Vos Questions - Burnout
Similarities and differences in professional and parental burnout
What is burnout?
Burnout is a process of disconnection experienced by a person when there is too significant a gap between an ideal that the person pursues and who they really are. We distinguish professional burnout and parental burnout.
Burnout professionnel
The WHO recognizes burnout in 2019 but does not classify it as a disease
"Burn-out, or occupational exhaustion, is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been properly managed"
Burnout parental
No recognition by the WHO at the moment. According to Isabelle Roskam and Moïra Mikolajczak, Belgian researchers and founders of the Training Institute for Parental Burnout
"Parental burnout is a syndrome that affects parents exposed to chronic parental stress in the absence of sufficient resources to compensate"
Intense fatigue that no rest can compensate
Detachment from work. You do the bare minimum which is required.
Detachment from the children often accompanied by fits of anger and a lot of screaming on behalf of the parents
Situation of contrast appears between who we really are and who we have become
Leave work? Possible
Leave the children? Impossible
Why is it important to prevent burnout of any kind?
Burnout is an extremely costly phenomenon:
Costly on a physical level: it can promote the onset of serious illnesses given the internal imbalance that occurs in the body.
Costly on a psychological level:
Deterioration of self-esteem and self-confidence
Recurring feelings of guilt
Deterioration of relationships with those around you due to increased tensions within the couple and family
Costly in time and energy:
once burnout occurs, it requires completely starting over by questioning our values, our beliefs, our needs, our limits to understand how this could have happened and how to avoid falling into it again.
The earlier certain issues are identified, the easier it will be to avoid burnout.