Are you at risk of burnout? Here’s what to do

About that email you just fired off. Did you really need to send it? What else should you have been doing?

In an era of noisy busyness, the only way to live a purpose-driven life is to stop doing busy work. “But,” I hear you cry, “I’m extremely busy!” That is exactly the point.

We used to answer to meaning, but today we answer to mobile. When did we become slaves to our mobile phone push notifications – social media updates, emails, WhatsApp messages? Trying to keep up with a heightened “on” mode and a constant state of busyness is exhausting.

Is it any wonder we’re burnt out?

What busy stops us doing

Busy leads us down a treacherous path to burnout. Apart from our health – exhaustion, tension, mood swings – what else is at stake? If anyone can illuminate this, it’s Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse responsible for patients in the last weeks of their lives. She recorded people’s biggest dying regrets in a blog, and subsequently in a book. Here are the top five regrets, as observed by Ware:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

“When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled,” wrote Ware. “Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made.” Among the top regrets, from men in particular, was a sense of time lost to work. “They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship,” the blog read. She also described the excessive energy people spent suppressing their feelings to keep peace with others. “As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming.”

When the ties of busyness, stress and regret together weave a rope, the rope can eventually choke us.

How prevalent is burnout?

Some researchers have documented rates as high as 85% among financial professionals. In 2017, ComPsych, the world’s largest provider of employee assistance programmes, found that three out of five employees are highly stressed. Of those surveyed, 56% of employees see accomplishing basic tasks as the top work priority, while workload and people issues are the top work stressors.