The hazard of loving our work

Anxiety, burnout, fatigue, and overwhelm are hallmarks of unhealthy workplace environments. Amidst a workforce returning to the office, lessons learned in work/life harmony, and the rise of 'quiet quitting', we're collectively paying more attention than ever to the importance of strong leadership, employee satisfaction, and healthy workplace cultures and environments.

Recent surveys by the American Psychological Association support this trend: 71% of recent respondents across sectors believe their employers are more concerned with employee mental health than in the past, and 81% indicate that how employers support mental health in the workplace will factor into their future employment decisions.

And more and more, we're witnessing organizations taking steps to address the mental health of their employees. In 2022, the World Health Organization published its 123-page Guidelines on Mental Health at Work, citing the rising prevalence of mental health issues within the workplace.

The message is getting out: healthy workplace cultures, leadership that prioritizes employee mental health, and opportunities to revisit work/life harmony and mitigate workplace stressors can help both employees and employers.

Yet if the pandemic taught us anything, it's that sometimes we're most at risk of these phenomena when we love the work we're doing. Over the past few years, it's those who are most passionate about their work – health care workers, social workers, educators, and the like  – suffering from burnout, compassion fatigue, and other job-related anxieties.

It's definitely a paradigm shift: the care, pride and passion we feel for our work can be detrimental to our well-being if they mask problems. If we become so wrapped up in ‘the cause’ that we have trouble separating ourselves from work, its demands jeopardize our work/life harmony, or our conviction in its importance causes us to neglect our own needs and overlook matters of workplace environment or role strain, even work we feel passionately about can cause us trouble.

What, then, can we do?

Through the fall and winter, Center's researchers worked with the ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes to address this very question.

When we're doing work that is professionally impactful and personally meaningful, it can be hard to recognize the signs of job-related fatigue and overwhelm. When we love the work, goes the common logic, we are immune to burnout.

Mindfulness itself can provide the self-reflection, perspective-taking, and resilience development that can help us weather patches of career-related ennui, burnout, or overwhelm.

Mindfulness practices offer foundational tools that can help us contextualize and scale our overwhelm, come to terms with our personal stakes in the work, and mitigate the emotional fatigue of our work. These practices can help us maintain perspective, avoid overwhelm, and focus our energies where we can make the most impact -- and regain the satisfaction and passion that first led us to our careers.

For more mindfulness tips or to see how mindfulness can help when our work by its nature exposes us to risk of overwhelm and fatigue, download our article co-written with the ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, 'Practicing mindfulness in addressing the biodiversity crisis,' in Conservation Science and Practice here.

When fulfillment turns to stress: assessing your risk

A first step to managing workplace anxiety is recognizing when we are at risk. At Center, we often recommend teams and employees complete the Professional Quality of Life (proCOL) self-assessment. Unlike other tools that measure the degree to which we are already burnt out or fatigued, proQOL allows us to additionally measure our compassion satisfaction and how at risk we may be to encounter burnout or fatigue in the future. 

Download the proQOL here.