Happy 2021 fellow readers. Virtual Adviser has developed an online burnout assessment tool. Click on the link above to initiate the process. Enter your details, answer all the questions and receive a score. Your score is interpreted and the result sheet is confidentially emailed to you. Kindly enter the correct email address to ensure that you receive your results.
Your Health Is Your Wealth
The intensity of burnout during a pandemic is discussed and the legitimacy of the measuring tool explained. We conclude with five science based steps to help you cope with burnout, courtesy of Thrive Global.
Arianna Huffington writes in her blog entitled, The Fascinating History of Burnout, “…years before the coronavirus pandemic started, the world was already experiencing an epidemic of burnout. And the phenomenon has only gotten worse as the pandemic has progressed. Not surprisingly, rising rates of burnout were first felt by doctors, nurses and other frontline healthcare workers. Soon, the conversation expanded to include those working from home as well as frontline workers in a range of service industries, from grocery store cashiers and factory workers to mail carriers and bus drivers.”
I took inspiration from this article and got the experts at Virtual Adviser together to build an online assessment tool, freely available for everyone to use.
Burnout is a phenomenon responsible for physical, emotional, behavioral and interpersonal symptoms causing harm to the many individuals suffering from this phenomenon. Although the burnout phenomenon existed before 1947, it was only termed burnout in the 1970s (Maslach, Schaufeli & Leiter, 2001). In 1974, the first psychological piece on burnout was published, written by Freudenberger (Savicki & Cooley, 1982).
Daley (1979) defines burnout as a reaction to job-related stress, which varies with regard to the intensity and duration of the stress itself. He further explains that burnout may be visible in workers who become emotionally detached from their jobs, and might eventually lead to them leaving their jobs.
The most widely accepted definition for burnout is the three-component definition of Maslach et al. (2001), which defines burnout as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and diminished personal accomplishment which often appears in individuals who work with other people.
The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) was developed in 1981 to measure burnout and is the most widely used measure of burnout in current times. Various papers criticized this measure and its underlying model. One such paper is that of Kristensen et al. (2005), developers of the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory. Kristensen et al. (2005) disagreed with the popular three-component conceptualisation of Maslach and Jackson, and based the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory on their own understanding of burnout.
Kristensen et al. (2005) understood burnout as a phenomenon with fatigue and exhaustion as its core, but the attribution of fatigue and exhaustion to specific domains in a person’s life is the additional key feature. These domains include work, and a more specific domain, client work. Based on this understanding, Kristensen et al. (2005) developed the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory to measure personal burnout, work-related burnout, and client-related burnout.
Since 2005, there have been several studies conducted across diverse groups in different countries that established the reliability of the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory as a measure of burnout. The CBI has no patent on it and the questionnaire can be used freely. However, The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) does have legal limitations on the free use of it’s questionnaire. For our purposes, CBI results correlate well with MBI results and hence can be used as a reliable indicator of burnout.
However, we do caution that the tool is an INDICATOR of burnout. You need to consult a professional clinical psychologist to verify the outcomes. We share the contact details of our own expert psychologist on the results page. Note that the questionnaire represents personal burnout, work-related burnout, and client-related burnout in that sequence, starting from the first page (of three pages). The final score is average of the three sections. If you do well in two sections and poorly in one of them, the section that you performed poorly in will be masked by an overall good score. Take recognition of this when interpreting your results.
Coping Strategies
To conclude we repeat Arianna Huffington’s five, science-based, micro-steps to take with you into 2021 for a new year of less stress, more calm and no burnout.
- When you wake up, don’t start your day by looking at your phone. Take one minute to focus on your intention for the day or remember what you’re grateful for or simply take some conscious breaths.
- Practice box breathing in moments of stress. This technique, practiced by the Navy SEALS, is a powerful stress reliever that works by activating our parasympathetic nervous system, which lowers our stress. Just inhale for a count of four, hold the air in your lungs full for a count of four, then exhale for a count of four.
- Set a news cut-off time at the end of the day. While being informed can help us feel more prepared in the middle of a public health crisis, setting healthy limits to our media consumption can help us have a recharging night’s sleep and put the stressful news into perspective.
- Right now, send a message to a neighbor or friend and ask how you can help them. Reaching out to others puts our stresses and worries into perspective, and gives us a much needed “helper’s high” that boosts our well-being. Read “15 gift ideas that no one is talking about“.
- Declare an end to the working day. The truth is that our working day never ends so we need to declare an end. And mark it by turning off our phone and ideally charging it outside of our bedroom.
Virtual Adviser promises to be your leading online adviser on everything that impacts your wealth. We are constantly looking for ways to be of value to you. I wish you a fantastic 2021!
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