Jan Jachimowicz

So we might find it harder to feel joy, excitement, enthusiasm, but it can also be really difficult for us to feel a lot of the negative emotions that are important for us to experience because they are helpful signals of how we react to the external environment.

And typically the prescribed solutions for emotional exhaustion in the short term is something like a vacation, a break, having psychological detachment from your work.

And in the long term, a more sustainable relationship to your work, making sure that in between work days you have adequate time to recover or that if you have a particularly emotionally intense work day that you take some more time to recover and so on.

But there's a third source of burnout that I think often goes missing.

And that component is called cynicism.

That is when you no longer believe in what it is that you are doing.

And when you're feeling cynical, no vacation is going to fix that.

No amount of upskilling is going to fix that.

When you're feeling cynical, what you need is to feel inspired again.

You need to remind yourself, why am I doing this to begin with?

But it's really difficult to continue giving more of yourself when you're feeling cynical.

It's one of the hardest things to come back from.

And it's something that can creep in because we don't really recognize it.

until it can be too late.

And so when it comes to diagnosing ourselves, I think it's just really helpful to think about what am I experiencing right now?

Am I feeling emotionally exhausted?

Is my tank empty?

Do I need a break?

Or perhaps do I need to renegotiate a different relationship to my work so that it's more sustainable?

Am I experiencing a lack of self-efficacy?