One of my favourite one-liners from a movie comes from the 2002
Spider-Man movie where Tobey Maguire plays Peter Parker. He is sitting with his grandmother in hospital. She tells him that he looks tired and he should look after himself. Then she drops the bomb: “You are not Superman, you know.”
A good start in the prevention of burnout is to accept that we are not Superman. We all have physical limits as to the amount of stress we can endure, the number of hours we can work and how long we can concentrate.
People from all walks of life are being diagnosed with burnout syndrome these days. Yet, burnout is not a modern phenomenon. The US psychologist Herbert Freudenberger first identified it in people in the helping profession in 1970. Yet, as burnout is predominantly caused by (work) stress, it can debilitate anyone, at any level in society – and many people suffer from burnout and are not aware of it.
Years before the coronavirus pandemic started, the world was already
experiencing an epidemic of burnout. And the phenomenon has only gotten worse as the pandemic has progressed. Not surprisingly, rising rates of burnout were first felt by doctors, nurses and other frontline healthcare workers. Soon, the conversation expanded to include those working from home as well as frontline workers in a range of service industries, from grocery store cashiers and factory workers to mail carriers and bus drivers.
To better understand our own experience of burnout during the pandemic, we can look back nearly 50 years to the moment when the modern idea of burnout originated.