Workplace burnout and fatigue: Causes, symptoms and coping strategies

With COVID-19 has come a major shift in our day-to-day lives. Whether working from home or on the frontlines, workplace burnout and fatigue can affect anyone. It’s important that we can recognize burnout and fatigue and how they can occur, so we can do our best to prevent and mitigate the potential implications they can have on our health and wellbeing.

We recently spoke with Dr. Jagdeesh Dhaliwal, Psychiatrist about workplace burnout and fatigue.

Burnout

Burnout is an occupational syndrome caused by unmanaged chronic workplace stress. It can occur due to a variety of factors including, working persistent long hours, high stress environments, large workloads with strict time constraints, and/or poor work-life balance.

Burnout symptoms include:

• Mental distancing or negative feelings for one's job
• Reduced effectiveness in the workplace
• Feelings of emotional exhaustion

If workplace stress goes unmanaged by the employee and employer, burnout can cause:

• Headaches, chronic pain, worsened immune system
• Depression and/or anxiety
• Professional problems such as impaired job performance
• Difficulty maintaining and building professional and personal relationships
• Changing jobs, reducing work hours, leaving one’s profession

Fatigue

Fatigue is the feeling of extreme tiredness and exhaustion that can be physically and mentally interfering in one’s professional and personal life. Fatigue can be caused many factors, including high workplace demands, interruptions of one’s sleep cycle, poor sleeping habits, being overworked, and more.

Fatigue symptoms include:

• Physical: sleepiness, exhaustion, tiredness
• Psychological: compassion fatigue, emotional exhaustion
• Ability to perform day-to-day functions disrupted

Compassion fatigue

Compassion fatigue is defined as emotional exhaustion caused by working in a caregiver environment. It can occur when one experiences difficultly separating work from personal life by feeling overwhelming empathy. Within health care professions, compassion fatigue can be especially prevalent and can arguably lead to fatigue.

Some symptoms of compassion fatigue include, anxiety, sleep disturbances, loss of purpose, self-doubt, poor self-care, withdrawal/isolation and inability to concentrate.

Workplace burnout and fatigue coping strategies

Practice self-compassion

• Be kind to your yourself, free from harsh self-judgement
• Recognize that you’re not alone, others suffer too
• Embrace and accept your negative emotions and then let them go

Take a compassion break

A compassion break is a 2-3-minute exercise that can help you take action to be self-compassionate and can help ground and refocus you in the present moment.

• Close your eyes
• Put your hands on your heart or hug yourself
• Think of a situation where you felt you had an emotion struggle
• Acknowledge that pain and hurt
• Speak kindly with yourself and acknowledge that others suffer too

Identify your window of tolerance

• Be mindful of your window of tolerance and stay within it, this is often the window where you feel most at ease
• Recognize triggers that take you out of that window
• Utilize strategies to get back into your window of tolerance like self-compassion, taking a compassion break, etc.

Ways you can use compassionate communication

• Use compassionate language when speaking to yourself and others
  
  • Avoid using phrases or words like “have to” and “should” when speaking with others. Instead use “I need” and express your emotions kindly.

• Practice self-care
  
  • Take care of yourself by: optimizing your diet and sleep, exercising, meditating, journaling
  • Instead of a to-do list, try using an agenda with designated time slots

• Establish a ‘growth mindset’
  
  • Allow yourself to learn and grow every day. Establishing a mindset like this helps you become your best self at work and at home. Do the very best you can and try not to focus on being perfect because no one is!