How To Build Immunity To Burnout In The Workplace

Raise your hand if you have ever experienced burnout during your career. I sense many raised hands. That is because workplace burnout is incredibly common.

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. Burnout also means feeling unmotivated and feeling stuck and ineffective. And making too many personal sacrifices, wanting to leave your job, and having a bad or cynical attitude about your work.

 

Fortunately, according to Dr. Kandi Wiens, author of the new book, Burnout Immunity, you can learn how to build immunity to burnout.

 

More specifically, Wiens’ research shows that professionals who exhibit a high degree of emotional intelligence (EI) have the ability to clearly perceive, understand, and productively manage emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. They know it means: 

• Understanding yourself.
• Managing yourself.
• Understanding others.
• Managing relationships. 

Workers with specific EI skills know how to successfully cope with stressful work environments and experiences.

 

Her research also demonstrates that EI competencies improve the more you use them.

 

The five EI skills are: 

1. Build self-awareness to identify what makes you vulnerable to burnout.
2. Manage your stress triggers and response and tap into moments of good stress.
3. Regulate your thoughts and emotions to remain effective in the midst of stress.
4. Develop healing connections to keep burnout at bay.
5. Recover from moments of burnout, reconnect to things that bring you joy, and reimagine a new way forward. 

You tackle these EI skills after completing the first, and most crucial step – determining your stress risk level in the workplace – by taking the Burnout Risk Assessment you will find toward the end of the book and that you can also take online.

 

Wiens also discovered during her research that people with burnout immunity have a special relationship with stress. Those specific EI behaviors include: 

• They believe that each new stressor offers an experience to learn, expand, and evolve.
• They actively seek out stretch opportunities they know will be challenging—or even very difficult
• They value challenges and find them energizing rather than draining.
• They view stressors as changes, not threats.
• They can handle the discomfort of learning curves and uncertainty.
• They believe that stress will enhance their ability to grow and improve. 

Finally, the book’s tips for combating and managing day-to-day stress include:

1. Take micro breaks.
2. Have some fun.
3. Maintain your social connections.
4. Establish and maintain boundaries.
5. Try an anti-stress diet.
6. Get proper sleep.
7. Take time off.
8. Lavish yourself with self-care.
9. Try meditation.
10. Management your mindset.
11. Keep negative self-talk in check.
12. Ask your manager for a change in your work conditions. 

 Kandi Wiens

 

Today, Wiens shares these insights with us:

 

Question: Why did you decide to write the book?

 

Wiens: In a nutshell, I wrote the book for two primary reasons: 1) I needed to document everything I was learning and applying about stress management after I experienced a life-threatening wake-up call induced by severe chronic stress and burnout, and 2) my research findings are unique in that they uncovered for the first time, why some people get burned out and others don’t.

 

The longer version of my why is that in 2011, I had a hypertensive emergency with a blood pressure reading of 200/110 that was brought on by severe chronic stress and burnout. At the time, I was a management consultant and, like most people who experience high stress at work, I felt like burnout was an inevitable part of my success – something I would eventually need to go through to achieve my professional goals.

 

After several months of recovery and spending time reflecting on my unhealthy relationship with work, I decided to enroll in a doctoral program at The University of Pennsylvania. I wanted to understand one big question – why do some people get burned out and others do not?

 

In every study I’ve read and every study I’ve conducted, there was always a group of people who, despite experiencing dangerous levels of stress, were not burned-out. What was going on with these people? Had they hit some sort of genetic lottery that gifted them with super stress-busting superpowers? Or did it have more to do with nurture? Who knows…maybe they had been raised by unusually coolheaded parents. Was it an acquired skill? Were they Jedi-level meditators capable of remaining unflappable even in chronically stressful environments? Whatever they had, where could I get some?

 

Though most of the media coverage on burnout centers on its skyrocketing rates around the world, I became intensely curious about this virtually unknown group of leaders who seemed to be immune to burnout. If I could identify what made them different from others – and what they shared in common – it might just hold the key for the rest of us to learn how to avoid burning out.

