The age of burnout: Why you need a healthy work-life balance

“Here’s to another day of outward smiles and inward screams.”

Throughput, ROI, productivity, stress... burnout!

As we navigate our careers, expectations and workplaces in a reckless corporatised hamster wheel, glorifying long hours and workaholism, the body clock eventually delivers its verdict.

Sans a healthy work:life balance, conducive family time and much-needed self- love, the ‘burnout’ phenomenon engulfs us gradually but surely.

They say eat your food as medicines now, for you shall not have to eat medicines as food later. This anecdote fits in well with burnout too, as we compromise on our precious mindspace and physical health. Organisations will forget you in a jiffy, ignored family and friends might rally, but the scars of what could have been will continue to haunt.

Burnout is cathartic and comes with our tendency to overextend to comply with despotic corporate whims and fancies. We are “tired” and yet “wired”. Gen Z, however, is leading the way in spelling out their priorities, something millennials can truly learn from.

In professional journals, burnout is defined as a phenomenon that arises from continually experiencing stress in the workplace, resulting in exhaustion, cynicism and a perceived lack of professional accomplishment. The symptoms of workplace burnout come from primarily six buckets, viz unsustainable workload, a perceived lack of control, insufficient rewards for efforts, lack of supportive community, lack of fairness and mismatched values and skills.

As per research studies published in Harvard Review, when we look at voluntary attrition, managers experiencing exhaustion are 1.8 times more likely to leave the company, while managers experiencing cynicism 3 times and managers experiencing lack of professional efficacy 3.4 times more likely to do so. When a manager is impacted on all three dimensions, they are 5.3 times more likely to look at other options.

The other tangent is that employees leave toxic and insensitive managers, not organisations. So charity begins at home really.