Self-Care is Not the Solution for Burnout

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.

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?

work environment factors are a major reason why people experience burnout, then why aren’t we seeing more work-related interventions? Why instead do we see a plethora of self-help resources and books that centre the topic of burnout on individual people? Why do places of employment host self-care outreach programming but not work environment audits... See more

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

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!

From this compassion-centred framework, we are creating resilient workplaces not just resilient workers. Wellbeing becomes a focus of work environments.

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

If we think that burnout happens because of weaknesses or vulnerabilities of an individual worker, then we are less likely to assess work environments and work cultures that cultivate burnout as a logical outcome to poor working environments, hostile work cultures for those with marginalized identities, unreasonable work expectations, ineffective l... See more

Burnout is the shared responsibility of both the individual, the organisation, and our work culture. We have increasingly become a burnout culture and is is salt on the wounds of so many people who are struggling to suggest that the problem is that they are not doing enough yoga.