How Young Professionals Can Keep Burnout at

Bay
Burnout is a psychological syndrome that arises in response to prolonged interpersonal and job-
related stressors. According to Maslach and Leiter, key dimensions of this response are a
colossal amount of exhaustion, feelings of detachment from the job, and a sense of lack of
accomplishment. To minimise the extent of psychological damage, detrimental effects on
wellbeing, and diminished productivity, employees can take the following steps:

Identifying specific reasons

Several factors may push an employee to the brink of burning out at work. Stunted job
satisfaction, nature of tasks, and elements of the broader organizational culture may play a role in
inducing burnout symptoms in employees.
“Absence of person-role fit caused me the most stress,” says an employee working for a reputed
telecom company in Dhaka, wishing to remain anonymous. “I applied for a position in the tech
department but they placed me in the HR for a role I was not interested in. Performing a job that
I did not find fulfilling caused stress to build up and it eventually led me to be unmotivated and
overwhelmed.”
Similarly, unrealistic goal-setting practises, lack of recognition for work, and norms that inhibit
individual employee’s scopes of achieving personal growth can cause job dissatisfaction over
time. This may lead to detachment from the job in the long run. Once the set of reasons for
employees’ burning out is outlined, the management and relevant stakeholders can work on
addressing this issue by improvising their strategies.

Prioritising Self-Care

We often forget that self-care is as important as work itself. Mehran Khalid Afif, a mental health
professional at BRAC Institute of Educational Development and Moshal Mental Health, emphasises on
the necessity of taking frequent breaks and engaging in self-care.

“From a cultural standpoint, young professionals have always viewed self-care as a means to an end –
the end usually being enhanced productivity at work. Many have been conditioned to not acknowledge
the importance of self-care and even fall prey to an inherent guilt when they do things for themselves,”
he says. This inherent guilt makes employees subscribe to the notion that the opposite of self-care is
taking care of something or someone else – which, in case of many employees – may be the
organisation. “However, the opposite of engaging in self-care is simply not engaging in self-care. Once
employees realise this fallacy, the employees would feel less guilty about taking breaks which would
lessen the probability of them experiencing burnout symptoms”, he adds.

Designating Break Time

There is a huge difference between procrastinating and taking time off on a designated day. Many
professionals have the tendency to label procrastination as a break because we do not get any work
done while procrastinating. However, the outcome of choosing to consciously take a break on a
designated day is very different than that of procrastinating. The former makes us feel rejuvenated while
the latter makes us feel drained. Making this distinction between breaks and not-breaks makes all the
difference.

As such, Sonnentag, Kuttler and Fritz advocate complete detachment from major stressors of any kind
for a fixed period of time to enable recovery from burnout. They define psychological detachment from
work as a state of mind during non-work time characterised by absence of job-related activities and
thoughts.

Finding Customised Approaches

Every employee is exposed to a distinct set of stressors in their personal and professional life so
their means of preventing burnout is different. Baha Uddin Khan, the Product Specialist at
Intelligent Machines, makes a detailed work-plan ahead of time to keep his schedule organized
in order to prevent burnout. This helps him create a boundary between core hours when he can
work without interruption and his leisure hours. He says, “I usually try to plan my everyday
schedule in a way that lets me have at least two to three hours for myself throughout the day.
During that free time, I usually watch a movie, play games, or hangout with my friends.
Additionally, I go on a trip outside Dhaka every three or four months to escape the monotonous
city life. This helps me a lot to deal with stress and prevent burnout.”
Now the question may arise: how do we know what exact measure would work for us? The
answer to this dilemma is that it varies from one person to another; one is supposed to find out
what works for them through a trial-and-error approach.

In conclusion, apart from taking designated breaks from stressors and prioritising self-care,
everyone should keep their broader mental health in check. One should seek to find out if the
symptoms they have are exclusively burnout-related or if they are symptomatic of a bigger issue.
Consulting mental health professionals regarding this would help equip one with the ability to
tackle personal and job-related stressors in a healthy manner.
References

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4911781/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
222627071_Job_stressors_emotional_exhaustion_and_need_for_recovery_A_multi-
source_study_on_the_benefits_of_psychological_detachment