I’m Not A Pothead But I Might Be A Burnout

The big work related news of the week is the World Health Organization has now officially listed burnout as an “occupational syndrome”.

In the eleventh edition of the agency’s manual called the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), the WHO claims that burnout is due solely to “chronic workplace stress” and “should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”

Drawing on a growing body of research, the eleventh edition now claims that doctors can diagnose someone with burnout if they have:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
• increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
• reduced professional efficacy

The WHO says doctors should first rule out adjustment disorder as well as anxiety disorders before diagnosing burnout.  Additionally, the diagnosis is limited to work environments, and shouldn’t be applied to other situations in life.

Doctor Burnout

In other burnout news this week, Time published this article on physician burnout. 

From the article:

For doctors and hospitals, though, the ramifications [of burnout] can be especially dire. Doctors in the U.S. experience symptoms of burnout at almost twice the rate of other workers, often citing as contributors the long hours, a fear of being sued, and having to deal with growing bureaucracy, like filling out clunky and time-consuming electronic medical records. Burned-out doctors tend to make more medical errors, and their patients have worse outcomes and are less satisfied. Doctors also have higher rates of suicide than the general population, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

The article links to a recently released study in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.  The study attempts to quantify the costs of physician burnout thusly:

On a national scale, the conservative base-case model estimates that approximately $4.6 billion in costs related to physician turnover and reduced clinical hours is attributable to burnout each year in the United States.

Yikes.  And according to the Time article they didn’t consider some expensive aspects of physician burnout such as malpractice lawsuits and a general degradation of patient care because those things are too difficult to quantify.  So the real costs are likely way higher.

There are quite a few physician bloggers in the personal finance space and Physician On Fire wrote a great piece about burnout with a FI perspective in mind.

Am I A Burnout?

Growing up we called druggies and potheads ‘burnouts’.  Thankfully I avoided all that stuff, I knew where the line was.  But did I become a different kind of burnout?

Looking at the main three criteria of burnout according to the WHO, I reflected on my career and what prompted me to cut down to part time over a year and a half ago.

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion – I definitely had this quite a bit in my career, but more so throughout my 30’s when I was still hitting it hard, knuckling down, and front-loading.  I worked my ass off.  One time I slept on the floor next to my cubicle.  I think I also once did a shift of 26 hours without sleep, at the computer.  I don’t recommend these things at all, but at the time I didn’t mind my job to be honest and I knew I was banking investments that would get me promoted and get me closer to FU Money. 

Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job – This was definitely a cause of me to go part time.  I tried not to be negative, really I did.  But being in management in a massively bureaucratic organization is a thankless job.  And as I became further detached from the actual mission of my agency, it became much harder to not be cynical about the wasted taxpayer money and the needless bureaucracy.

Reduced professional efficacy – The word efficacy means “the power to produce”.  So in a pure sense, yes, I experienced this.  But it’s directly related to the previous issue of being in management.  My ability to produce needless administrative documents that end up as shelf-ware and inane personnel reports that serve no purpose was indeed reduced.  Because I saw that the work they were giving me didn’t matter.  Do I have a reduced capacity to produce real and meaningful work at my job if tasked to do so?  No.  I’m quite positive of that. 

So there you have it, I suffer from some of the symptoms of burnout according to the WHO.  But in my case it might be more accurately described as “positional burnout” due to the fact that much of it seems to have been brought on by being in management. 

I think this might be a common thing.  Take my friend Zac for instance who blogs at Four Pillar Freedom.  He’s a data scientist and loves it.  But he doesn’t love a ton of the crap that comes with his job like schedules, meetings, performance reviews, and office politics. 

I think lots of people suffer from burnout at their job not because of the actual substantive things they’re supposed to be paid for, but because of all the unnecessary crap their job inflicts upon them. 

But who knows, I’m apparently sick with burnout myself, so I could be wrong 🙂

Your turn readers – do you suffer or have you suffered from workplace burnout according to the WHO criteria?