The Four Hundred

Why do some people have ample energy at work while others appear as depleted as a spent match? Why are some unfailingly pleasant, and others chronically irritable? Why does working invigorate some people while draining others? Research suggests that a lack of clear criteria for job selection greatly contributes to these outcomes and that they are emblematic of a poorly understood condition we casually call burnout.

Think of criteria as specialized beliefs about what is important; specialized because they are unique to each individual. They may include such things as interesting work, growth opportunity, creativity, adequate compensation, flexibility, being your own boss, opportunity to help others, working with people who are respected in their field, and so on. Notice that criteria is not synonymous with job title; rather, it defines the reasons or values that make a particular job desirable and worthy of investing life energy. When a job meets personal criteria, the daily experience of working is more likely to be nourishing. If a job fails to meet important personal criteria, the work experience will be draining.

Certainly, an unsustainable workload will leave an employee feeling more and more drained over time, but the essence of burnout is being out of resonance with your own values. The practice of abandoning personal values and the resultant malaise is nearly universal and begins at a very early age. According to Randy Kunkel, a stress and burnout researcher, a full 95 percent of the people he interviewed described being in some stage of burnout, and even children as young as six exhibited symptoms.

Burnout, Kunkel discovered, has five stages, each of which exhibits its own set of symptoms. As a person moves from stage to stage, the symptoms are accumulative, resembling an inverted pyramid of expanding burden and pressure.

Stage I is marked by physical fatigue. Often the fatigue is chronic. People may complain about feeling tired even after a full night's sleep and their sense of weariness may grow palpably as they approach the workplace each morning. At this stage, small aches and pains are common and the body itself becomes an obstacle to feeling wholly energized and to enjoying a full range of activity. People with excessive workloads and too much responsibility often exhibit Stage I symptoms.

Stage II is characterized by social burnout. In this stage, people become irritable and less tolerant. They are reluctant to deal with others and find ways to delay important interactions. If forced into social situations, they will treat others harshly. Managers, for example, may bark at employees without provocation, reschedule meetings, or put off disciplining a problem employee. At this stage it is also common for people to begin to isolate, to hide in their office, eat lunch alone, and not participate in the usual office banter.

Stage III produces intellectual burnout. By this stage people are tired of thinking. They watch the clock, waiting for lunch, waiting for day's end, anxious for the time when they can leave. Their primary experience is a sense of being overloaded, and the remedy is to escape into passive activity, like surfing the Web or watching excessive amounts of TV. During this stage, people are likely to postpone doing demanding work, lacking concentration and sufficient mental energy to tackle it.

In Stage IV, people exhibit psycho-emotional burnout. They feel as if everyone is making excessive demands on them. Frequently they voice complaints like, "Everyone wants a piece of me." Feeling beset, they not only avoid contact whenever possible but also stop investing in others, too tired to mentor a junior employee or to help their kids with homework. Life is organized around conserving energy: taking the elevator, not the stairs, avoiding extra assignments, doing the minimum required. Drug and alcohol use may increase, to deaden the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Stage V is spiritual burnout. Core meltdown. When people reach this stage, they essentially throw in the towel. Their spirit feels broken, and they are nearly incapacitated by a deep and profound weariness. They barely have enough energy to perform simple life-maintenance functions. Nothing seems worth doing. The needs of others become exaggerated and are perceived as threats. People suffering spiritual burnout know that something must urgently change, but just the thought of change is too exhausting. At this point, the accumulative effects of burnout are so acute that people can summon few resources to begin the process of remedying their situation.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the vast majority of workers experiencing burnout don't do anything at all. Seventy percent, Kunkel says, simply lock in. They rationalize their situation and stay right where they are. Safety and security are most often cited as the reasons for inaction, but the price of locking in is surrendering personal power to whatever outside influences are contributing to the feeling of being burned out. Those who choose to remain in their present environment will, over time, experience burnout in waves: intense when the wave peaks, less so when the conditions that fuel burnout abate. So if the feeling of burnout is aggravated by a demanding manager, days on which the manager is out of the office or otherwise occupied are bearable; days on which there is anticipated interaction are anxious and exhausting. And since burnout equates to a lack of control, locking in and surrendering personal power simply ensures that the cycle will continue.

A quarter of the people, however, muster enough personal power to change their environment. They leave their job and find another. Of course, if the new job is selected using the same foggy criteria, eventually the deficiencies will become intolerable and lead to the familiar state of burnout. To avoid a recurrence, more is required than a simple change of venue. Unfortunately, very few choose the third alternative, which necessitates addressing the problem from the inside out.

Only 5 percent change not only their environment but also themselves. In this context, changing yourself requires getting clear on what is important and summoning the courage to pursue it. A simple and informative way to begin the exploration is to rank your top five or six job criteria and then ask yourself, "If I couldn't have number one, is having number two enough?" Do the same for two through six. Chances are you will find some places where you are willing to compromise and some values that are not negotiable. For example, a good salary and growth opportunity may be two of your criteria, but you may discover that you are willing to take less money if the work is new and challenging. Or, conversely, you may have strict financial requirements but would be willing to accept less interesting work if the salary was right. Based on your exploration, you can reorder your criteria as appropriate.

Next, make a list of everything you do during the course of a typical day. Start with getting up in the morning, and go through all of your daily activities until you retire for the night. You will find that some activities are nourishing, some are draining, and some are neutral. So, for example, taking a shower is neutral, having breakfast with the kids is nourishing, commuting is draining, developing new applications is nourishing, fixing old ones is draining, interacting with customers is nourishing, company meetings are draining, grocery shopping is neutral, going for a run is nourishing, and so on. Place a plus one (+1) next to the activities that are nourishing, a minus one (-1) next to the activities that are draining, and a zero (0) next to the neutral activities. Add up your score. Is your life more nourishing than it is draining?

For each activity that doesn't nourish you, ask the following questions. Is it important? Does it need to be done? Why does it have to be done? Can anyone else do it? If I choose to keep doing it, what does it get me? And, finally, ask yourself this question: What is missing from my life? The idea is to identify what really needs to get done and what could be jettisoned or delegated, and also to uncover activities that no longer serve you but persist out of habit.

Also, look for ways that activities rated as neutral or draining could be made nourishing. So, if commuting is draining, could you spend the time listening to a language or book tape in order to make the drive more pleasant and productive? Or, if grocery shopping is neutral, pick up a treat or a video as a reward.

Although few among us will lead lives that are wholly and unfailingly nourishing, there is no reason why our lives and careers should not be a source of fulfillment and sustenance. It's no accident that the concept of burnout uses fire as a metaphor for a condition that consumes physical, social, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resources. It is a powerful metaphor, although not totally accurate. It would be more accurate to say that burnout is a destination and that slow burn is the process by which we arrive there. Like the frog that will sit in cold water while the temperature rises until the water boils, never thinking to jump, we often stay in one place too long for our own good.

The difference is that we, unlike the frog, have the ability to monitor the temperature.