3 Causes of Burnout & How to Beat It
Healthcare professionals are no strangers to depression, stress, irritability, and mental or emotional exhaustion. However, experiencing those symptoms yourself can be quite a shock. Handling burnout is more common than you might think, with 45 percent of all healthcare workers experiencing burnout.
Burnout can affect anyone at any career level. If you’re unsure whether you are experiencing burnout, understand that it often looks like depression, isolating yourself from others, an increase in unhealthy habits, or even increased irritability with patients or co-workers. If you are experiencing these symptoms, here are some tips to face it head-on.
1. Work Factors
Countless factors go into burnout, one of them being work. Take a look at your work life. How many hours are you scheduled a week? Are you spending most or much of your time on bureaucratic tasks like charting and paperwork? Are you unfairly compensated? If your answers are less than satisfactory, we suggest changing your work-life to combat it.
Let’s take a look at hours as an example. The more hours you work, the greater the likelihood that you will experience burnout. We understand that it’s not always easy to cut back hours. Working long hours is quite common for the eyecare industry. However, if your hours significantly affect your mental health, it may be time to scale back.
2. Me, Myself and I
Your personality might also contribute to your mental state. Personal characteristics such as perfectionism, idealism, self-criticism, a poor support system, unhealthy coping mechanisms and even gender could be contributing stressors. In fact, women are more likely to burnout than men.
Consider seeking professional help to cope with burnout, developing a safe support system of family, friends or other groups with whom you could talk to relieve stress. Even coping methods as simple as exercise can alleviate burnout.
3. It Takes A Clinic
Handling burnout is never easy. Sometimes, the factors that pile up and lead to burnout are out of your control. Your work setting, lack of respect from your patients and colleagues, government regulations and increasing digital requirements can all affect you.
Try speaking with your group administration to discuss productivity pressure. Hiring additional staff to help with your workload or reducing your hours are potential solutions to relieve pressure.
Consequences of Burnout
There are plenty of consequences that can affect the quality of your work and work-life. Those who experience extreme stress are often short with co-workers or patients. When it comes to patients, burnout often leads to a lack of interpersonal relationships, increased clinical errors and poor patient satisfaction.
Burnout can harm you both physically and psychologically. The simplest ways to stop it are to lower your stress levels at work and improve your ability to prevent those stressors from impacting you.
There’s no right or wrong way to deal with burnout. We can’t promise to fix all your problems, but if most of your problems comes from your job, it may be time for a career change. Submit a resume today or look over our job board to see if one of our open positions is right for you.