Nearly 50% of us feel burnout; here’s how to manage it
📆 Including today, there are only 11 Mondays left in 2024
Issue #189: a quantum mechanics scientist largely forgotten by history, why few women get Nobel prizes, and making MVEs rather than MVPs
By Scott Lamb
Burnout is a word with multiple identities. Since first appearing in the cultural lexicon in the ’80s with Herbert Freudenberger’s “Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement,” it’s been a word we use casually to refer to stress and exhaustion related to work. But it has a clinical definition, too; the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases defines it as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Some research says 48% of workers globally experience burnout at some point in their careers.
For people who’ve suffered the clinical version, recovery can be a long, fraught process. As Devon Price writes on Medium, some people never fully recover from an episode of clinical burnout. Looking at multiple studies, there’s evidence that recovery can take years, and many never return to the same levels of energy and cognitive capacity they previously had. “It’s as if burnout sufferers have fallen off their previous life trajectory, and cannot ever climb fully back up,” Price writes.
Workplace burnout is especially challenging because even if you’re noticing symptoms, it’s not always easy to just take time off. Some approaches for heading off burnout while still working are also just good advice for maintaining your health:
- Start with your body: As always, exercise, diet, and sleep play a huge role. Tend to those needs first.
- Restructure your work: Look for places where you can make accommodations with your schedule, tasks, or workload
- Get away: Take a mental health day, some OOO time or consider taking a leave of absence
If you’re feeling burnt out, remember: It’s not just a passing phase, and it’s not a sign of weakness. Burnout is a structural issue that demands a structural response.
🔥 3 great Medium stories in 2 sentences or less
- You probably don’t know the name Max Born, but he played a central role in developing the theory of quantum mechanics alongside Werner Heisenberg; why his name has largely been forgotten by history (and wasn’t part of Heisenberg’s 1932 Nobel Prize) is one of the great untold stories of science, finally told by his great-grandson Pierz Newton-John on Medium.
- Related: Fewer than 7% of Nobel Prize winners are women, and that number is even lower in the sciences; the reasons boil down to forms of gender discrimination at every stage of a woman’s career.
- Want to launch something quickly and learn from it? Instead of thinking about the MVP (minimum viable product), focus on making an MVE — minimum valuable experience.
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Edited and produced by Harris Sockel & Carly Rose Gillis
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