Author: Christina Bruni

Christina Bruni is the author of the new book Working Assets: A Career Guide for Peers. She contributed a chapter "Recovery is Within Reach" to Benessere Psicologico: Contemporary Thought on Italian American Mental Health.

Awakenings

I’m taking a detour to promote the new book that can be bought on Amazon for only $14.99. Reading the stories of struggle and triumph could give you ideas about tactics to use so that you can flourish on and off the job.

The book above features the first-person accounts of 28 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia who have recovered. Plus, credible information on AOT, ACT, marijuana use and psychosis, treatment and medications used.

My recovery story is featured at number 5 in the book. It’s the shortest in length recovery story. The other stories have longer pages.

The other survivors went through years and years of hell and heartache. Getting the right treatment right away can result in a better outcome quickly. Yet for those of us who struggle long-term this book shows that hope for a better life is possible at any time in your recovery.

There are as many versions of recovery as there are people living in recovery. Like a thumbprint our lifestyles are unique and can be full and robust in their own way.

The point is not to compare yourself to other people. The grass might be greener on the front lawn over there. Inside the house it’s a hot mess where you can’t see it.

In coming blog entries I will talk more about coping with pressure on the job.

What Burnout Is

Months ago I listened to a webinar on burnout and how to alleviate this type of compassion fatigue.

Stress is the perceived threat to one’s mind, body, spirit, or emotions. The anticipation about a stressor often comes out of nowhere without an obvious trigger.

Pinpointing the root of the stress is the key to developing strategies to manage what’s going on.

The definition of burnout is:

“A state of physical, mental, or emotional exhaustion resulting from chronic stress. It is characterized by feelings of alienation, indifference, and low self-regard; a loss of interest in work, and an inability to perform one’s day-to-day job duties.”

Burnout is often caused by a feeling that work is out of control. This stress can affect you over the longer term.

How to prevent compassion fatigue and attendant burnout:

  1. Take a break.

2. Say no to a request in a positive way: “Sorry my plate is full.”

3. Remember that you can’t answer every question. Sometimes you don’t have an answer.

4. Obtain skill training like listening to a burnout webinar.

5. Focus on proper rest and nutrition.

6. Remember that you alone don’t bear the brunt of “fixing” yourself or the situation. Empathic supervisors keeping the lines of communication open hold another key to alleviating burnout.

In the coming blog entry I’ll give my ideas for coping with stress and pressure on the job.

Practicing Dolce Far Niente

The Italian ethic of dolce far niente is in English words “the sweetness of doing nothing.” Italians invented stopping to smell the roses.

I have long been entranced with my culture’s practice of taking time going about things “piano-piano” which is slowly-slowly like the tour guide in Rome told us to walk through the historic streets.

Having my health wrecked acting as a caregiver I had to prioritize my wellbeing in every area of my life not just by mitigating the effects of doing unpaid emotional labor for a family member.

Research proves that by working insane hours at a job a person’s level of productivity goes way down. The opposite of what you would think happens when we labor past 5:00 at the office to “get things done.”

Sadly, alternative careers to those in corporate offices often come with a lower salary and the risk of compassion fatigue with burnout. No one is immune from the risk of burning out.

How have I built ongoing rest into my life on and off the job? At the height of COVID forced indoors in lockdown I took naps in the afternoon long before reading Rest is Resistance.

Today after I work out in my home gym I lie in bed for an hour after each session and sometimes fall asleep then.

As best I can I try to go to bed between 9:00 to 10:30 p.m.

Tricia Hersey in Rest is Resistance ends her book with the call to use our imagination to create the future we want to have for ourselves. While napping ideas come to her.

The plots to novels come to me in dreams at night when I’m sleeping. I wake up, grab my pen and notebook and write down the details about the characters, plot, and book title.

I have also solved real-life problems by paying attention to the events in dreams and what those dreams are telling me to do.

Rest is not a luxury. It’s required for everyone living in America today. Especially for those of us who aspire to get a full-time job.

Coming up soon a dive into the perils of scrolling social media for hours. I haven’t ever been a fan of social media like Facebook. (hint: it’s more likely anti-social.)

