanced.

If our work is too easy and too simple, we often see that we start to get bored and lose interest. When the challenge is big, but our skills and abilities are limited, we often witness the occurrence of fear, worry, and frustration. As we can read in the article How do our bodies and our mind react to stress? Such feelings may be strong enough to trigger the stress reaction.

Stages 1 and 2 are clear examples of the situation in which the Burnout patient will find himself when, for an extended period, he experiences a lack of proper balance. When we have a further look at the causes, we must study the factors that cause the challenge to be too big or our abilities and skills to be too limited. Factors that increase the chance of Burnout are:

• Personal Factors
  • Character qualities like perfectionism, inability to know and protect one’s limitations, having high expectations, idealism, preparedness to give, being prepared to care, loyalty, a desire to stand out. Other factors that may increase stress in the personal field are problems in one’s private life, financial worries, health problems, poor interpersonal relationships, the loss of loved ones, and leading an empty life.
• Work situation and the nature of work
• Tedious work, having no influence on one’s working conditions, insufficient support by colleagues and superiors, lousy management, a heavy workload, irregular working hours, lack of clarity as regards to tasks and responsibilities, the intensity of the work, a lack of balance in the relationship of the employee and his client (a teacher that gives much and receives little, working with unpleasant patients in health care), the person’s attitude towards sick leave, bureaucracy, etc.

What can we do about Health?

We can reduce stress by decreasing our workload or by increasing our ability to deal with stress. Reducing stressors is a hard thing to do because usually, we cannot control them. Unfortunately, our workload can only be decreased by other people. Whatever we may want, often we have no control over things like work pressure, our colleagues, and interpersonal relationships.

Many causes have to do with the organization structure, culture, values, work situation, and nature of work. In this field, there is an outstanding job to be done for organizations and employers. They should approach stress utilizing system-oriented thinking instead of process-oriented thinking. This means that pressure should be looked at in the context of the organization and not as the problem of an individual.

But the individual himself can also do something. Every individual can do something to be better able to cope with stress and to reduce the chance of Burnout. In the first place, it is essential to organize your life in such a way that you can quickly deal with stress.

Good food, regular exercise, time for relaxation, social activities, and not making your life too complicated are things that everybody can take care of. Moreover, we think that there is a significant supporting role for techniques like Meditation when it comes to the prevention and the recovery of Burnout. Read Meditation, a great way to deal with Health learn how Meditation can help you with Health.

Exercises in Dealing with Burnout

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