Our pre-industrial ancestors organised their day by the position of the sun. We have alarm clocks, phones, smartwatches, routines, reminders, endless pings, meeting requests, and last but certainly not least, the little voice in our heads telling us we need to ‘be productive’. With all these reminders that we need to ‘do something’, that we have to be productive, is it any wonder that employee burnout has become a very real organisational risk?

Besides, considering the pandemic-induced seismic shift in the way we work, how does your team know that you’re even there if you’re not sending an email every five minutes?

How to deal with the stress of being always on

Countering the stress and temptation to be at our computers 24/7 requires a change in the way we think. Resilience is not how you endure – it is how you replenish and recharge. It’s about resting and doing nothing in a meaningful way.

Even pre-Covid-19 workplace studies showed that employees report being stressed a lot of the time by politics, artificial intelligence and pressure to master new skills. Not to mention the unfailing stream of information from so many different sources.

If left unchecked, the consequences of prolonged stress include fatigue, insomnia, high blood pressure, vulnerability to illness, mood disorders, increased mistakes on the job, decreased productivity and a loss of overall vitality.

Sound familiar? Maybe not, but here’s the myth: burnout is easy to detect.

Chronic stress sneaks up on you over time. It is not until it really impacts your functioning or your performance at work that the penny drops. If you are an industrious person, chances are that you need to be monitoring for it regularly, before you are caught in a spiral. The sooner we can identify and acknowledge burnout, the sooner we can respond and not go into the cycle that feeds it.

The difference between being tired and burnout

Burnout is made up of three core components:

• Exhaustion: This is massive emotional, physical and cognitive fatigue.
• Cynicism: When you show low levels of engagement, be it with your job, life or family engagement, plus lack engagement with yourself. The latter may feel like a lack of purpose.
• Inefficacy: You know you are more than capable but get to a point where feelings of incompetence or not making progress have taken over.

Whereas it previously was believed that burnout happens on a continuum, starting with cynicism and ending with exhaustion, research has found that someone may score high on one of these components and low on the others. As a result, everyone has a different burnout profile.

The role of time poverty and time affluence in burnout

Time poverty takes up cognitive resources because the human brain cannot cope with so many interruptions, demands and distractions. The evidence shows that the currency that our brain operates on, attention, cannot be spread so thin without some fallout. Our brain needs blank time to optimise itself.

The opposite, time affluence, is the feeling that you have enough time. Yes, the way we think about time is based on subjective feeling. The reason that we feel time poor, is that we (consciously or not) organise our time in tiny chunks. Leisure time is sporadic and disconnected because we are constantly interrupted by our phones.

On top of that, we equate stress to success: in order to be successful we have to operate under prolonged periods of intense stress. Sacrificing sleep, time with loved ones and indulgence, is a mental model we should probably question. Once we reach a threshold, we stop being able to engage people with empathy, our productivity diminishes and we are more likely to make mistakes.

So let’s be deliberate about how we think about time: if in reality you can’t afford to free up much time for leisure, focus on how you think about the time you do free up. Even if you have very little time for leisure, the way you think about it is going to make all the difference.

Practical ways to fit downtime into your day

It does not take much to feel good. Find yourself using little time windfalls to check social media? Sure, you get a dopamine hit, but what if we use these moments a little more effectively for our own mental health? To claim back time, thinking of these small pockets of time as a gain will move to increase our happiness.

• Make a menu. Write list of small, replenishing actions or behaviours that you can do when you get five minutes, an hour or a day free. What are the micro, positive things you can do to bump up your mood?
• When you’ve completed a stressful task (whether it’s positively stressful or negatively so), block off 20 minutes to let your nervous system recover. Counterbalance a stressful moment with a calm moment. This will build out psychological reserves: core capabilities that create robust resilience.
• When you decide what microbehaviours you can use to psychologically detach and replenish, make it a norm to talk about them.
  
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