MOST Analysis

Mission Statement

Stress, Burnout, Anxiety and Depression – there’s been a lot of talk about the significant increase in the occurrence of stress and burnout and their link to depression and anxiety over the last few years. The truth is, these have been around for decades; we’re just talking openly about them now. This module explores the depth of stress and its impact in life, looks at the difference between stress and burnout and does a deep dive into the way you can understand what stress is, where yours is coming from and how you implement simple and effective steps to reduce your stress on a daily basis.

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Objectives

01. Stress – understand what stress is, look at the common causes of stress, the way you respond to stress and stress as a health problem.
02. Stress versus Distress – look at the difference between stress and distress, the factors that cause distress, the negative effects of distress and how to turn distress into eustress.
03. Secondary Stress – understand what secondary stress is, how it affects you, the ways you experience it and what you can do to reduce its impact.
04. Stress and Mental Health – deep dive into the link between stress and mental health, understand how stress affects relationships, values and meaningful purpose in life and look at ways to reduce psychological stress.
05. Burnout – explore the difference between stress and burnout, look at the signs, symptoms and causes of burnout, how to recognise burnout symptoms and deal with burnout when it occurs.
06. Depression – why understanding the difference between stress and depression is important, the connection between stress and depression, what is known about depression, what treatments there are for depression and the lifestyle changes you can make to minimise depression.
07. Anxiety – understand the similarities and differences between anxiety and depression, look at who gets depressed, the link between smoking and mental health conditions, and what the treatments for anxiety are.
08. Doom Scrolling – look at what doom scrolling is and the role that it plays in our lives, how it affects the brain and the psychological and physical effects it has as well as the things we can do to minimise its impact.
09. Stress Management – ways to understand your stress levels, the importance of managing stress and what happens if you don’t manage your stress as well as providing tools and techniques for managing stress.
10. Stress Myths – the role of social conditioning in allowing stress into our lives, 9 common stress myths that rule our lives, how to move past stress myths to create a new way forward.
11. Support Recovery – look at what happens when distress is left to run out of control, understand the impact to the nervous system of a breakdown and what causes this to happen as well as look at ways to support the nervous system in recovering after experiencing a break down.
12. Environment, Community and Self – understand the ways in which your environment impacts your personal wellbeing, how to create a healing environment at home and in the workplace and the way that nature impacts your wellbeing.

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Strategies

01. Engage and elicit expectations for the program.
02. Understand the importance of strategic wellness planning and complete exercises that assist in embedding this knowledge.
03. Set aside time to study the information, tools and resources in the workshop.
04. Set aside time to meet with their team to discuss the elements of the workshop.
05. Identify, and make a list of, the key personnel needed to participate in health and wellness discussions.
06. Participants to complete the exercises as directed in each course manual.
07. Allocate time to consider the current effectiveness of any health and wellness program in place.
08. Without conducting any in-depth research, identify where strategy can play a role in adding depth and breadth to the existing health and wellness programs.
09. Identify elements where strategy can boost areas that are working well from existing health and wellness programs.
10. Identify the convincing rationale for creating a bespoke health and wellness program.
11. Create a clear narrative regarding the need to incorporate strategic elements in creating the framework for a health and wellness program.
12. Set aside time to identify, and write down, any additional commitment required to create a strategic plan for the health and wellness journey.

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Tasks

01. Set aside time to read through course manuals and make notes.
02. Allocate time to read the workshop’s preliminary analysis.
03. Identify the key personnel needed to create an effective health and wellness program.
04. Ensure relationships are built with key personnel through regular meetings, discussion and gathering ideas.
05. Schedule a meeting within the next 30 days for participants to meet and discuss workshop.
06. Participate in small groups during the workshop to share observations and reflections.
07. Determine and schedule the time needed to dedicate each workshop.
08. Demonstrate preparedness, commitment and personal presence at each workshop.
09. Prepare questions, seek feedback and create a plan for personal growth.
10. Each exercise in the workshop must be fully completed by the participants, and they must share the process and outcomes with the group.
11. Participants should identify and put into practice the adjustments presented throughout the workshop in order to finish their project.
12. Participants are asked to go over resources for ideas and choose at least one new tool from the list to use.

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Introduction

The third workshop in the Simplified Wellness Program – Stress, Burnout, Anxiety and Depression – focuses on the explosion of the occurrence of mental health globally and the impact that it is having in both the personal and professional arenas.

The truth is this: stress, burnout, anxiety and depression have been around for decades. The issues surrounding them are now more openly discussed and there has also been a significant increase in the number of people reporting their experience of these issues.

During this workshop you will explore the depth of stress and its impact in life. You’ll look at the difference between stress and burnout and also look at the way that stress can be related to anxiety and depression. You will also do a deep dive into the way you can understand what stress is, where your own is coming from and how you implement simple and effective steps to reduce your stress on a daily basis.

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History

History of Stress

One of the pioneers of stress study, Hans Selye, took the word “stress” from the physics profession. In physics, stress refers to the force that causes a physical body to swell. For example, bending a piece of metal until it snaps occurs because of the force, or stress, exerted on it.

