Self-Care is Not the Solution for Burnout

Self-care, if it is to have continuous value in our lives, should be anchored into moving toward what we value.

Dr. Maslach outlined some of the factors that research has found leads to burnout: * Excessive workloads * Lack of flexibility in schedule * Lack of worker autonomy * Destructive competition among co-workers * Getting shut out of opportunities * Loss of shared common meaning and purpose at work * Workers feeling they are not meaningful change agent... See more

This creates the impression that burnout originates within individual people.

A great deal of the public focus on burnout has zeroed in on the skills and deficits of individual workers all the while three decades of research has demonstrated that work environments, not individual workers, have the greatest impact on the possibility of burnout and worker turnover. Work environments!

As our economy and society have often been insensitive to the natural order — taken her for granted and assumed an infinite supply of materials to consume. Our work has followed this basic assumption as well — that people will continue to give endlessly of themselves for those productivity margins.

Certainly when we experience burnout we need to find ways to address our compromised wellbeing. But the larger issue of burnout work culture needs to place a wider responsibility on the systems that produce them. No amount of essential oil baths or stretching exercises are going to fix your toxic work environment or provide compassion-centered lead... See more

When we constrain our self-care practices to avoid something bad from happening, we deprive self-care of its fundamental value in our lives. It turns self-care into an obligation, a purely defensive maneuver, or a method of somehow recovering a lost sense of motivation, morale, and hope for the future.

Burnout, then, is an outcome of an interaction between burnout producing environmental factors and individually susceptible workers.

Rather than being merely reactive to workplace concerns, are there ways in which workplace leadership and community members can identify potential threats to burnout prior to it happening?