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from the find-a-bigger-candle-to-burn-at-both-ends dept.
In today's era of workplace burnout, achieving a simpatico work-life relationship seems practically out of reach. Being tired, ambivalent, stressed, cynical and overextended has become a normal part of a working professional life. The General Social Survey of 2016, a nationwide survey that since 1972 has tracked the attitudes and behaviors of American society, found that 50 percent of respondents are consistently exhausted because of work, compared with 18 percent two decades ago. ... common signs of burnout include:
- Feeling emotionally drained and mentally unwell. Nausea. Being unable to sleep or constantly fighting sicknesses like head colds.
- Feeling alienated by your colleagues and bosses, feeling constantly underappreciated, or feeling ostracized by them.
- Feeling you are not personally achieving your best, or regularly "phoning it in."
"There are a lot of things that can happen when people begin to have this problem at work," Dr. Maslach said. "There are things like absenteeism, turnover, but also things in terms of errors, not being careful about the work they're doing. We see a lot of difficulty with people getting along with each other — angry, aggressive." ... If you're suffering from burnout at work, or if any of those symptoms sound familiar to you, there are a few things you can do now, before you get some time off to recover. (Although you should definitely consider some time off to recover, if you can.)
- Focused breathing, which can tap into your parasympathetic nervous system to help you reduce or manage stress.
- Frequent breaks, preferably five-minute breaks for every 20 minutes spent on a single task, or sitting at your desk.
- Ergonomic chairs and desks, like a sit-stand arrangement, or even a small plant in your office space.
- A trusted mentor at work with whom you can discuss and strategize other ways to deal with work-related issues.
- A hobby outside of work through which you can decompress, de-stress and dissociate from work. It doesn't have to be anything specific, but regular exercise or another fitness activity works wonders here, and has benefits beyond stress relief.
AI and robots don't need yoga, meatbag.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday September 07 2017, @01:06AM (1 child)
Here's a crazy thought: Had these folks ever considered that perhaps the 20-30% increase in worker productivity in the US combined with this 50% being exhausted by work might have something to do with the jobs being harder?
A simple example of this: In a typical retail establishment 20 years ago, a cashier was usually responsible for 1 register and handled each customer 1 at a time. Now, thanks to automated self-checkout machines, a single cashier might be responsible for as many as 12 customers at once. Now which job do you think would be more exhausting?
Or take a relatively professional job like teaching. It used to be a teacher had to draw up their lesson plan and the exams, and teach their class. Now, they frequently have to draw up 5 lesson plans because 1/6 of their kids have some sort of special rules that have to be taken into account, because the kids in their class getting low grades have diagnosed psychological disorders rather than simply being stupid or lazy.
And the message articles like this are sending is that this is somehow the fault of the people working harder than ever before for pay that hasn't risen substantially since 1979.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 07 2017, @03:21AM
Probably not, but I don't see a notable increase in the hardness of work per hour over the past twenty years. It's a really weird situation and I just don't see work triggering a tripling in the feeling of fatigue. Work doesn't seem to have gotten significantly harder or longer. For example, according to this table [oecd.org] the US went from 1834 hours worked per worker per year in 2000 to 1783 hours worked per worker per year in 2016. Perhaps what has changed is a combination of the fitness of the worker combined with the activity outside of work?
Becoming more overweight makes a fixed level of physical activity more strenuous. We know that there is an overweight problem in the US. So it is possible that a less fit populace experiences greater fatigue. Similarly, I've heard that there might be a decrease in the amount of sleep that US culture gets. There's an obvious correlation between fatigue and not getting enough sleep.
Activity outside of work may make work more strenuous. For example, if you spend an additional hour driving in busy traffic each day for your full-time job, that's effectively another 300 hours a year of unpaid work. Spending time watching TV or surfing the internet may be fairly peaceful, but it is also not sleep either.
My take here is that we're not really seeing an increase in the difficulty or duration of work. But we might be seeing the effects of a less healthy populace combined with more activity outside of the workplace. That might be deepening fatigue experienced from work.