The TEFL Times

By David Vincent

If life weren’t tough enough anyway, the miserable fact is that job burnout is increasingly common in the contemporary, stress filled workplace. As teachers of English, I feel we’re prone to this more than just about any other group of professionals.

While some job stress can, naturally, be regarded as a normal occurrence, how can we really know when we’ve lost the ability to control the root causes of that stress, or when they’re leading to a more serious condition, job burnout?

Job burnout, though a serious problem, is a natural response to stress in the workplace, leaving us feeling powerless, frustrated, fatigued, drained and even without hope. Never the less, it’s important to realise that, in teaching English as in any profession, job burnout doesn’t happen overnight; it’s important to recognise the early signs and act before the problem becomes serious. Here are a few questions you really might like to ask yourself:

• Do you often find yourself dreading going to work in the morning?
• Do you regularly feel fatigued and lacking in energy at work?
• Are you easily bored at work?
• Do work activities you once found enjoyable now feel like drudgery?
• Do you feel depressed on a Sunday (assuming that your job affords you some form of weekend), thinking about Monday and the coming week?
• Have you become more cynical or bitter about your job / boss / place of work?
• Do you find yourself easily annoyed or irritated by your co-workers?
• Are non-work relationships (marital, family, friendships) affected by your feelings about work?
• Do you find yourself envious of individuals who are happy in their work?

Think about this: Do you now care less than you used to about doing a good job? If you answered yes to half or more of the above, the chances are you’re suffering from some degree of job burnout. Unfortunately, for many who reach the burnout stage, the steps out of it can be really difficult, especially as burned out individuals often feel as though there’s no hope.

The fatigue and despair we associate with burnout can make it hard to actively seek solutions. Also, it often leads to feelings of isolation, leaving people feeling alone in their predicament. The difficulties in dealing with full-scale job burnout are why it’s important to recognise the early signs and take action, a good starting point being to recognise the factors that could be leading to burnout.

Theories about job burnout say tedious and boring jobs appear to be one source. Another is facing a job that’s beyond your ability to do it well. Lack of recognition for the work you do can be another serious source of job stress. As teachers of English, it’s easy to see how these symptoms manifest themselves in our everyday lives.

Although it can be difficult for those faced with burnout, it’s not impossible to recover from. If someone is experiencing burnout, the first step is to address the causes of work dissatisfaction, in other words the what, when and why of burnout:

What?

Have you been able to face changes in the organisation, the demands of the job, your boss, or the industry? These changes happen often, did you realise the effect that they had on you?

When?

Was there some pivotal event that changed the way you view your job; a new boss, other teachers, or responsibilities? Again, these things happen regularly. Did they have a major effect on you?

Why?

Have you yourself changed? Are your interests or values pertaining to work now different than they were before? Has the school’s mission changed? Are your abilities and skills not being utilized?

Identifying the what, when and why of burnout can help to start you on the road to exploring options to manage the sources of your stress. Sometimes simple things, such as talking to a boss about making changes to your job responsibilities, can make a difference.

Sometimes more serious measures may, however, be necessary, such as changing jobs or even changing your career field, as daunting as that may sound. Most importantly, job burnout is a reaction to work stress. Methods of handling stress can be identified and encouraged. While career counselors specialise in helping people with such issues, they are extremely hard to find when you’re in a foreign country, if they exist at all. Job burnout is therefore a common problem among TEFL teachers, but one from which we can recover and, in the end, learn more about our needs in relation to work.

There are practical methods we can employ to combat the condition, regardless of our situation. Here are some things we can do:

Take care of our bodies

Eating right, sleeping well, doing exercise and seeing a doctor if we feel burned out. If we can take care of our physical health, it will reduce our burnout.

Do our favorite things

Make a schedule for spoiling ourselves over the course of a day, week or month. Reading favourite books or doing our hobbies is the same as recharging the batteries after going through a difficult period.

Set yourself realistic targets

Making targets for our lives will give us a genuine sense of purpose. We should make personal targets over the short and long term and set up a plan to achieve the targets. Learning and reaching new targets will ease our burnout.

Talk with friends and colleagues

Communicate with others who will listen and understand us, but not judge. Talking with others like that will ease our emotions and we are practicing healthy communication. We must be sure to let our emotions out in healthy and productive ways.

Understand our strengths and weaknesses

Knowing our strengths and weaknesses can help us to learn better ways to deal with day-to-day stress. We can avoid stress once we recognize the cause.

Enhance our relationships

Getting closer to our partners, children, friends and other people we can count on will really help restore our energy. It can ease our burnout, as we will not feel underappreciated.

About the Author

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