Resting from Burnout

In future blog entries down the road I will talk about how we can have a life of health, wealth, and happiness. The idea of wealth today lies in having abundance. Regardless of our finances we have a cornucopia of skills, strengths, and abilities that can help us live our lives well.

The book above I read in 5 hours straight. I recommend that you rest between reading the chapters in Rest is Resistance.

The author is the founder of the Nap Ministry. Her book is short. Her life’s work of righting the injustice of capitalist “grind culture” is rooted in Black Liberation.

In the book Hersey attests that resting as a form of resistance is for everyone in society not just Black Americans.

The fact is every worker of every color and creed should not live to toil in servitude to corporations that put profits before people.

We should create our own value system that prioritizes being not doing as the indicator of a person’s worth. The myth of needing to be productive at all times I haven’t been a fan of either.

Hersey advocates for taking naps. She is against influencer-peddled methods for resting that only perpetuate that you should “rest up” to be able to get more done the next day.

Hersey is against capitalism as it exists today as it was founded through the forced inhuman 24/7 labor of enslaved Africans on plantations.

In the coming blog entry I will talk about my firsthand experience with napping and resting and taking breaks. To show you how I as an Italian born in America prioritized my mental and physical health long before reading Rest is Resistance.

Offsetting Burnout

I attended a Zoom burnout session. In future blog entries I’ll talk about what I learned there.

While burnout is NOT the employees fault some things can help alleviate the stress that are person-centered as referred to in The Burnout Challenge:

Staying Healthy

Getting enough sleep

Relaxing

Understanding oneself

Developing new skills (on the job)

Getting away from the job

Getting social support

In terms of developing new skills on the job circa 2008 I took training to help customers create resumes and conduct job searches.

This made all the difference in sparking joy at work.

It can be tough when staff feel they can’t approach management to get things done in terms of the 6 causes of burnout. What if the upper echelon doesn’t see fit to change things?

A new 2023 book at the library titled Exit Interview was a memoir and expose of working in the corporate Amazon office. The woman author said she had in effect sold her soul: After 12 years working in that environment she no longer recognized the person in the mirror.

I buy things on Amazon that I can’t find locally or anywhere else. I admire Jeff Bezos for how he transformed Amazon from an online bookseller in 1997 to the Marketplace of the World. However I’m NOT a fan of how Amazon treats its workers. Warehouse staff are given health insurance precisely because their jobs in the warehouses cause ill health.

Sadly the cure for burnout is not job-hopping if you risk going “out of the frying pan into the fire.” The next job you get could be like reliving the old job.

I will talk further in future blog entries about visionary ideas for making the workplace a better place to work.

The Burnout Challenge

I recommend reading the Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter. Decades of research support the authors’ claims.

You might not be a manager who can institute systemwide change. Yet reading this book when you’re an employee can help you to lobby for change with higher-ups and find out how to make your job less stressful.

The six root causes of burnout are: workload, control, rewards, community, fairness, and value mismatches. Contrary to popular belief the fix for this chronic stress is NOT self-care that the employee engage in outside of work.

Burnout isn’t an individual issue; It’s a situational stressor in the workplace. You are not to blame nor are any coworkers for not being able to handle this toxic environment.

The analogy the authors use is how miners sent a canary into a coal mine to see how the bird would stand up to the atmosphere. A canary that did not remain in robust health signaled danger.

Yet too often the “I” focused attempts to alleviate a staff member’s burnout are like expecting to “toughen up” the canary so it can withstand the pressure in the coal mine. Instead of making the coal mine healthier to work in.

Individual effort and management attention are required at the same time. The authors advocate that leadership perform routine and ongoing “checkups”–like a medical checkup–to assess the health of the workplace and pinpoint future areas of concern. Employees should be asked for input and the solutions should be customized to the individual company. There should be long-term commitment to doing what it takes to sustain positive outcomes.

Coming up what we as employees can do to manage what goes on. Again knowing that often management practices are at the root of the burnout.

The Pomodoro Technique

A method for controlling your time on the job that I think everyone should use is the Pomodoro Technique.

Creator and author of the book the Pomodoro Technique Francesco Cirillo originally used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato.

