What is it like to work in a profession where you care for people all the time but you feel like your services are empty? Where you’re thriving in a setting where you can show empathy but your empathy is lacking? What is it like continuing to work while you experience burnout? What if your experience is like coming into work on nothing but five hours of sleep and much more coffee than you’re willing to admit?

You first get started on seeing what your itinerary is for the day. Several meetings, trainings and appointments later, you can finally go back home to your bed. You go to your first appointment where you meet up with a patient. At this point with how long you’ve worked with this patient, you just repeat everything you’ve been telling them like you’re a broken record. You log onto an online training that is required for your firm. After that, you have several back-to-back appointments until your lunch break. It’s two hours after you normally eat lunch so during your last appointment, your stomach was growling madly. After lunch, you visit with another patient before a staff meeting, but on the way you run into a coworker that stops to talk to you about how they can’t make it to their kid’s baseball game. The time with your patient was unfortunately cut short because of this elongated conversation with your coworker. In the meeting, your boss displays statistics of where health care providers are falling short. They provide no extra support or guidance on how to improve those numbers.

You think back to your patients. How often do they feel like your service is inadequate? How would you know they feel that way? After your meeting, you sit down with one of your patients who needed an emergency appointment instead of going home like you planned because they’re experiencing some self-doubts. Later that night, you flop down on your bed, still in your work clothes, and scroll through your phone. The best part about going to sleep is finally escaping the day you had. But the worst part about sleeping is having to wake up to do it all again tomorrow. It feels like you’re going nowhere and can’t help the people you want to help. Burnout, as described in the National Library of Medicine (NLM), is “more than usual feelings of being stressed. The symptoms are similar to those of other mental health conditions, but there are critical differences.” Burnout is typically developed through stress from work. There are a lot of factors that can influence why a person experiences burnout. The Mayo Clinic suggests that one reason for burnout is because of varying levels of demands. “Maybe your job is boring. Or it's so busy you can't keep up with the demands. In these situations, you need a lot of energy to stay focused. This can lead to fatigue and job burnout,” the Mayo Clinic says. In a lot of organizations, many people wear many hats, which increases the stress from an increased workload.

Remington Rainey, co-founder for Pulse For Good, recounts when he asked about an organization's IT department when coming up with his company’s service of providing surveys to vulnerable people. “Very common tech question. And they looked at us, blinking-deer-in-the-headlights look,” Rainey said. “And said ‘our IT staff is Ted and he comes in on Thursdays and volunteers for two hours, that’s our IT staff’.” When refining Pulse For Good’s product, co-founders Rainey, Blake Kohler and Marc Weaver wanted to relieve stress off of service workers. When gathering feedback from patients, Pulse’s system allows workers to focus on one less responsibility while allowing patients to let providers know how to improve the quality of their service. Pulse’s co-founders explain how collecting feedback in the most effective way can benefit organizations in their new book Candid. “Sadly, many nonprofits who aren’t prioritizing feedback often use up valuable resources with minimal results. They are practically sprinting in the wrong direction, hoping what they do is helpful in some way but having no proof that it is, all while resources drain and burnout creeps in,” it says in Candid.

Burnout among health care workers is no joke as it “may increase the risk of someone getting depression. That makes it even more important to take burnout seriously,” the NLM says. The Mayo Clinic suggests multiple options in how to handle burnout. The article gives many personal remedies. Among the most effective ways to cope with burnout, it recommends seeking support and diffusing certain responsibilities. We here at Pulse For Good are more than willing to help workers of organizations and health care services relieve their stress. To know where we can ease your burdens, contact us on our website!

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