Managing Emotions or How to Cope with Burnout at Work
Recently, the topic of burnout in the IT sphere has become so popular that it is simply impossible to ignore it: employees groan in exhaustion, HRs try their best to send them on vacation and indulge them with heart-to-heart talks, companies conduct all sorts of master classes, meditate, compensate for visits to psychologists and coaches.
Hi, my name is Anna Zarya, I am the HR Director at Pruftek IT, a trained psychologist and an expert in managing emotions and personal burnout. And here is my favorite HR meme:
After reading this article, you will give yourself the opportunity to learn how to manage your emotions so that you can forget about burnout forever and enjoy your activities.
To begin with, let's try to conduct a quick burnout diagnostic test based on the professional burnout questionnaire (Maslach) in the form of a bingo game.
Count how many squares you have marked “yes”.
If you scored less than 6 “points” (= “yes” answers) – great! It will be useful for you to read the article to prevent professional burnout in the future.
If you have more than 6 “points”, then this article will definitely be useful to you.
It is not without reason that the topic of the article is called first of all “emotion management”, and secondly “burnout at work”, because burnout at work is a direct consequence of a lack of emotion management skills.
How does burnout relate to emotion management?
Only a small part of the emotions from the entire arsenal of a person is pleasant for him, while the majority of the emotions we experience create unpleasant, and sometimes unbearable discomfort. It happens that we ignore or do not notice this discomfort, or notice, but do nothing to solve the problem that provokes it. And then it does not go away, but is fixed in the form of background tension and stress, which are supposed to remind us that something is wrong. Such constant accumulated stress is what is now called burnout.
I can confidently say: a person who knows how to manage himself and his emotions will be able to avoid the risk of burning out forever without registration or SMS!
Intriguing? First, let's understand what “manage“.
A survey of my friends and colleagues showed that many do not see the difference between “manage” and “control”, but it is colossal!
A common example: is there a difference between “monitoring your diet” and “managing your diet”? If you monitor your diet, you restrict your food intake; if you manage your diet, you plan your meals so that they are evenly distributed throughout the day and are sufficient to make you feel comfortable and enjoyable, and at the same time healthy in the long term.
Let's try the same reasoning with “control a person” and “manage a person”, and then with “control emotions” and “manage emotions”.
Manage — it’s not that simple, because only a person who realizes that only he bears the responsibility can manage himself and his life in all its manifestations, from nutrition and emotions to finances, career and planning children responsibility for his own life. It's like driving a car on the highway: it's not very smart to hand over the wheel to the passenger sitting next to you, or to let go of the wheel and stare at your phone feed in the hope that other cars will pass you.
So this is the first step towards our goal – to realize responsibility for our lives.
Have you decided to take the wheel into your own hands? Then let's move on!
It is important to know and remember that emotions are absolutely legitimate in all their manifestations and whatever they may be – whether you like them or not – they have the right and should be.
Emotions are an evolutionary physiological mechanism that is designed to guide humans (and, of course, a similar mechanism guides animals). It is a signal that something is going “right” or “wrong,” bodily responses to stimuli from the external world that a person can process cognitively. By the way, my colleagues and I collectively came up with this smart definition when we were discussing the topic of burnout, and I really like it.
I also really like Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, which provides a handy way to organize the variety of emotions we encounter every day.
Basic emotions are given to us by evolution and are inextricably linked with the biochemistry of our body, they were and are crucial for survival. They are the ones that give the stimulus to explore the surrounding area in search of food, to look for shelter, to run, to freeze or to attack when danger arises, to look for a partner so that the biological species does not become extinct. In other words, everything we do, we do in fact because of the presence and influence of emotions (=hormones).
In the process of evolution and with the development of the social construct, our ancestor developed more complex emotions. Although they are not directly related to the survival of the individual and the species, they are based on those very first basic emotions and all the same hormones (if we speak in the modality of physiology).
Since these emotions and feelings are more complex, their understanding and interpretation are not so obvious, however, on average, a person still understands what is being discussed when he hears their name. The ability to do this accurately is emotional intelligence. There are different maps of where emotions are in the body on the Internet, and it will also be useful to draw your own, because noticing and identifying emotions through the body is the fastest and most reliable way.
In addition to the skill of understanding and naming emotions, it is very important to be able to classify.
The coolest thing that Robert Plutchik's wheel gives is the division of emotions into sthenic (charging) and asthenic (discharging).
In this context, aggression doesn't seem so negative, because it gives us a huge boost to strength, which we can direct constructively, for example, into a work task, or go to the gym to pump up. And fatigue or sadness don't seem so wrong and hateful, because there is an understanding that your body, like a small cute tired child, needs rest, attention and care, because the “battery is at zero” and forcing yourself to do anything is pointless.
For a more in-depth study of the mechanism of the emergence of emotions, I would like to recommend the popular science book “Hormones of Happiness” by Professor Loretta Graziano Breuning. This book will help you understand the connection between the body and emotional states, their significance and learn to manage them.
So, to avoid burnout we should:
Understand that everyone is responsible for their own life and themselves in all their manifestations.
To realize that a person can control emotions so that they do not control him.
Accept your emotions as an integral part of yourself, allow them to be.
Learn to identify, name and classify even the most complex emotions and feelings (=pump up emotional intelligence)
Have a strategy and tactics for managing emotions.
Explore existing methods of managing emotions and look for those that suit you.
For point 5, I will provide a small basic scheme for managing emotions, which we created through joint efforts with the team when we discussed the problem of burnout, and since more than one person worked on this scheme, I dare to hope that it turned out to be universal.
Now a little about the techniques:
I want to share translation of the article cognitive behavioral therapist, coach, and writer David Bonham Carter, who broadcasts the approach of self-training and self-help, about the ABC technique, which teaches us to divide what happens to us into emotions, facts, and interpretations. This is a very useful practical skill that allows us to learn to name emotions and notice that our interpretations of what is happening are not always objective reality.
I also really liked and found useful an article on a related topic, which examines in detail various emotions and highlights a useful technique for managing emotions, “I-statement”, which is a continuation of the ABC technique and can be useful in communications.
Of the body techniques for managing emotions, I found Jacobson's progressive muscle relaxation technique to be effective and easy to master. You can watch detailed instructions with a video on a popular psychological site, here.
I suggest that the reader try to track throughout the day what emotions he experiences, what causes them, and how he interprets them, and also talk about/write this down for himself or within the framework of communication in the format of “I-statements”.
For example: I feel joy (emotion) when I work on this article (fact), which means to me that I can be useful to readers (my interpretation).
Since the Russian mentality has the attitude “patience and work will grind everything down”, it is very difficult for us to approach the issue of managing emotions at work differently: we forbid ourselves to be weak, angry, dissatisfied, unproductive, and when we become like that, we do not know how to deal with emotions and hide them from ourselves and others. Because of this approach, we do not give ourselves the opportunity to solve problems when they arise, and bring the situation to professional burnout. If you learn to monitor your condition, admit it to yourself honestly, take responsibility and look for solutions, then your well-being in your activities and life in general can become more pleasant and productive.
Finally, I want to add that this article is intentionally not overloaded with theory. The goal in its creation was to show the reader the importance of working with emotions and burnout in an accessible form, so that our large IT (and not only) community of Russia becomes a little happier!