After completing his medical training at the Université of Montreal in the 1920s, Hans Selye coined the term “stress”. No matter what ailments his hospitalized patients had, he saw that they all shared this one trait: all of them appeared ill. In his opinion, they were all experiencing physical stress.

He suggested that stress was a general burden on the body brought on by deviations from normal bodily processes. Stress hormones were released as a result of this stress. A closer examination of general adaptation syndrome, our body’s short- and long-term responses to stress, led him to coin the name “General Adaptation Syndrome.”

General Adaptation Syndrome had three stages, according to Hans Selye’s theory.

Stage 1: Alarm response

This is a stressor’s instant response. Humans demonstrate a “fight or flight” response during the earliest stages of stress. This stage depletes the energy of other systems, such as the immune system, making us more susceptible to disease.

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Stage 2: Resistance

The body starts to adjust to stress if alarm reactions persist. But because the energy is focused on stress reactions, this adaptation is bad for your health.

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Stage 3: Exhaustion

This is the last phase following prolonged exposure to a stressor. As the immune system deteriorates, the body’s capacity to withstand stress is gradually weakened and eventually destroyed. According to Selye, long-term stressed patients may develop serious infections or heart attacks due to a weakened immune system.

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The Ensuing Debate

Selye established the discipline of stress study and made compelling cases for how stress affected health. Yet not everyone shared his physiological perspective of stress as an all-encompassing condition. What about emotional strain (for example, the death of a loved one, irritation, caring for a sick child, or issues at work)? Could it be stressful in these circumstances too?

Several doctors, psychologists and scholars shared this opinion. Various research studies were undertaken to investigate the effects of stress in different situations.
In one study, carried out by Dr John Mason, two groups of monkeys were denied food for a brief length of time.

The primates in Group 1 were left alone, while those in Group 2 observed others being fed. Both groups of monkeys were observed to experienced physical hunger-related stress, but the group that witnessed others eating had higher stress hormone levels. Hence, Dr Mason demonstrated that both physical and psychological stress might trigger the body’s stress response.

As the research on stress developed, individuals claimed that since stress was a general phenomenon, everyone ought to respond uniformly to similar stressors. But for others, something about this assertion seemed off. Many also believed that everyone’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol had to be increased by some sort of universal factor.

In one intriguing study, experts in parachute jumping had their levels of stress hormones measured.

Now, there’s no doubt that jumping out of a plane is stressful. Surprisingly, the results of this experiment showed that their levels of stress hormones were normal.

Afterwards, stress hormone levels were assessed in both novice jumpers and their teachers. A notable difference was discovered! Students’ levels were typical the day before the jump, but instructors’ levels were quite high. Students’ levels were very high the day of the jump, while instructor levels were average.

The researchers came to the conclusion that because the instructors were anticipating the jump and knew what to expect, their stress hormone levels were greater 24 hours before the jump. The students had no clue what to expect and therefore their stress levels remained the same.

However, the novelty and unpredictability of the circumstance on jump day caused the pupils’ stress hormone levels to soar, while the instructors went through the same process as usual and therefore didn’t experience any change in hormone levels.

Throughout the following 30 years, various researchers carried out tests that revealed there are similar features to situations that cause stress hormone levels to rise in everyone, even though the kind of stressors causing the release of these hormones are different for everyone.

When evaluated, the results of these tests showed that the stress response is different for everyone, and hormone levels are affected by four common factors:

• Novelty
• Unpredictability
• Threat to the ego
• Sense of control

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History of Burnout

The term “burnout syndrome” was first used in two scholarly papers written in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger and Sigmund Ginsburg. Freudenberger, a psychologist and psychotherapist who was born in Germany and later moved to the United States, popularized the phrase in later works (Freudenberger, 1975, 1977a, 1977b; Freudenberger & Richelson, 1980). As a result, he is widely regarded as the concept’s founder.

It is important to remember that Freudenberger did not coin the phrase. However, he deserves praise for methodically outlining and studying a mental state that he personally experienced and that some of his colleagues had previously described as being ‘burned out’.

In other words, even before it was recognized as a psychologically and clinically important disorder, the phrase was being used to describe a specific experience and mental state.

In his original 1974 essay, Freudenberger defined getting burned out as “being fatigued by exerting excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources”. He claimed that the physical signs of burnout included tiredness, fatigue, recurrent headaches, gastrointestinal problems, insomnia and shortness of breath. Frustration, rage, suspicion, a sense of omnipotence or overconfidence, excessive use of tranquillizers and barbiturates, cynicism and depressive symptoms were also listed as behavioral indicators.

In his essay, Freudenberger outlined personality traits that caused people to experience burnout, in addition to describing the symptoms of burnout. In more general terms, his essay indicated that he believed that burnout happens in situations that demand a lot of emotional labor, empathy, personal commitment and intrinsic motivation. It can also occur where the required labor is physically and mentally taxing – these are common working conditions in the social work, education and health care industries.

