Welcome
In this extended blog we want to set the scene of what burnout is, why it happens, why helping professionals are at risk, and our offerings at Helpers Hub. In other words, the road map of why we are here.
What is burnout?
These days it seems a lot of people are feeling stretched thin, juggling busy lives with a cost-of-living crisis and the stressors of the chaotic and sometimes frightening times we live in. Against this background, you may have heard more people talking about burnout, or maybe you have wondered if this might apply to you. But what exactly is burnout?
Simply put, burnout is a state of chronic physical and emotional exhaustion. It’s a consequence of relentless, prolonged, and/or highly intense stress and demands that exceed our ability to cope.
The emotional exhaustion associated with burnout involves a state of depletion, of feeling drained of our emotional resources. This can be experienced as cynicism and detachment towards work, colleagues and ourselves. Along with reduced motivation, decreased productivity and a sense of inefficacy, it can impact on quality of life, both at work and personally. Over time negative mood states are likely to build like irritation, anxiety, anger or depression. Physical depletion associated with burnout can present in numerous ways including persistent fatigue, gastro-intestinal symptoms, aches and pain, increased risks of cold and flu viruses, or at the severe end compromised immunity and more chronic health conditions. In other words, a lot to manage on all fronts.
Why do we burn out?
There are multiple reasons people burn out, many of them to do with living in societies that seem to demand more and more of us. External stressors may include intense workloads, time and financial pressures, unrealistic demands, and limited resources or support. Collectively this can create a persistent state of stress, which over an extended period places excessive strain on people’s resources and resilience. What is more, in a bid to keep plates spinning and continue working, the activities that usually nourish and replenish us are the first we drop.
There’s often an interplay between these external factors and our learned ways of coping with stress (e.g. pushing through), that can cumulatively result in burnout. Habitual coping styles originate from a rich mix of our temperaments, personalities, early life, traumas, cultures, even shaping factors before our births like the intergenerational values and epigenetics we inherit.
Burnout in the helping professions
What’s unique or different about burnout in the helping professions? Firstly, we are likely to be more at risk due to the high emotional demands and intense interpersonal interactions associated with caring roles, hence why vicarious trauma and empathy distress fatigue are often part of the burnout picture.
For all its wonderful benefits in our work, empathy is the vehicle which can drive us to unwanted destinations and unmanageable emotional loads if left unchecked. Our capacity to attune to and feel the needs of clients is vital in shaping our interventions. It is a survival strategy and our indicator for 'knowing what to do’. We are wired to empathise through the afferent nerves in our peripheral nervous system, bringing information to our brain via our senses so that we can react accordingly.
In addition, mirror neurons in our brains enable us to quite literally feel what others are experiencing without us having to do anything. So when we work with high distress, we feel it and our nervous systems respond accordingly with raised heart rates, tense muscles and the rest. This process can be unconscious and if we are detached from our bodies even more so, as we might miss the signals.
Add to this counter-transference - others’ distress triggering our own buried memories, past traumas - and we can see how working with others in high distress over long periods can drive us to burnout territory if we drive blindly without awareness.
Secondly, research shows the way helpers approach their work can risk burnout. For example, high levels of conscientiousness and commitment at work, together with confidence being tightly bound to work performance, are common. From our experience as schema therapists we see particular patterns as hazards, such as excessive self-sacrificing, people pleasing, perfectionism, approval seeking, or emotional deprivation.
The impact of burnout on our work
Burnout has the potential to shrink our window of tolerance. We then become less able to tolerate strong affect and sensation, both for ourselves and for others. We may become less able to help the people we are supporting to face their own pain, because we ourselves are avoiding feeling pain (whether consciously or not). In our private lives we might isolate ourselves, unable to face the prospect of having to expend any more social energy. However if we can’t regulate ourselves, we can’t co-regulate with the people we are helping or with anyone for that matter.
The Helpers Hub
Dedicating time and space to ourselves to stretch our capacity to feel again is an act of deep, meaningful self-care. It also means we can create a large enough container for our clients. It guards against burnout, or it helps us to come back from it. It helps us to meet our clients’ needs on a deep emotional level.
Widening our tolerance can take time and effort including increased awareness, learning new skills, building adaptive habits and being part of a supportive community.
What we offer is a needs-meeting path to increased emotional intelligence, body connection, emotional regulation, restorative practices so that our bodies don’t burn out on the job. We offer this in a variety of mediums (webinars, workshops and retreats) drawing on somatic therapy, parts work from Schema Therapy, polyvagal theory, mindfulness approaches and whenever possible the healing qualities of nature 🌿.
