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The Real Cost of Workplace Burnout
You often hear stories of office employees working 100 plus hours in a week in order to meet the demands of their companies. Getting asked whether you are okay working extra hours before you even start at a company is too often the case. But it’s a tricky balance to say the least and one that can often lead to some level of what we call burnout.
Burnout in it of itself is a term that tends to get used much too liberally these days. It is mainly used to imply some level of dissatisfaction or discomfort with ones current job. You get too tired or you have a dispute with your manager, and all too often you will hear the term ‘burnout’ being used to describe it. But I think it’s important to make the distinction between emotional burnout, such as not feeling joyful, and physical burnout, such as physically not feeling well.
I’ve personally experienced both stages during my corporate work in the past. And one is clearly more hazardous than the other. At past jobs in which deadlines were short, documentation was scarce and specifications changed often, stress was a commonplace occurrence. And those years were, from a health perspective, the worst that I have faced so far. Everything from joint pain, to headaches to digestive issues were waiting for me as soon as I woke up.
