Who Is At Risk?

Stress / Burnout – Who Is At Risk & Why?

Imagine yourself in this situation: Perhaps you like millions of other individuals, are an office worker. Work is piling up on your office desk, work space. Your mobile phone is ringing incessantly with greater and greater demands being placed on you, for your time and expertise. Customers demands are ringing in your ears. You feel that you cannot possibly multitask everything effectively.  You are trying your best to juggle a thousand and one jobs at once. Your supervisor wants to see you immediately that you are not meeting your quota. Your son is at trouble at school. His teacher wants to see you straight after school. Your pleas for assistance to your partner at home go unheeded. The entire situation seems to be getting more and more out of hand, the phone rings again, more and more demands on your time. Is it any wonder today especially, with an economic crisis upon us, with the added threat of job layoff’s that so many millions of people, just like you, feel so ultimately stressed out to the hilt?

When the situation becomes so out of hand, stress becomes distress, dis-ease sets in and you feel just about ready to explode, knowing that you cannot take very much more of this. All of this paves the way for stress burnout.

According to one brain researcher stress burnout is ” the result of living an out of balance lifestyle, typically associated with an all-work/no-play spiral.” Overwork though is not the only contributing factor to stress and burnout, under the same pressure and similar circumstances, some burn out whilst others individuals are not prone to the same levels of stress.

So, who are the likely candidates and/or victims of stress and burnout likely to be?

Just as there is the increased likelihood that some people will be more prone to a certain disease, the same can be applied to stress and burnout. A professor of social psychology at the University of California noted “in order to suffer from stress, burnout, you must first be on fire.” A most apt description which fits exceeding well when you come to think about it. In a nutshell this is saying that those one’s that are prone to burnout stress related symptoms are in fact, your high achievers, those one’s that set themselves high ideals and goals, in other words often, a company’s often best people can be extremely prone to stress and/or burnout.

If one was to sum up the personality traits of potential victims of stress and burnout, professor Fumiaki Inaoka from the Japanese Red Cross, College of Nursing, wrote in the book, Moetsukishokogun (Burnout Syndrome): “Those who are inclined to burn out have strong tendencies to be sympathetic, human, delicate, dedicated and idealistic.  They are not machine oriented but ‘human orientated’, so to speak.”

Asked to develop a test to screen out those that are more likely to burn out, one specialist expert in the stress management area had this to say: “What companies need to do,” he said, “is find the people who care enough to burn out … and then develop the appropriate platforms within the company to combat burnout.”

Especially vulnerable are those individuals involved directly with human-orientated services, for example social workers, doctors, nurses, and teachers. Perhaps they more than most, eagerly accept the challenge of helping other people, giving of themselves all the time to improve only, the lives of other people around them, within their communities. These individuals, perhaps you are one of them, burn out when they realise that they are not achieving the sometimes unachievable and unattainable goals, which they have set for themselves to aspire to. Caring mothers too can suffer from the same feelings and symptoms for very similar reasons.

What is stress?

Do you feel stressed?

Are you suffering from burnout?

When you feel stressed or burn’t out it can be increasingly difficult to work at the standard ‘normal’ rate of performance that you usually expect from yourself. Being stressed out or burned out is obviously not good good for you, either mentally, physically or spiritually, in fact when you feel as though you are stressed out to the maximum, it often becomes impossible to function as you normally would.

So first let’s explore what stress burnout actually is.

According to H Freuden-Berger in the mid 1970’s he came up with this definition of stress related burnout, which today is just as fitting as it was back then perhaps, “a state of exhaustion resulting from involvement with people in emotionally demanding situations.” Further we could add to this with the assistance of the American Heritage Dictionary, also “a physical or emotional exhaustion, especially as a result of long-term stress or dissipation.”  There are however depending on the researcher you ask or model depended upon , many shades of difference in the definition of the term ‘burnout’.

It can be said that burnout does not in itself have a true or fully precise medical definition, victims are identified by bouts of short or long-term fatigue, a certain lack of enthusiasm , overwhelming feelings of helplessness or hopelessness and commonly too, malaise. The burnout victim often reacts out of the ordinary even when small things don’t go completely according to plan, responding out of character when going through feelings of burnout. Accompanying stress or burnout the victim often feels extremely tired, irritated and isolated, unsure and indecisive about exactly how to combat these feelings.

Burnout stress also causes procrastination, putting off tasks that otherwise under normal circumstances the stress victim would have no problems at all in getting on with. All efforts expended in the home or workplace may seem to the stress victim to be pointless.

Stress or burnout can affect just about anyone, from school age to those more mature in years, from busy high flying executives to just about anyone you could bump into on the street.  Stress costs not only the individual afflicted with burnout a great deal, but it also affects family relationships and colleagues in the workplace.  In short, stress and/or burnout steals from you, your enjoyment of life and your normal rate of productivity.

Some symptoms to look out for, keep on the watch for include:

* Depleted energy reserves
* Lowered resistance to illness
* Increased dissatisfaction
* Feelings of pessimism
* Increased absenteeism
* Inefficiency at work
* Increased irritability

If you notice any of the above in your work ethos or in relationships either working life or family life, you could be starting to feel the effects of stress or burnout. The time to take action is NOW!