Burnout and My Personal Journey

At Agile Coach Camp Canada 2024, During lightening talks, I heard several people mention burnout. Not as a reference to a Neil Young song, but rather a comment on how people feel. I was struck, because I went through burnout myself nearly a year ago. I facilitated a session on Burnout in the dreaded 4pm session on Saturday afternoon. Half of Coach Camp was already at the Kingston Brewing Company, and yet lots of people wanted to join and contribute in this session. It’s a pain point that many of us can relate to.

When we’re burnt out, we exhibit in three dimensions: Exhaustion, Lack of Productivity and Cynicism. Cynicism is particularly insidious, because it becomes the easy way out when we lack the resources to cope.

Burnout happens when our Acute Stress + Chronic Stress exceed our Resilience. Acute stress is the stuff that happens in the moment. Situations that involve novelty or unpredictability. Examples: car or bike accident, giving a speech in front of a crowd.

Chronic Stress is the ongoing variety. Repeated exposure to the same stressors, often made worse if we know we can’t escape them. Chronic stress can come from a variety of sources: dealing with a family member’s ill health; constant checking on social media; lack of money; a poor team dynamic at work, are all examples.

Since we can’t avoid Acute Stress, our only options are to reduce Chronic Stress and increase Resilience.

6 Factors that lead to burnout:

• Workload - is the volume of work we have sustainable? - ties into the Agile Manifesto and sustainable pace
• Lack of Control - ties into Autonomy (e.g. ability to shape the projects we work on) - having multiple bosses, or multiple sources of work, reduces our control
• Insufficient Reward - underpaid, lack of recognition, the Status portion of the SCARF model
• Community - are you connected with the people at work and outside of work? - the Relatedness portion of both the SCARF and ARC motivational models.
• Fairness - are you treated fairly?
• Values - are your personal values in alignment with the ones at work?

Many people comment that too much “stuff” is going on at every level of the system. Everyone is too busy just trying to cope, to pause, take look, and improve, because their cognitive load is too large. All of this makes systems fragile, and this contributes to burnout.  This is a “Workload” problem and also “Lack of Control”

Ignoring signs of burnout is a bad idea. One meta-analysis of around a thousand studies shows

it is a significant predictor of a large number of health problems: “hypercholesterolemia, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hospitalization due to cardiovascular disorder, musculoskeletal pain, changes in pain experiences, prolonged fatigue, headaches, gastrointestinal issues, respiratory problems …”[1].

How does this affect Agile Coaches, ScrumMasters, Product Owners and their Teams? Many coaches are suffering from signs of burn out. Too many work under conditions of uncertainty (lack of control), are pressured to get more work done (workload), and told to do things they feel are wrong (values). Worse, it turns out that teams can suffer burn out, not just individuals.

Dealing with Burnout

To deal with burnout, we can either reduce Chronic Stress or Increase Resilience. On a practical level, we need to do both. If these notes seem detailed, it’s because I spent months dealing with burnout last year, and I learned a lot about myself along the way.

Sources of Chronic Stress

• Loss of Control over one’s time – Having kids is wonderful but they obviously need a lot of attention and time. And, as they grow, that often extends to chauffeuring when they join sports or other hobbies. We can spend 10–20 hours a week just on practices and driving. If you have elderly parents or other family responsibilities, it can easily leave very little unallotted time on the calendar and that gets overwhelming. We’re happy to do all of this, but it is an ongoing source of stress.
• Juggling tasks and priorities – When it’s not clear what is important, we often feel like we’re running around randomly, trying to deal with tasks without seeing how they fit into the bigger picture. The mental energy required to keep all of the balls in the air, without constantly feeling like you’re dropping one, can be exhausting over and above the activities themselves. This is especially bad in organizations where it is said that everything is important and it all needs to be done soon.
• Pressure to Do More – The list of things to do feels like it is already longer than could ever be done and there’s constant pressure to do more. At work this shows up when Scrum Teams are told to increase their velocity. At home this can be self-imposed, “I must get these 10 things done around the house by Sunday evening”.
• Comparison to Others – Social Media platforms (e.g. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram) lead us to compare ourselves to the very best, whether in terms of looks, achievements, or lifestyle. Similarly, performance ranking systems at work may cause us to feel like we’re being compared to the exceptionally smart colleagues down the hall. Constantly analyzing, questioning, and judging our self-worth focuses our energies in a negative way that can easily leave us feeling defeated or unappreciative of our own value.
• Dopamine Rush (mostly from technology) – The chemical release we get from refreshing social media for “like”s, or checking email and Slack at work, acts like a slot machine - maybe this time when I look it will have something valuable. The randomness gives us a greater feeling of reward than something with a 100% chance of success. These are also called the Superstimuli.
• Lack of Sleep
• Lack of Income and Debt
• Lack of Activity or Exercise – lack of physical activity increases our susceptibility to stress.  
• Overtraining – while lack of activity causes harm, over training or a lack of recovery can lead to exhaustion and burnout
• Health Problems – This not only affects us physically and mentally, but almost always involves lack of control which is emotionally difficult to deal with.
• Environmental Stressors – Living in noisy or otherwise unfavorable environments can be stressful. Can also exasperate feelings of lack of control.
• Mis-Alignment with Personal Values – For example, for me, when I am in a workplace that treats employees with a lack of humanity and respect, that causes me stress.
• Lack of Emotional Understanding – According to Brene Brown, there are 87 identified Emotions (https://brenebrown.com/resources/atlas-of-the-heart-list-of-emotions/), yet most adults can only identify three: “happy,” “sad,” and “anger”. This lack of emotional expression leads to bottling up feelings and a belief in “toughing it out”.
• Issues in Personal Relationships – This includes stressors from marriage, children, and friendships.
• Challenges with Work Relationships – For example, sometimes we have a colleague who we feel doesn’t listen to us, or management who doesn’t seem to appreciate our contributions.
• Pressure to Conform – For neurodivergent individuals, the pressure to conform to societal norms can be a significant source of stress.
• Lack of Social Support – This applies both at work and outside work, especially if you have few non-work friends. 

