Andrew Procter - The Essential Guide to Burnout: Overcoming Excess Stress

We especially wish to thank all those who were willing to share their personal story of stress and burnout with us. We are also very grateful to Helen Leach, Kate Mendez and Emily Wingfield for their help in typing and commenting on the script.

This book is about burnout. Maybe you are reading it because you think you are heading that way, or because you know someone who is in that situation, or you may have been given the book because you have burnt out. Whatever your situation, we sincerely hope this book will be a tool in your full recovery, or help you support someone else.

If you are reading for your benefit, the fact that you have managed to get hold of it, open it and read these words shows that you have the motivation and energy to get better. This is great. It is the seed of your recovery. We hope that your reading of it will water and nurture that seed until it grows up into a full recovery.

Burnout is an official disorder. Once thought to be an illusion, it is recognized as a genuine diagnosis. It has a category in the latest International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) as a life management disorder.

Burnout is big. A recent survey estimates that one-third of British business workers will suffer from it at some stage in their careers. At any one time, half a million people are suffering from work-related stress that makes them ill. Work-related stress accounts for 10 per cent of the workforce being ill and off work. In the UK, 6.5 million working days per year are lost because of stress. This makes work-related stress the second largest category of occupational ill health in industry as a whole.

These are very frightening statistics. Behind every single one of them is a tragic personal story. For this book we have interviewed various people who have suffered from burnout, including Ed. This is the beginning of his story.

CASE HISTORY: ED

Ed is a tall man, and on the last day of a holiday in a villa in Italy with his wife and young family, he banged his head on one of the door lintels. It was not an unusual thing in itself; being so tall he was accustomed to banging his head. This time, however, the small incident proved too much for him. Without him realizing it, he was on the floor, curled up in a ball, weeping uncontrollably. His wife had to take over, drive the family to the airport and get them home.

Banging his head was the last straw in a long sequence of events leading to Ed burning out. He had been under prolonged stress through overwork. He had been promoted to the board of directors at his firm while still a relatively young man, and was under intense pressure to perform. Work was pretty much all there was, he says. This led to him reassessing his values in life. He spent a lot of time talking things through with a number of people, and in the end chose to change jobs. He now has a very good job, but with a very different, healthier outlook on life. He has new priorities, especially about his family and other close relationships.

Eds full story is given at the start of our first chapter.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book explains how to recognize when we are burning out, understand what is happening, address what to do next and make a good and positive recovery. It is divided into three parts.

Part One is more factual. It explains what burnout is and how it works. It also gives measuring exercises to help assess how burnt out we are.

Part Two has three chapters on practical things to address when we are well down the road to burnout. They are written to help us in the immediate circumstances of burnout, and use the motif of the red, amber and green of traffic lights. The red chapter is about stopping, the amber chapter about waiting, getting ready to move forward, and the green chapter helps in thinking about the direction in which to go.

Part Three looks at many different facets of life. We emphasize that burnout need not be an end, but can be a beginning of a much more richly satisfying life, a much-needed opportunity to reconsider and remake life choices. This part addresses creativity, spirituality, relationships, getting to know and understand yourself, lifestyle, creativity and culture. It is designed to offer a wide choice of new opportunities in life as we recover.

The final chapter is on how to avoid burnout in the future. It offers a template for planning an ongoing lifestyle free from it.

Each chapter of the book answers a common question asked by people when they get into burnout. While we have tried to make the book progress from its beginning through to its end, please feel free to dip in and mix around the chapters, depending on your interests and requirements. Many of the chapters have suggested exercises. We recommend that you try as many of these as you can. Recovery depends on being able to do things rather than read about them, and it is in the doing of the exercises that the real road to recovery will begin.