Steadiness: Learn how to beat fatigue and live a stable life with Beating Burnout: Helping the all-or-nothing personality to find balance. Photo: Supplied.
Take charge of your stress and slow down. Consider an opportune prompt about giving preference and selecting rest, calm and renewed energy. So, call the shots, chart your own course as you learn how to beat weariness and create stability in, or bring it back to, your life, with Beating Burnout: Helping the all-or-nothing personality to find balance.
Authored by clinical psychologist Mike McKinney, this volume makes sense of burnout, pointing out that it’s a phenomenon that comes about as a result of experiencing ongoing (usually high) levels of pressure and stress.
“In the modern working world, burnout is often seen as a disease,” McKinney explains. “However, the concept, and indeed identification, of burnout is not all that new. Companies have been aware of burnout for decades and the industrial/organisational arms of psychology have studied and written much about it.
“… At the core of burnout is a sense of emotional tiredness or even exhaustion. This comes about due to the ongoing nature of the job demands and the realities of trying to function in your life.
“This is particularly so when you are consistently operating at a level that requires more from you than you are receiving or replenishing. Alongside this is a type of intellectual or cognitive tiredness that presents itself as a loss of sharpness and reduced ability to do previously normal cognitive tasks. People also tend to experience reduced physical and personal energy, often in contrast to what they previously had.”
The effects of burnout do not remain exclusively in the office. You will experience the associated difficulties in all facets of your life. If you think about it, it’s pretty hard to conceive of a way that significant stress and its associated negative personal changes would remain within the four walls of your workplace.
Reflect on it. These experiences will be carried home with you and expressed in all domains of your life. Interestingly, and unfortunately, you most likely did not notice this burnout beginning to impact your work performance. Consequently, there is a high chance you will not notice that it’s affecting how you relate to your world, the people around you and the things you previously found positive or interesting.
With more than 25 years of experience, McKinney says people who have an “all-or-nothing” approach to life can be more at risk. Yet, he says red flags exist. He notes ways to fend off what can be an incapacitating and detrimental condition.
Burnout happens when ongoing, high-demand pressure situations over lengthy periods wear you down completely. It is a multidimensional concept that tends to have key components, which are explored in McKinney’s 223-page paperback. Also examined are the steps you can take to generate a positive impact, whether you are sliding into fatigue or fully drowning in it.
McKinney examines the warning signs with expert insight, explaining the reasons for and indicators of imminent danger. Focusing on his findings that certain personality traits contribute to workplace burnout, he takes an informed look.
This insightful, practical work is filled with suggestions for positive changes that can be sustained, and offers ways to help you consider a wider (and possibly new) purpose in life, underpinned by ways to enhance resilience. It offers easy-to-understand information about this intricate and problematic issue and shares useful strategies to handle the impact.
Yet, the story does not end there; the book provides tools to help you find meaning and direction in life, out of the office, and equips you with ways to handle the tough times. If burnout is part of your daily life, or you have turned the corner, then Beating Burnout is assembled for shared family reading time.
Beating Burnout: Helping the all-or-nothing personality to find balance, by Mike McKinney, Exisle Publishing, $24.99
