Whether you love your job or not, you’ve likely experienced occasional exhaustion, frustration, disillusionment, and a desperate urge to hurl your alarm clock across the room and hunker back down under the covers until further notice. That’s not stress, right? Or is it? Most of us don’t consider burnout to be a form of stress. After all, it’s just the boss who’s a jerk, the coworkers who don’t pull their weight, and the work that’s tedious and thankless. Never mind the hellish commute, day after day. But a new study suggests that burnout and stress are not so dissimilar.
Key Takeaways:
- A depression and adrenal failure diagnosis as a result of burnout was the wake-up call Rachel Service needed to change her life.
- Service, who now holds workshops across Australia and New Zealand about how to be happy, spent the early part of her career working 12-hour days and sleeping at her desk to make deadlines and get noticed.
- Most people experience stress. But there is a difference between regular stress and burnout, which is mental, physical and emotional exhaustion.
“Figures released in 2015 by Safe Work Australia show workplace accidents and illness cost the economy $61.8 billion, or 4.1 per cent of GDP, in 2012-13, the most recent year these figures were updated.”