On Monday I will start registration for my new course, Everyday Energy. This three-month course is designed to help you build practices into your life that promote greater energy and productivity.
In case you missed it, I wrote a short article series discussing our human energy crisis, the biological roots of our exhaustion, and the need to restore our natural rhythms of effort and rest. Today, I’ll explore the meaning we attribute to work and why our society’s dominant paradigm often contributes to burnout.
Burnout is more than just tiredness. If so, a good night’s sleep may be enough to restore our energy. In contrast, burnout occurs when exhaustion occurs.
Research into the causes of burnout is complex and fascinating. Simply put, burnout occurs when:
- First, we are overworked. Demand exceeds our ability to respond or recover. Fatigue results.
- This can cause us to feel a lack of control and an inability to keep up, leading us to Feeling inadequate. We feel helpless and powerless.
- Finally, our fatigue and helplessness disappeared Increased cynicism About the work itself. The work isn’t just too much and too hard, but it feels ultimately pointless.
Three components of burnout—exhaustion, cynicism, and incompetence—explain why taking a vacation isn’t the answer to burnout. We may be able to deal with temporary fatigue, but when burnout sets in, our belief in the work itself and our ability to cope with it sours.
Addressing burnout isn’t easy. We need to replace stubborn cynicism and feelings of inadequacy with a new sense of competence and meaning in our efforts. Sometimes this can be worked out within an existing role, but often it requires finding a new workplace, job or even career path.
The persistence of burnout explains why energy management is so important. We want to stop the downward spiral of fatigue before it spirals into ineffective or cynical beliefs that are difficult to adjust to.
Avoiding burnout isn’t the only reason to care about energy management. There is an opposite state to burnout worth cultivating: flourishing. Just as burnout can become entrenched, prosperity can create lasting resilience and provide a source of energy.
Thriving: The Opposite of Burnout
If burnout is caused by a combination of unrecoverable fatigue, feelings of inadequacy, and growing cynicism about the meaning of work, thriving is exactly the opposite. When you excel at your job, you:
- Maintain a healthy balance between effort and recovery.
- Be confident in your abilities.
- Feel stable and secure about the meaning of your job.
When these three conditions are met, the effect is resilience. In times of crisis, you have more ability to dig deeper and can make greater efforts without feeling overwhelmed.
Thrive also neatly illustrates that the opposite of burnout is not relaxing, but lying somewhere on a beach. While addressing our physical state of exhaustion is often our top priority when we’re overwhelmed, the fantasy of escaping all work—whether it’s counting the days until retirement, buying lottery tickets, or playing video games—is a way of coping, not a way to thrive.
Prosperity is not about compromise. This is not a conservation stance that prevents us from burning out, but one that embraces challenge and effort, more Bring vitality to our lives.
flattening of meaning
I’ve previously discussed the biological roots of fatigue and how our work culture can help promote burnout. When we disrupt sleep, diet, and exercise, fail to manage stress, and work outside of our natural rhythms, we create the conditions for exhaustion to set in.
But our work philosophy exacerbates these problems. Our culture sends us conflicting messages about the meaning we should get from our work.
On the one hand, we should follow our passion, find our voice and make an impact. From this perspective, work is not just something that needs to be done, but a transcendent mission. It’s a lofty vision, but it often conflicts with the mundane realities of how we actually work. By demanding meaning in our work to achieve some ecstatic ideal, we often lose sight of the meaning that actually exists in our daily tasks.
On the other hand, we are taught to maximize economic value and to view work as a means to an end (i.e., leisure). In this view, work is the price you pay to do the things that truly make life worthwhile.
In an interesting article, philosopher Agnes Callard writes about teaching Aristotle’s views on work and leisure. She commented that what students are doing now, pursuing the spiritual life, is true leisure in the Aristotelian sense. But, for most students in her class, attendance is more like “work”—something they need to do to get good jobs and live in society.
Both visions make it harder to find true meaning in our work. The call to transcendence ignores the worldly and leaves us longing for a job that doesn’t exist. A transactional attitude denies the meaning of work and everyone works on weekends.
We need a work philosophy that bases work on a stable understanding of its value. Ultimately, the value of our work and the significance of sustaining a prosperous life are not limited to a few rarefied professions. It is available to all of us as long as we can see it.
If you like this course series and want to learn more, I will open registration for Everyday Energy on Monday. Courses will explore biology, psychology, and energy philosophy in greater depth and help you develop lasting practices for a thriving life. I hope to see you there!