I wrote about this before: You set a kitchen timer for 25 minutes. Use the block of time for a section of a work project. When the timer goes off set it for a five-minute break period. In the five minutes do nothing related to the work project.

Schedule 3 to 5 Pomodoros in the morning. Take lunch. Continue with 3 to 5 Pomodoros in the afternoon.

Managing Time on the Job

Before I review again the Pomodoro Technique (genius!) I want to write about two methods for managing time on and off our jobs.

First: We can use “time blocking” to schedule into a shared calendar the blocks of time we’re using for specific projects. Listing the type of work we’re doing in each block.

Second: We can use “time boxing” to take time for ourselves. This will also allow us to rein in the time we devote to passion projects. So as to not let this time creep into the time we need for our commitments.

On and off our jobs we can use time blocking and time boxing.

The benefit is that these acts are simple strategies for managing our time.

What often leads to burnout is that we live our lives on (and off!) the jobs in reaction mode instead of being proactive. Everything that comes on our desk at that minute or all the invitations in our private life piling up are seen as emergencies. We think we have to resolve these things immediately when they come crashing into our days at the time we’re doing something else.

Multi-tasking by shifting our focus from one task to another repeatedly has been proven to be an ineffective tactic for getting work done. I remember the interviewer for one job telling me that I would have to be good at multi-tasking. This was decades ago and her crystal ball was broken. No need existed on that job for multi-tasking after all.

Slowing down and focusing is the secret to managing our work projects. If you have ADD or ADHD you might need to read a book about specific ways to develop workarounds for time management that take into account the challenges you have. I will research these kinds of books and get back to followers in here with the titles.

I took a burnout quiz. It showed I had no burnout. It is possible to halt burnout before it starts. In coming blog entries I will talk more about how to do this. I will talk about alleviating pressure on the job too. It’s the stress that leads to burnout. And stress doesn’t have to be inevitable on the job.

How to Alleviate Burnout

The fact is we should not have to alleviate burnout. We should not experience this in the first place. The 6 root causes of burnout come from management. In the coming blog entries I’ll talk about how to stop burnout before it starts.

First: research proves that a caring company is a healthy and wealthy company. Per the book The Power of Wonder: The Extraordinary Emotion that Will Change the Way you Live Learn and Lead:

“Research out of Utrecht University found that those who felt they could be authentic at work had higher job satisfaction, engagement, motivation, and performance.”

Finding a job where we can show up as our true self is the key. Where are these jobs? I don’t think they’re in office work as corporate workplaces continue to exist today with management foisting unrealistic demands on employees.

The higher the overtime hours a person works the less productive they are. Sixty hour workweeks do not prove you’re working hard.

I’m going to review in here again The Pomodoro Technique which is a better way to get work done within the day.

The Power of Wonder states also: “Empathy has a bottom-line benefit, too. Another study found the top ten most empathetic companies showed twice the growth in value as that of the bottom ten and generated 50 percent more in earnings.”

I’m quoting from this book because I think you should buy the book and read it. The Power of Wonder should win a literary prize. I checked it out of the library. It was published this year so is current.

Coming up more on clocking burnout out of our lives before it takes over.

This Must Be The Place

I arrived early to an after-hours event at a library. Able to browse the shelves I checked out three books.

The beauty of working in a public library is that I can wear silver-coated pants and black platform Adidas Gazelles to the job. Plus use neon green eyeliner and lavender lipstick.

“This Must Be the Place” if you want the freedom to clock out on time, get generous paid time off, and possibly receive a pension when you retire.

The pay isn’t always so hot yet you’ll likely be offered a 403(b) you can contribute to for a source of retirement income.

This month I took a burnout quiz that revealed I didn’t have compassion fatigue. In the coming blog carnival I’ll talk about stopping high stress before it starts. Our work doesn’t have to create ill health.

We can S.O.S.–save our sanity and serenity before things get out of hand. That’s why I’ve coined the term The New Alt-American Dream: We can opt out of what used to be called “the rat race” and find the job we like going to.

Not everyone likes living in New York City. That’s OK. I recommend researching jobs in your local public library system. To become a professional librarian you’ll need a master’s degree. A clerk or computer tech person often only needs a H.S. diploma or GED.