Who Is At Risk?

Stress / Burnout - Who Is At Risk & Why?

Imagine yourself in this situation: Perhaps you like millions of other individuals, are an office worker. Work is piling up on your office desk, work space. Your mobile phone is ringing incessantly with greater and greater demands being placed on you, for your time and expertise. Customers demands are ringing in your ears. You feel that you cannot possibly multitask everything effectively.  You are trying your best to juggle a thousand and one jobs at once. Your supervisor wants to see you immediately that you are not meeting your quota. Your son is at trouble at school. His teacher wants to see you straight after school. Your pleas for assistance to your partner at home go unheeded. The entire situation seems to be getting more and more out of hand, the phone rings again, more and more demands on your time. Is it any wonder today especially, with an economic crisis upon us, with the added threat of job layoff’s that so many millions of people, just like you, feel so ultimately stressed out to the hilt?

When the situation becomes so out of hand, stress becomes distress, dis-ease sets in and you feel just about ready to explode, knowing that you cannot take very much more of this. All of this paves the way for stress burnout.

According to one brain researcher stress burnout is ” the result of living an out of balance lifestyle, typically associated with an all-work/no-play spiral.” Overwork though is not the only contributing factor to stress and burnout, under the same pressure and similar circumstances, some burn out whilst others individuals are not prone to the same levels of stress.

So, who are the likely candidates and/or victims of stress and burnout likely to be?

Just as there is the increased likelihood that some people will be more prone to a certain disease, the same can be applied to stress and burnout. A professor of social psychology at the University of California noted “in order to suffer from stress, burnout, you must first be on fire.” A most apt description which fits exceeding well when you come to think about it. In a nutshell this is saying that those one’s that are prone to burnout stress related symptoms are in fact, your high achievers, those one’s that set themselves high ideals and goals, in other words often, a company’s often best people can be extremely prone to stress and/or burnout.

If one was to sum up the personality traits of potential victims of stress and burnout, professor Fumiaki Inaoka from the Japanese Red Cross, College of Nursing, wrote in the book, Moetsukishokogun (Burnout Syndrome): “Those who are inclined to burn out have strong tendencies to be sympathetic, human, delicate, dedicated and idealistic.  They are not machine oriented but ‘human orientated’, so to speak.”

Asked to develop a test to screen out those that are more likely to burn out, one specialist expert in the stress management area had this to say: “What companies need to do,” he said, “is find the people who care enough to burn out … and then develop the appropriate platforms within the company to combat burnout.”

Especially vulnerable are those individuals involved directly with human-orientated services, for example social workers, doctors, nurses, and teachers. Perhaps they more than most, eagerly accept the challenge of helping other people, giving of themselves all the time to improve only, the lives of other people around them, within their communities. These individuals, perhaps you are one of them, burn out when they realise that they are not achieving the sometimes unachievable and unattainable goals, which they have set for themselves to aspire to. Caring mothers too can suffer from the same feelings and symptoms for very similar reasons.