Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal Your Relationship with Work
Kandi Wiens, 2024
Why do some people burn out under the same pressure while others keep working at full strength for years? Kandi Wiens had a hypertensive crisis in the middle of a routine checkup, then went on to question hundreds of people in the most stressful professions. This is her answer: how burnout differs from a hard week, why the job is more often to blame than the person, and which five skills protect you from burning out.
Who it is for
For people who work hard and feel their strength running out. And for anyone who wants to understand why some people hold up under years of pressure while others burn out.
Once I managed to break out of burnout with the strategies I learned from the people in my research, I had energy left for the good things: the things that make life meaningful, joyful and beautiful.
Same load, different fates
Picture two people at neighbouring desks. They have the same boss, the same deadlines and just as many emails every evening. A year later, one of them is still coping and even finds the work interesting. The other wakes up drained, answers colleagues in short, cold replies and can no longer remember when the work last felt good.
The usual explanation is character: one is tough, the other is weak. Kandi Wiens sees it differently. The University of Pennsylvania, where she once wrote her dissertation, is now where she works. She herself once came within a step of disaster, and then spent years asking people in the most stressful professions why some burn out and others do not.
Her answer became the title of the book: burnout immunity. It is not inborn toughness but a set of skills that Wiens places under emotional intelligence, meaning the ability to notice your emotions, understand them and manage them well. Skills like these can be learned.
But first Wiens lifts some unearned guilt off the person. The main source of burnout, she says, lies in the work itself: in the pressure, the culture, the demands. The skills do not change that. They help you hold on until conditions change, and notice in time that something bigger needs to change.
Ahead you will learn how to tell burnout from a hard week, where your tipping point lies, how to take back the wheel in a difficult moment, and what to do if your strength is already running out.
A headache and a migraine
These days the word “burnout” comes up after every hard week. Wiens asks us to use it more precisely, because what you call it decides what you do next.
She explains the difference with a comparison. Chronic stress is like a bad headache, while burnout is more like a migraine that will not go away. Stress lets go once you deal with it. Burnout drags on for months. The World Health Organization treats it as a phenomenon tied specifically to work and describes it by three signs:
• Exhaustion. There is no energy even after the weekend, and the morning starts with the thought of how to make it to evening.
• Cynicism. The work, your colleagues and the people you work for leave you cold and detached.
• Reduced effectiveness. It feels as if you are doing everything worse and none of it makes a difference.
Wiens's research began with the question of why some people reach these signs and others do not. Together with Annie McKee, she studied 35 chief medical officers from 35 large American hospitals. For people like these, stress is part of the job description.
69% of them described their stress as severe, very severe or the worst possible. You would expect almost all of them to be burned out. But Christina Maslach's questionnaire, the main tool for measuring burnout, showed something else: most of them were not burned out.
What set them apart? Not a lighter load. They noticed where their tension came from, kept themselves in check and listened to the other person. More than 65% named empathy as something that lowered their stress, and 89% coped with it by working through disagreements openly. Wiens saw emotional intelligence in action here.
What does this show? The strength of the pressure does not settle the outcome on its own. How a person handles that pressure matters too. Hence the first step: every few weeks, check yourself honestly against the three signs. One sign points to a hard stretch. All three together, and for a long time, mean it is no longer about one bad week.
A common mistake: treating everything with a vacation. A vacation relieves stress, but if all three signs come back on your first day at work, something bigger will have to change.
About the author
Kandi Wiens is a researcher of burnout and emotional intelligence and a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs a master's program in medical education. She also works as an executive coach.
Read in Livria