 

Over the last 11 years, I’ve conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews with people who experience chronic stress at a seven or above on a 10-point scale – that’s severe, very severe, or worst possible levels of stress – and they managed to avoid burnout. Let me say that again – they experience very high levels of chronic stress, but they are NOT burned-out.

 

So, what did these resilient role models have in common? It turns out that the one thing those with burnout immunity shared was a high degree of emotional intelligence (EI).

 

Question: Of the five EI-based skills, which one is typically the most challenging to master and why?

 

Wiens: According to my research participants and coaching clients (and I can personally attest to this as a formerly burned-out leader), Regulation of our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors is the most challenging to master because it requires to break our Protective Patterns and create new ones.

 

We all have a set of default responses to stress that we fall back on. Usually the origins of these automatic, unconscious responses can be traced to childhood, where we learned them from caregivers. The ones that stuck with us and that we still rely on today were reinforced as we grew into adulthood. 

In other words, these responses, whether they’re positive or negative, constructive, or destructive, worked to alleviate our stress. Then the brain, ever on a quest for both equilibrium and efficiency, noted the response’s effectiveness and will turn to it again the next time stress hits. Deployed enough times, the brain encodes this response as a habit, eventually creating an automatic, default response to stress – i.e., a Protective Pattern.

 

Getting unstuck from ingrained stress-response patterns is not a small task, and many of us will find ourselves resistant to change. It feels good to protect our old ways of doing things, not to mention that some destructive default responses are addictive.

 

Question: After reading the book, how long should a reader expect it will take to achieve burnout immunity?

 

Wiens: The length of time to achieve burnout immunity can vary drastically from one individual to another. It depends on several key factors, including (but not limited to):

• The degree of/intensity of an individual’s stress.
• Whether their stress tends to be more frequent acute bursts of stress vs. longer periods of chronic stress.
• Their burnout risk level (low, moderate, or high).
• How much and what types of support they must work on their burnout immunity skills.
• The probability that things will change for the better in their work environment.
• Aspects of their personality and/or temperament that make them more vulnerable to staying stuck in burnout, and, perhaps the biggest one of all...
• Their motivation and ability to make changes that safeguard their psychological health. 

Question: The book's servant leadership teachings are particularly interesting. Why did you decide to include that material in the book? Note: If you want more background on servant leadership, please read pages 200-206.

 

Wiens: This was a bit of a surprising finding in my research. After interviewing a number of physicians, police chiefs, educators, and school principals and superintendents, I noticed a trend with a large volume of them self-identifying as servant leaders. And they shared the following in common: 

• They have a high degree of empathy and genuinely express care and concern for others.
• They are more focused on serving and fulfilling the needs of other people than they are on their feelings of stress.
• They are highly effective mentors and coaches. They are motivated to help others learn, grow, improve their performance, and advance their careers.
• They help to create a work environment of psychological safety.
• They help to create a work environment that supports the efficacy and best performance of employees.
• They are engaged in what their team members are doing.
• They are physically and emotionally present for others.
• They reward, recognize, and celebrate the efforts of others.
• They have a deep belief that their purpose is to help others and to make a positive contribution to society. 

One of the fascinating things about having a servant leadership mindset and approach to work is that it helps people more easily trigger the “tend-and-befriend” response to stress, rather than their fight, flight, or freeze response to stress. The tend-and-befriend response is known to increase serotonin production, which plays a big role in regulating mood, sleep, appetite, learning ability, and memory.

___

 

Named by the Financial Times as the Best Business Book of the Month April 2024, Burnout Immunity is packed with research, exercises, self-assessments, and real-life stories from people with natural burnout immunity and those who have cultivated it. It is a must-read for anyone who raised their hand when you started reading this article.

 

Wiens is a senior fellow at The University of Pennsylvania, and the director of the Penn Master’s in Medical Education Program. She is a researcher, national speaker, and executive coach.

 

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.