Freudenberger’s essay also offered some preventive strategies. He suggested addressing issues at an organizational rather than just an individual level, since he thought that burnout was particularly tied to specific working conditions and organizational contexts.

In particular, Freudenberger suggested reducing working hours, consistent job rotation, regular monitoring and employee training.

This pioneering work on burnout foreshadows a lot of the subsequent 50 years’ worth of research. Many psychological and medical studies were conducted after Freudenberger’s first study, beginning with work done by Christina Maslach and her associates in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Maslach, 1976; Maslach & Jackson, 1981; Pines & Maslach, 1978).

Maslach is still one of the most well-known researchers in this area and was a pioneer in the study of burnout. Maslach, a social psychologist, concentrated on measuring burnout in contrast to Freudenberger’s qualitative, nearly autoethnographic, portrayal. She created the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which remains the most used questionnaire for measuring burnout today, based on the three components of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy.

Burnout research underwent a paradigm shift as a result of the work of Maslach and her colleagues – particularly the development of the MBI, which made it simple to gauge the mental condition of various groups and professions.

In 2001, Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter then went further to make a distinction between a pioneering and an empirical phase of burnout research. The goal of the initial phase, in the middle of the 1970s, was to define and name this new “syndrome”. The research at this time was primarily based on observations and interviews in the human services and healthcare industries.

Following the development of the MBI in the early 1980s, the focus of burnout research shifted, and the syndrome appeared in an increasing number of professions including elite soccer players, military personnel, police officers and teachers.

The relationship between burnout and well-established industrial-organizational psychology terms like job stress, job happiness and organizational commitment was also carefully defined because of Maslach’s studies.

The MBI seemed to provide a shared grasp of the idea of burnout, showed that it was a cohesive phenomenon, and allowed for its measurement without the need to consider or re-evaluate the fundamental presumptions linked to the condition and its societal ramifications.

Burnout has attracted a growing amount of interest from researchers, practitioners and the workforce during the past decade. In particular, clinical psychologists began to recognize burnout as a diagnosis and made an effort to distinguish between burnout cases and non-cases, as well as those who received therapy and those who did not.

On 28 May 2019, the World Health Organization re-defined burnout in the 11th Revision of The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and directly linked burnout to workplace stress. Despite this change, only a relatively small number of nations, including the Netherlands and Sweden, have made burnout a recognized medical diagnosis today. In the majority of (industrialized) nations, it is still a contentious diagnostic that is frequently debated but not formally acknowledged in the healthcare system.

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Current Position

Stress and burnout have received significant attention in recent years with their prevalence and impact on mental health in contemporary life being seen to dramatically increase.

Globally, people are experiencing ever-increasing pressure in their daily lives – notably, in their workplaces – and they live in a world that faces significant socioeconomic issues.

As a result, managers, employees and workers across almost all industries and sectors worldwide experience work-related stress, fatigue and exhaustion, with burnout syndrome being the term used to describe the most pronounced symptoms.

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Future Outlook

Since the global COVID-19 pandemic began, some worrying statistics have emerged:

• Employees are now more than three times as likely to report mental health issues.
• Despite being under stress, employees refuse to take a vacation. In 2020, American workers wasted 33% of their paid vacation days despite working an average of 49 minutes more in a typical workweek.
• Every area of a worker’s personal and professional life is affected by burnout, which manifests as a lack of motivation, an increase in errors, bad sleeping patterns, a break from friends and family, irritation and other symptoms.
• A startling 76% of workers claim that stress at work negatively impacts their mental health, causing despair or anxiety.
• 98% of respondents to global surveys respond that they are currently experiencing one or more symptoms of burnout.

To combat these statistics and hopefully reverse them over time, every organization, in every industry will need to invest time, money and resources into the following activities:

Offering resources for mental health

One of the most significant keys to preventing burnout is eradicating the stigma surrounding mental health. Organizations need to have a conversation with their people to determine the best means of providing these resources.

However, consideration can be given to delivering mental health education and services via text, email, or phone, on-site and/or online mindfulness and meditation sessions, self-guided resilience resources, and participation in monthly mental health challenges.

Broadening access to mental health services

Professional mental health care is another option in addition to office resources. This can be offered through providing increased employee access to teletherapy or expanding benefits to cover mental health.

Checking in with staff

Showing an interest in employees is a straightforward but highly powerful way to prevent burnout and foster relationships.

To do this, you can create regular surveys to better gauge what is happening in your employees’ lives, and then create initiatives and policies that are guided by the information you gather in the surveys.

Encouraging staff to take mental rest breaks

Bursting the burnout ‘bubble’ can be accomplished by celebrating relaxation and allowing workers time to unwind and socialize.

Suggestions here include the introduction of midday mental rest breaks – also termed as lunchtime virtual happy hours – that encourage employees to take a break from their job and mingle, even if they are working remotely. You can also investigate implementing areas in the workplace where staff members can take quick naps during the day.

Reducing the number of meetings

Meeti