Burnout is Real:
The Most Stressful Thing
You Can Avoid
By: McKenna Winkelmann
If there is one thing just about everyone can agree on at this moment, it’s that it has been a long year or two (however long it’s been at this point). COVID-19 truly took a toll on those in the healthcare industry with nearly half of women and 41.5% of men in the profession reported experiencing burnout. The collective symptoms? Stress, fear of exposure, anxiety or depression, and work overload.
If there’s anyone the pandemic has sent into overdrive, it’s healthcare workers. And with no signs of letting up anytime soon, it’s important to take a step back from work to be introspective with the signs of burnout, what it looks like in the workplace, and the active steps you can take to make sure burnout doesn’t become a regularity in your day to day life.
Signs of burnout
The term "burnout" was coined by the American psychologist, Herbert Freudenberger, in the 1970’s. Ironically enough, he used the term to describe the consequences of severe stress and high standards in “helping” professions, like health care. While the term has found its way into everyday life, the effects of it are still extremely prominent in the healthcare profession.
Burnout has many effects as it’s an extremely personal issue to deal with, but the three widely accepted symptoms of it include:
- Exhaustion: Being drained physically and emotionally, as well as simply not having enough energy to get through the day
- Detachment from daily activities: Feeling stress or negativity around working conditions, potentially while also feeling emotionally detached from your work.
- Reduced performance: Negativity about daily tasks may make it difficult to concentrate and follow through with simple tasks
However, some other symptoms to keep eyes open for include: escape fantasies, irritability, frequent illnesses, anxiety, and depression.
Burnout in the workplace
Burnout isn’t a new fad to the dental world. In a study of 2,500 dentists conducted before COVID-19, it was found that 83.6% of them experienced burnout in their career, along with common symptoms like depression (95%) and anxiety (89.2%). Simply put, dentistry is a stressful profession and it requires a lot, mentally, physically, and emotionally, of the doctors who choose it.
Some of the common signs of burnout within your day in the practice include:
- Everything about the job starting to annoy you and you lose interest in it
- You have zero energy to give during the day
- Work/life balance is nonexistent in day to day life
- You can’t leave work at work
- Irritability becomes a prominent part of your daily emotions
Having to deal with one of these options is hard enough, but juggling more than one can put an extreme strain on your professional life and is simply unattainable to continue in the long term without repercussions.
Ways to manage burnout
While I’d love to say there’s a magical way to snap your fingers and remove the stress of burnout from your life, it takes time and honest, consistent effort to see it through. Stress has a way of slowly creeping into your life and piling up into burnout, which means excusing it from your life requires sorting through the stressors to find ways to mitigate them. This can be an overwhelming mountain, so let’s take it into 3 categories to consider tackling it.
1.) Find ways you enjoy working on your physical and mental health
When dealing with burnout, it’s hard to look at a day filled to the brim with things and think “well let’s just add more to it then”. I get it, honestly. So start small, figure out what you’re doing right now to work on your physical and mental health, write it down, and continue doing that.
The best way to make significant change in your life is to make it attainable for yourself so you don’t let yourself down before you can really get started. From there, find ways you can and want to improve your lifestyle, let it be cooking more meals at home or making time for a daily walk with the dog. Things that bring you joy will be more likely to stick around in your day-to-day routine than things that don’t.
A great way to improve mental health is to begin practicing mindfulness meditation. The practice is a powerful way to improve cognitive flexibility, a way of being able to approach problems and reimagine solutions from multiple viewpoints and increase adaptability. Research has also shown that mindfulness can reduce activity in our amygdala, the structure in our brain that is the starting point for all stress responses in our body.
2.) Schedule your work/life balance in each day
It’s so easy to lose track of time and find your entire day gone before it's even started, especially when it comes to stressful work situations. While emergencies happen that can cause these circumstances, this should not be an accepted “normal” in your day to day life. One of the best ways to deal with this is to, as I like to call it, “schedule your minutes”. Take time each day to see when your appointments are, what needs to be done around the office, take a lunch break, and anything of this nature. Then, write down your day minute by minute so you know where you can pencil in your downtime, where you may need a little leeway, and most importantly, when your day is finished and you’re walking out the door.
After that, your only job is to stick to this schedule and mean it. Yes, emergencies can happen and mess up your minutes, but not every day. So once you’ve exhausted your work minutes for the day, you leave them there and go enjoy whatever your life minutes entail for that day.
3.) Ask for help
Help looks different for everyone. Sometimes it's a matter of asking for help in the office and potentially hiring on new team members to alleviate time and patient constraints. It’s okay to hire a consulting company to help manage and train your team to function at its best. Help can also look like asking for PTO to get away from work and enjoy more “life minutes''. Sometimes it’s talking to a mentor in the healthcare community so you don’t feel so alone in your problems and have someone you trust to bounce ideas off of. It can also be talking to a professional because you just need help finding where to start cleaning up your pile of stressors.
Help looks different for everyone and is a very personal experience, but it's imperative in making sure you can achieve not being burned out by life. While fighting burnout is a battle, it’s the best way to make sure you’re at the forefront of your narrative and not becoming a secondary character to it. Struggles are going to happen along the way, but they are there to help gauge where you are in burnout and make sure you don’t succumb to it.
Stress is unavoidable, but burnout is preventable.
Helpful Resources
Burnout and Mental Health Resources
ACEP: Resources for Emergency Physician Mental Health Care
AFSP: Healthcare Professional Burnout, Depression, and Suicide Prevention
Physician Support Line - 888-409-0141
Consulting Companies
Published August 31st, 2021 12:00 pm CST
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