Many of these are intertwined and compounding. For example, demands on our time can often create issues in personal relationships which leave us feeling like we have lack of social support.

As I said before, since we can’t avoid Acute Stress (one-off or unpredictable issues), our only options are to Reduce Chronic Stress and Increase Resilience. In the Agile Coach Camp Canada session, we came up with a good start of how to do that

Things That Increase Resilience

• Reduce superstimuli
• Create space for self
• Spend time in nature
• Spend time socialising (renew old friendships, make new friends)
• Exercise (although over-exercise can be a chronic stressor)
• Talk to someone about your stressors (e.g. friend, therapist, support group)
• Rehearse what to say in difficult circumstances
• Prayer
• Meditation
• Mindfulness
• Sleep
• Journaling
• Hobbies 

How I Reduced Stress When I suffered burnout, I made a list of my personal superstimuli (artificial stimulants that activate our reward systems more than real life) included spending time reading social media feeds over talking with friends. And reading the news, which can cause us to be exposed to far more information about threats than we would have experienced 200 years ago (since we have little control over most of it, it can feel stressful and defeating). Beware of social media and others, which are evolving to become greater stimuli as the algorithms find ways to keep us engage longer and longer. So I listed Mastodon, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and online news as examples of technologies that were bringing stress into my orbit.

Then I made a list of my other chronic stressors, some of which included:

• Few close personal friends (self-employment means you miss out on work friends)
• Over-use of technology for everything (from necessary work to personal hobbies like book reading)
• Loss of control of time (my calendar looked like a Jackson Pollack piece) 
• Pressure to conform to societal expectations (it will come as a surprise to no one who has attended a workshop with me that I have ADHD)
• Dietary choices (e.g. alcohol, stress-eating)
• Allowing too much of my personal worth to be tied up in the success of my business or the ScrumAlliance

The first step on my journey to recovery was to reduce the superstimuli. I eliminated Facebook altogether; timeboxed LinkedIn and Mastodon to 15 minutes each a day; and on Mastodon I unfollowed people who talked about American politics. I now limit newspaper reading to first thing in the morning.

• Attempting to be productive all the time creates a form of self-induced pressure that is harmful, so I adopted a productivity strategy.
• Schedule a deliberate window of productive hours for each day (loosely based on when I naturally feel most alert and creative)  
• Have a hard stop at the end of the productivity window every day  
• I’m also adding a shutdown routine into my day so, at a certain point, I move away from productive work and onto planning the next day. (This should allow me to stop thinking about work in the evening hours 🤔🤞🏻)  
• Include new skills development during productive time, which will also help increase fun and joy  
• Limit switches between productive and personal time  
• When accomplishment matters, focus on productivity. When meaning matters, switch off productivity.
• Create a vision for my life and work. The work portion is bigger than my current business model and acts as a reminder being a Certified Scrum Trainer is small part of my life.

Now in my downtime, I (mostly) avoid superstimuli like email and Mastodon. Instead, I try to do things that involve less time on devices (e.g. I’m reading physical books again - the library has an amazing hold system). When I do want to read something electronic, I use my iPad, from which I’ve removed email and other distractions. I’ve also joined a local hiking group to get out in nature and grow more friendships. 

And, finally, I try to remember to deliberately take a moment and savour things. The taste of a great cup of coffee. The breeze on a hike. The sound of a person’s laughter.

[1] How to Calm Your Mind – Chris Bailey.