Burnout and spiritual-health
In this episode, we explore a crucial distinction that’s important in coping with burnout
Burnout isn’t fun. Neither is the feeling of being so worn-down by the world that we’re barely able to function at all. And yet both of these are dangerously common amongst those of us who are working with change, especially at the larger scale.
It’s not a trivial issue, because the loss from this can be enormous - personal, professional, even global at times. True, the loss is often in what didn’t happen, or couldn’t happen, a change that we needed that couldn’t occur - sometimes described as an ‘opportunity cost’ - so in that sense it can be hard to recognise, or to measure. Whichever way we look at it, losing skilled people at the need them most is always going to hurt - again, sometimes right out to a fully global scale.
It’s often described as a mental health issue, yet in practice that type of framing often kind of misses the the real point. There’s usually nothing wrong with our thinking as such - the thinking-part is still working fine, though it does tend to get in the way of this specific issue here. Instead, it’s more about doing too much of this - stuck in a dark room, staring at a screen and nothing else, hour after hour, day after day…
…and not balancing that with enough of getting outside…
…literally smelling the flowers and suchlike…
…or perhaps small-pleasures such as watching an old steam-train rumbling by.
But to make sense of this, we need to draw some clear distinctions between the four main dimensions of health: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. All of these dimensions play a real part in what’s going on here, but the one that matters the most is the spiritual dimension.
(Yeah, I know that the word ‘spiritual’ tends to panic people a bit, but there are strong reasons for using it here, and we’ll come back to that in a moment.)
Good physical health can play a useful part in keeping burnout at bay, and many forms of physical exercise can likewise help in keeping a better balance across all of the other dimensions. And although poor physical health will hinder us, it’s more a contributory factor here rather than a core driver in its own right: staying slumped over a screen all day, snacking on junk-food and drowning in coffee may make us obese and send the blood-pressure sky-high, but it won’t trigger burnout by itself.
Much the same applies here around good or poor emotional health. Burnout may well trigger poor emotional-health - leaving us stuck in a tear-laden “pity-party”, as a colleague described it the other day - but the inverse is not so true: poor emotional-health may leave us unable to work, but it in itself it won’t trigger a burnout.
Likewise, mental health is not in itself all that much of an issue here - not as much as most people seem to think, anyway. Poor mental-health is mainly a dysfunction in thinking: inadequate sensemaking, cognitive-bias, lack of critical-thinking, a tendency to get caught up[ in conspiracy-theories and so on, or an inability or unwillingness to just plain properly think things through. On the one side, it gives us good ol’ Dunning-Kruger, where we over-estimate our mental abilities; on the other side, if we underestimate our abilities and get caught up in self-doubt, we risk getting stuck in Imposter Syndrome, which, yes, definitely doesn’t help, but again doesn’t in itself trigger burnout.
What does drive burnout is poor spiritual health. Since this dimension is so often misunderstood, I always use a flat, neutral definition here:
a sense of meaning and purpose; a sense of self and of relation with that which is greater than self
Note that this is always personal - a personal responsibility that cannot be offloaded onto onto anyone else.
(By the way, this is one reason why organised-religion can be more likely to damage spiritual-health than to help it, because its whole aim is to impose someone else’s definition of meaning and purpose onto the individual, rather than aiding individuals to find their own meaning for themselves. The roles of religion and the spiritual-dimension are so different, in fact at times almost diametrically opposed to each other, that’s it’s crucially important not to mix them up - especially so when dealing with issues such as burnout.)
And yeah, once we understand this, it should become clear that the real focus here needs to be on the link between burnout and spiritual health. Sure, yes, the other dimensions of health do play a part, but the most important drivers in burnout are around meaning and purpose, about our relationship with our own sense of self, and also about how we relate with that which is greater-than-self - such as, in the context of burnout, the ‘greater-than-self’ project we’re working on, our work-context, our profession and so on.
So to summarise all of the above, poor mental-health is indeed a common consequence of burnout, but is less likely to be a primary cause; whereas breakdown of spiritual-health - a sense of meaning and purpose, a sense of self and of relation with that which is greater than self - is probably the primary cause of burnout, with all of its devastating consequences to all.
Why is this distinction important? It’s because if we try to tackle burnout primarily as a mental-health issue, that’s not going to solve the issue here. Sure, we’re good at thinking, for most of us the main part of our work is about thinking, and we’re probably justifiably proud about our skills in thinking; when faced with almost any challenge, our first recourse would be to start by thinking how we’re going to solve it. But for this purpose, that’s exactly what not to do: from my own first-hand experience, and that of so many others I know, trying to think our way out of burnout merely makes it worse.
That’s because those mental-health tactics are almost diametrically opposite to what we actually need to do: we need to use spiritual-health tactics instead. Rather than trying to think about it, what does work is to take some time off, get away from work, allow a bit of room for serendipity, for just letting things happen, do something completely different for a while. Address the other health-dimensions too: get some exercise, change the diet, meet up with other people outside of work, tackle a mental challenge that isn’t related to the main area of work.
To be technical about it, in effect burnout is a chaotic-system loop, circling around a decidedly-unattractive ‘chaotic-attractor’ of a lost sense of purpose. All that our usual trying-to-think-our-way-out-of-it will do is to get the loop to spin faster and faster, tighter and tighter; we need to use a different kind of chaos to disrupt the spin and break out of the loop. And in practice, almost any kind of disruptor can do it, as long as it is something different - though we may have to try a few different tactics until we find the right one that does do the job.
But if we can’t do any of that, or won’t allow ourselves to do that, then that burnout is only going to get worse - and all the other dimensions of health will probably get worse, too. That would definitely be Not A Good Idea…
Burnout is such an endemic problem in our fields of work that we do all need good ways to deal with it. Yet it’s not a ‘mental-health issue:’ not really, not as such. Instead, to make sense of it, to reduce the risks of falling into it, and to find our way out from it, we first need to understand the links between burnout and spiritual-health, and build our way forward from there.
In short, do anything that will help to rebuild a sense of meaning and purpose, rebuild our own sense of self, and rebuild a sense of connection with something else that is also ‘greater than self’. That’s what does work for this.
I hope this helps, anyway.