Burnout can occur whether you’re working for a big, busy company or are self-employed at home. In any work environment, to avoid burnout and achieve a satisfying work–life synergy, one important personal quality you should have is emotional resilience.
Emotional resilience refers to your ability to handle stressful situations, such as when you’re being personally attacked. Resilient people are able to “roll with the punches” and adapt to adversity without lasting negative effects; rigid people, however, have a more difficult time with stress and life changes, both major and minor.
Because all animals, including humans, have a fight-or-flight response, you can easily measure your response to a personal challenge. This refers to the hormonal and physical changes that occur when you believe you’re being threatened, whether by a bear in the woods or your boss at work. If you think of your boss as an angry bear, then you’re probably in a fight-or-flight mode every day.
Here’s how it works. The amygdala is a tiny area of the brain that continually reviews incoming data from your senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. It does this in real time, and when it perceives an external danger, it sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus. This quickly sends a combination of nerve and hormonal signals to various parts of your body.
This complex natural alarm system communicates with brain regions that control mood, motivation, and fear. It prompts your adrenal glands, located atop your kidneys, to release a surge of hormones, including cortisol and epinephrine (also known as adrenaline). All of this can happen so quickly that your conscious mind may not even be aware of the danger.
Epinephrine increases your heart rate and elevates your blood pressure. Extra oxygen is sent to the brain, increasing alertness. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases sugars (glucose) in the bloodstream, enhances your brain’s use of glucose, and increases the availability of substances that repair tissues. At the same time, it reduces functions that would be unnecessary in a fight-or-flight situation. It suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system, and growth processes.
These changes make sense and can be lifesaving in a real emergency, such as if you were attacked by a bear. But when the danger has passed, your brain and body are supposed to return to their normal homeostasis, which is the average daily level of those hormones. Your nerves and digestion return to their usual state, and life goes on.
There are three important things to understand about this:
Notice I said, “when you believe you’re being threatened.” This cascade of events in your body is triggered by your mind and its belief about your situation. For example, a trained park ranger could be threatened by a bear, but because of her experience, she doesn’t feel endangered. She’ll just calmly take the required steps to remove herself from the situation and go on with her day. Not a problem. Now think about a city dweller walking in the same forest at night. To him, every sound represents a dangerous predator. Every snapping twig or rustle in the bushes signifies imminent attack. His heart races, his hands get sweaty, his stomach gets tight. His breathing is rapid and shallow, and yet there is no danger; it’s all in his mind.
The fight-or-flight response was programmed into our brains millions of years ago and was a life saver, but in the industrialized world, except for soldiers, law enforcement, and others whose jobs put them in danger, we rarely face life-or-death situations. Most of us go through our lives with few, if any, dire emergencies that would require our digestive systems to shut down! But the response is still very much present when we experience emotional trauma. It can begin at home, if we see a parent being abused, or if we are being abused ourselves. It happens in the military in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder. It happened to healthcare workers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It can happen in an abusive work environment, such as the one created at Wells Fargo during the faked sales scandal. Some leaders, like the late Jack Welch at General Electric, enjoy creating a “fight-or-flight” culture in their company. In his case, the purported reason was to “keep people on their toes” because everyone knew the bottom performers would be fired.
If you stay in a fight-or-flight mode for a prolonged period of time, the sustained stress to your mind and body will be damaging. Overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones will disrupt many of your body’s natural processes, putting you at increased risk of many health problems. For example, cortisol increases appetite, so you’ll want to eat more to obtain extra energy. It also increases the storage of unused nutrients as fat.
There are many other results of this level of stress, including the following:
Anxiety;
Depression;
Digestive problems;
Headaches;
Heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure, and stroke;
Memory and concentration impairment;
Muscle pain and tension;
Sleep problems; and
Weight gain.
When building your work–life synergy, obviously the very last thing you want or need is to be under prolonged stress. It’s unpleasant, and it’s bad for your health. But here’s the thing: only you can decide what’s stressful for you.
Some people thrive on competition at work, such as people in sales. Some people, such as sports figures or high-rise steelworkers, enjoy physically challenging jobs. Librarians need peace and tranquility. Elementary school teachers enjoy the energy of children, even though they may be driven by rambunctious kids to play a game of “hide and no seek.”
Your emotional resilience is yours alone, and you owe it to yourself to find the role in which you feel comfortable, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
With deliberate consciousness and practice, you can strengthen your emotional resilience. With the right tools, you can become more resilient, even if you are naturally more sensitive to the slings and arrows that people and life throw at you.
Excerpted from Working Happy! How to Survive Burnout and Find Your Work/Life Synergy in the Healthcare Industry (American Association for Physician Leadership, 2024).