Under-challenged Burnout

Last week we talked about compassion fatigue, where people become exhausted from exercising empathy and compassion to an extreme extent. Today we’re going to talk about Underchallenged Burnout; burnout from work that is exhausting, not because its too much, but because it doesn’t let us be our best selves.

Being human is complicated. We can have all of our obvious and basic needs met, and still be suffering.

We talk a lot about the harms of stress a lot in the mental health field. Stress is everywhere, and too much of it can literally kill you.  I don’t want to downplay that at all, but stress is also very important to our daily functioning. The chemicals that cause stress help us get things done and there’s a degree to which we enjoy being a little bit stressed and a little bit anxious. That’s why we enjoy challenging games, scary movies, learning new things, gossip, and sports to name a few. Facing and overcoming challenges are both expected by our brains, which in response produce chemicals that are important to our survival. When we don’t have challenges to face or tasks that hold our interest at work, that's potentially 40 hours a week where our brains don’t get the stimulation we need. We also have to work a lot harder and use a lot more energy to provide our own motivation.

Being bored at work is also a characteristic of a lot of jobs. There are important jobs that society would fall apart without, but the actual work involved is just physically being in a location, repeating the same information a thousand times a day, typing numbers into a spreadsheet, scanning things, or some other monotonous thing, that no matter how important it is, doesn’t challenge us. On the flip side, things that were initially fun, novel, and challenging can become boring and easy once we’ve made it over the learning curve and have been doing it a long time.  Jobs that are boring sometimes also pay really well or have great benefits. 

Stress is an important motivating emotion, and if you’re experiencing this type of burnout it might be difficult to find motivation to do certain tasks,  go to work at all,  or even get out of bed in the morning. It might become harder to motivate ourselves to do tasks even (or especially) if they would be easy.  The energy it takes to make ourselves do everything despite the lack of motivation can be exhausting and we might feel very tired either physically, emotionally, or both. That sense of accomplishment we feel when we finish a difficult task is also important to our wellbeing and without it we might find we have lower self esteem or become irritated more easily. 

We can find other ways to meet our need for stimulation. 

This might be something simple like listening to music, audiobooks, or podcasts while working. It might be turning a work task into a race against either a timer or a coworker so the task feels more challenging. It might be chatting with a friend on the phone or a coworker in the same room, who knows what you’re supposed to be doing and can provide both accountability and something actually interesting to focus on.

It might look like fulfilling these needs outside of work, in a hobby or your personal life. This might be difficult to start because this type of burnout drains our energy like any other type of burnout, but fulfilling that need by playing games, taking up a new hobby, starting an exercise routine, taking a class, or volunteering with a non-profit can restore those things our brains need to feel energized.

We can also reduce the amount of energy we use up.

Sometimes we need to just push through it, and we can, but doing this over and over takes a lot of energy. We can build reward systems, like eating a piece of candy every time we complete part of our tasks or put a sticker on a chart. There are apps gamifying our to-do lists with apps like Habitica or Finch. We can look for external validation like telling a friend what we accomplished (works best if you let the friend in on what you’re doing and how they can encourage you). It’s a lot easier to convince yourself to want something if there’s some sort of reward at the end for the suffering.

We can also reduce our energy output in other places.  Your energy is a limited resource and managing it is a learned skill. There are things we just have to do sometimes, we might be doing more than we need to in other places because we feel like we have to. If you know you’re going to spend a lot of energy trying to motivate yourself to do work tasks, try not to commit to doing optional emotionally taxing things you feel like you “should” do but technically don’t have to. Finding ways to cut down on tasks that require more emotional output and spending more time on tasks we find more rewarding can help us manage better.