23 Burnout Habits that Plague the Workplace and How to Overcome Them
Read Time: 4.5 Minutes
A big thanks to the People and well-being leaders in this community for their amazing focus on supporting their organizations that have brought this work to life.
It’s a collective effort to realize wellbeing in the workplace, promote mental and emotional health for performance, and end the culture of chronic stress and burnout. #Wellbeing is the new performance?
Join us on September 6, 2023 at 12PM PT / 3PM ET for our next Workplace Wellbeing, Performance, and Recovery Support for People Leaders on LinkedIn.
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Key Highlights:
The theme for this week’s community support is identifying habits that lead to chronic stress and burnout in the workplace.
Habits are the unconscious behavioral, thought, and emotional patterns that predominantly govern our day-to-day results?
We’re creatures of habit, no matter how intellectual and self-aware we are. It’s one of our most powerful traits and also a source of our vulnerabilities if we’re not intentional about our habits.
At its worst, when our unhealthy habits control outcomes in our life, we become reactive.
What does it mean to be reactive?
When we behave from a conditioned response, where an outside stimulus triggers an automatic response
Like a knee-jerk reaction.
For example, if you hear a problem, it triggers you to feel angry, you then berate the messenger and it stirs up anxiety and a fight-and-flight resistance in those around you, so no one speaks up
Or, someone comes to you with a problem, it triggers you to take a deep breath and connect with the messenger, listen, and open up with a question, “How can I help?”
When it comes to leadership development, sometimes we can frown on being reactive because we can let our emotions override rational decision-making.
Being reactive is another form of habit in action.
It’s the choice of how you condition your habits to effective responses that are most important.
Being responsive on the hand is using self-awareness and willpower to interrupt a pattern so you can rationalize a decision.
Which is better?
It depends.
If you’re being responsive under stress and trying to willpower a negative emotional trigger, that can be exhausting, especially if you’re tired and on the verge of burnout.
While it can prevent an unwanted situation, it’s better to flag that trigger and emotionally process it, so it doesn’t condition you into chronic stress.
Now over time when you realize specific positive emotional states and resulting behaviors are yielding healthy and productive results, it’s beneficial to condition that into a habit to reduce your cognitive load. (i.e. brain power and brain cycles)
Let’s cover some common burnout habits from our Energy Audit Protocol :
Anxiety Induced Habits
Big # 1: Email / Text triggers can leave many of us anxious and compulsively jumping into action when our smartphones and devices ding and buzz
Coupled with the fact that many of us share our personal and work devices, non-work-related alerts can also condition us into anxiety.
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This leaves us in a constant state of alertness and vigilance which is a surefire way to develop chronic stress.
Big # 2: The fear of loss can lead to shame, unfulfilled expectations, unhealthy attachments, loss of control, and loss of identity.
What are some common workplace events that can trigger and condition these habits?
Now it doesn’t mean not having these events, it means understanding where we’ve installed the negative triggers so we can process them out of our nervous systems.
If we make the past a predictor of our future, and failure is punished or ignored in the workplace, we will project fear into the future which creates anxiety.
Instead, it’s important to collapse those frustration and anxiety-inducing triggers and be mindful of how we set our goals and expectations to be positive-oriented by framing feedback into positive adjustments.
Anger Induced Habits?
Big # 3: Unresolved past grievances with managers or peers when values and beliefs are violated, leave employees feeling hurt. It can ripple its way into being a burnout habit.
Miscommunication can lead to employees feeling unheard and coupled with these common workplace events:
For the work-from-office crowd, bad traffic and the commute can induce anger and anxiety.
Make sure managers are spending the time to check in and resolve any grievances, as simply as having your people note when anger, frustration, or resentment is triggered and bringing attention to those feelings during check-ins.
“Deal with it” is not a working strategy.
The “How are you?” / “I’m fine.” conversation is a sign that the communication and safety scaffolding isn’t there and employees aren’t mindful of them.? While it’s there, there are no details to share leaving us to shrug it off.
Capture when high-intensity stressors happen and use it as input to optimize work and environmental conditions to prevent them.
Most importantly, in our modern workplace, efficiently optimizing for better performance means subtracting the negatives, not adding more positives.
Burnout Behavioral Habits
While this isn’t an exhaustive list and new behaviors appear over time, here are some other common chronic stress coping strategies:
With the Energy Audit Protocol , we can begin to deep clean the energy drainers in our lives with clarity and focus.
As energy drainers are resolved, it opens up additional mental and emotional capacity to focus on energy gainers.
As a result, this exercise helps move us away from victimhood towards empowerment and demonstrates that ending burnout and our wellbeing is optimizing for better sustainable performance.
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Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
1. If you're still looking for personal recovery and support for your well-being, I'd recommend starting with this affordable course that's helped hundreds of people and their organizations, here .
2. If you’re struggling with a crisis of burnout and looking for an effective way to recover quickly, consider a life-transforming Burnout Retreat for your next vacation, here .
3. Build out Workplace Burnout Responsiveness and Recovery in your organization by booking a strategy call with me, here .