Preventing burnout

This programme supports professional care, it does not replace it. Occupational burnout and depression look very much alike and are not treated the same way: if you have lost all interest in what you used to enjoy outside work, if you judge yourself worthless, or if you think about dying, it is probably something other than burnout and it calls for a consultation this week. Established fatigue also deserves a medical examination: several ordinary conditions produce exactly this picture (section 24). And if your exhaustion comes from repeated hostile behaviour at work, this programme is not the right tool — see section 25.

1. Before you start

You wake up already tired. Sunday evening has a particular colour. You still do the work, but something has gone out: you answer more curtly, you avoid meetings, you catch yourself speaking about the people you care for or serve with a distance that is not like you. You take two hours over what used to take twenty minutes. You tell yourself you will hold on until the holidays — and you already know that last year's holidays fixed nothing for more than ten days.

This programme is written for that situation. It rests on the best-established work-psychology research on occupational burnout: what produces it, what maintains it, and what makes it recede.