Career 101: 5 TRiCKS To Prevent Job Burnout
"My health is already declining due to burnout"
"I'm burnout at work, how do I get 'unburnt'?"
"I really am feeling stressed and unhappy"
"I feel imprisoned and trapped here"
"Being in the office makes me miserable"
"I quit my job because of burnout"
I wonder if people can still remember their fresh-grad days, when they were so excited to land a job, get to work, hustle, and earn the hard work. I wonder if people can reminisce those days when people thought that having a job would make them stable, independent and of course, happy. Until one day, you do not like what you are doing anymore and it feels like nothing but stress and unhappiness. The dissatisfaction goes in, mental and physical exhaustion, and emotional stress enter your body and mind, and other feelings and work situations that we may find "toxic", and we keep on saying nothing to our co-workers but "Fck this job! I quit!" Reaaal Adulting Problems, Riiight?
Job burnout can be a result of different factors. It can be dissatisfaction to what you're doing. Maybe you really do not like it, and your work is contradicting to your values, and your monstrous boss adds fuel to the fire. Maybe, you feel like you're being so under-appreciated after all that you've done and years you've rendered in the company, still the company chose a newly hired employee to appoint as being in the managerial position who has no knowledge about the company, unlike you; worse is they think of you as an employee who cannot be simply trusted for no objective reason. Maybe, the company is giving you too much workload that are beyond the duties you agreed upon on the contract agreement, you work so hard and exhaustion is eating you up already, yet you feel no empathy from your company; they aren't giving extra vacations or incentives, or not even noticing your hard work, or not even appraising your salary after several years of working and you want to quit but you just can't because you've got no other source of income to feed your family; or more likely, job burnout is a result of mixed reasons I just mentioned. If an employee is already on the burnout* stage, he/she may likely to be cynical, ineffective and visibly exhausted.
Different jobs has different "burnout" effects. Like for example, hospital personnel face different stressful events such as birth, pain and death every single day. It has found out on studies in Iran that hospital personnel's job burnout brings emotional exhaustion and depersonalization which cause adverse effects on personnel health, specifically in physical and psychological matter (Abarghouei, et.al., 2016). Welp, maybe other countries can relate to that. On the other hand, teachers may face job burnout from getting heavy workload, classroom discipline problems, and feelings of isolation and lack of support from administrators (Jacobson, 2016). These causes can lead to illness, impatience, lack of commitment, and poor job performance of teachers (Parker, Martin, Colmar, & Liem, 2012). So, even though different jobs have different causes and effects of job burnout, it can still lead to various harmful impact on a person's mental, emotional, physical and psychological health.
So, when you think that you are on the brink of being burnout, you may consider these dumb-ish suggestions written below so you might prevent unwanted results of job burnout.
Basic Self Care
Are you eating healthy food? Are you drinking enough water? Have you slept for at least 8-10 hours for the past few days? Are you getting exercises during morning, or at least doing stretching just to start up your day? These are things or activities that are within your control so, seize the most of it! Eat healthy breakfast and don't skip just because you don't have time for it. Remind yourself to drink water. Do you always forget to drink water? search free apps that can remind you to drink water. There's a lot in the Appstore (made my partner to download one). If you really wanna track your activities, you can download the app "Habits", you can add questions there that would pop up in your notifications just so if you forgot to check it, and dates will automatically adjust to the current date. Track you personal self-care habits so you can have things in mind other than work.
Meditate
Like what I have said in my past blog, you can practice meditation through breathing in and out and counting the inhales, stops and exhales. Keep attention to your breathing that you can already notice your belly expanding and contracting-when you do long and slow exhales. You can also try meditation coloring book or what they call "Adult coloring book" which mostly consist of mandala, butterflies and flowers. Just for a trivia: Do you know that in various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of practitioners as a spiritual guidance tool, for establishing a sacred space and as an aid to meditation and trance induction? In Psychology, Mandala is also known as a psychological expression of the totality of the self.
Do Other Things Other Than Work, That Will Make You Happy and Peaceful
Whether it be connecting with your friends to chat, playing Uno Cards (even though this is stressful af lol), doing TikTok Vids together (I'm not saying that these are my friends), or drinking your fave MilkTea together (HA!) during your day-off. If you want to play basketball, or badminton, or chess, do it! Life isn't made for people to spend the days of their eternity in preparing, commuting and working so hard. Treat yourself. Relax yourself. Enjoy yourself. (or best have fun with your family, friend, or loved ones)
Drink Positivity in the Morning. Set boundaries.
Smile often, and think that what you're doing is for people and for your family. It seems hard, especially when your personal problems have piled up and you're experiencing work stress at the same time. But still, try to radiate positivity to your workplace.
I swear, it works. But of course, in order to radiate positivity to others, you must start it first with your self. Do the basic self-care, meditate, and do other happy and entertaining things other than work and do communicate with the management or your boss if you are experiencing extreme exhaustion or illnesses and just properly ask and file a leave and inform future activities proposed by your physician. This will benefit you, and the company in the long run. Have a positive mindset, but of course, physical illnesses are initial signs that something wrong is going on, so also have a reality check and learn to set your boundaries.
Consult Professionals
Whether you are experiencing illnesses or not, it's a good thing to have regular check-ups with your physician (better if you can visit psychologists or therapist or counselor for your mental health). Health is wealth (learned it the hard way T_T) So, please take care of your health and maintain a good body and mind wellness.
So, those are my dumb suggestions that I don't know if will work on you, but you won't know if you won't try. ;P Anyway, if respect is no longer served, you can always leave the table and say "that's the best thing I did for a horrifically toxic job".
(I ain't putting much of Dr. Wong's speech, ayt? or am I??)
Lol. But of course, think, analyze and plan first. Plan ahead before making decisions. Like what I've heard from.. (I already forgot though) but it says "Failing to plan is like planning to fail".
Anyway, that's just it. Comment down below your thoughts and suggestions, and if you do have additional suggestions to prevent burnout, express it through commenting so I can make another blog for this. K? Bye!
If you have done dumb things before, subscribe now to my blog to know more dumb advices that will make you just dumb-ish, in the future. Thanks for reading!
-- WAKAS --
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5014501/
Causes and Effect of Teacher Burnout https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3938&context=dissertations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala
https://corespirit.com/articles/psychology-mandala
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