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How to prevent burn out ?

Feeling drained or under pressure? Are you running around throughout the day, never finding the time to turn off? As soon as all the rushing has stopped, and the weekend and holidays come around, are you hit with a headache as a result of a build-up of tension and fatigue? If yes, then maybe it is time to rethink your habits and turn stress into performance.
Where is your performance point located on the Human Function Curve (see diagram)?

©D.R.

This Human Function Curve is a model illustrating how you can go « over the top » into exhaustion and deteriorating functionality when beyond the point of healthy fatigue.

In exhaustion mode, trying harder to overcome a declining performance is already « heading down the slope ». Fighting the gap between what we actually can do and what we think is intended of us only widens it. One of modern industrial society’s most challenging problems is the danger of chronic fatigue in humans. Too often we do not allocate enough time to refuel, take time off for exercise, set time for relaxation and pay attention to our nutrition/fatty food intake.

One good way to overcome fatigue is to establish a routine to refuel your body. It can take three days, a week or longer to achieve this. Only you can and must feel when your « batteries » are charged again.
(Source: Vivamea.com)

Prevention

Vivamea has adapted the “Sabres technique”, a technique taught by specialist Dr. Peter Nixon, and adapted to Vivamea’s needs. It has been very successful for thousands of people in the Vivamea program:

Refuelling requires you allocate a daily minimum of:

Once you have achieved inner balance and feel that you are able to control external/surrounding pressures, you can continue the refuelling program by adding these two points:

(Source: Vivamea.com)

Burnout

This condition occurs when you feel spent, exhausted, overloaded with work. When your physical and mental resources are depleted and new demands become burdens rather than challenges. You are then out of balance and you have been expecting too much of yourself.

You should be careful if you can identify too many of the following signals occurring simultaneously, but don’t worry if you only have one or two! Some signs of burnout are experiencing:

• Time pressure
• Stress
• Exhaustion
• Low tolerance to change
• Abdication of responsibility
• Depression
• Isolation
• Sleeplessness
• Chronic fatigue

Solutions

If you now feel that you are completely fed up with work and that you lack the energy to do anything about it, the first solution is to:

• Step back from the situation; take a day off, go to a work/life/health inventory workshop to identify the daily demands on you and discover what you value as important
• Focus on those important priorities and put them into action at once
• Refuel your energy
• Think about what you expect of yourself, what others expect of you and what you have committed to fulfill
• Talk about how you feel to someone you trust and listen to their response
• Give yourself positive feedback as you succeed in achieving your revised goals
• Listen to your body before you surpass your limits, to return to normal

Remember: taking on too many responsibilities (whether they be professional, social or personal) can be exhausting; monitor this and “watch you do not burn the candle at both ends.” (Source: Vivamea.com)
It is harder to reverse burnout than it is to take the necessary precautions to prevent it from occurring in the first place. These and many other techniques provided by Vivamea.com can not only help you beat burnout, but are also useful in each and every moment where you encounter stressful situations in your life. It is essential to stop stress in its tracks before it stops you. Prevention is the key. So, take time out to relax, recuperate and refuel, and beat burnout before it beats you!

Vivamea : Drive your way to personal and professional well-being

Chris Christiansson, Founder and Managing Partner of Vivamea.com © Patrick Preperier

In the context of a seminar on Burn-Out (see insert) at the EPFL in Lausanne, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Christiansson, Founder and Managing Partner of Vivamea.com. Mr Christiansson is also a coach specializing in Performance and Wellbeing and , a Behaviour-Physiology Specialist.Vivamea was launched after 9-11, when he and his team realized the real need to offer a technologically advanced product which, as Mr. Christiansson calls it, helps people “learn to drive themselves as they learn to drive a car.” After a few test-runs coaching and training about 3,500 people in multinationals, at mostly managerial and leadership levels, Vivamea was born. Intended to reach a larger public, it was modelled after these, and similar programs. Essentially, it is an online self-coaching service consisting of self-management tools for turning stress into performance. Its philosophy is based on five basic principles for one to learn how to:

1. work smarter
2. have purpose, meaning and engagement
3. understand the body’s equilibrium and what it is trying to tell you
4. manage oneself
5. gain sustainability

Who is Vivamea’s target public?

Vivamea targets professionally active people between the ages of 28 and 60 who have problems finding ways to integrate their personal, private and professional lives and want to learn how to refuel their energy. Vivamea’s tools and support are intended to help people find solutions to integrate work and health into their daily lives. However, we are not a medical service but an educational one. We have very strong backgrounds in different fields but we are an educational tool that people learn to use and apply. If they have therapeutic needs, medical needs, the system will indicate the need to consult a doctor.

How do you check your clients’ progress?

We have an online tool and a coach-managed tool. We have something called My Profile. If we have a coaching evaluation, we set some clear objectives. This means the client sets the objectives and we decide together what the next steps should be. We work in parallel, so that we can see that people are performing and going forward. We also ask specific questions to find out if they are the client’s real objectives or if there is something else behind them. Finally, we make some evaluations which provide us with clear indications of the correlation between reality and subjectivity.

How long does it take for your clients to see results?

From the 3,500 people we researched, 8% of them are mostly managing as part of their lifestyle. 57% need a little ‘kick’ in the back, some motivation and support as well as some challenging input, which is provocative enough for them to start to take responsibility. These people can easily go through a three-month program or even a little longer to make some changes. Basically, to build a routine, three to six months is needed to get the routine in place. Then, about 15% of people definitely need face-to-face training and that mostly takes from six months to a year. Finally, 20% of people have therapeutic needs and we suggest they contact either a doctor or a specialist.

Unemployment is also a source of stress. What advice do you give to the unemployed to combat stress?

That’s a very good point. I think being unemployed is a dramatic situation for anybody. If you are young and this has happened once in your life, then this may not be an issue. But for people who have been employed for a longer time, for people who are of a certain age and unemployed, it is sometimes a trauma. A trauma can be managed with help from external people but can also be managed by yourself. I think our tool is very good for people who are unemployed as it helps them to have some kind of self-reflection and self-responsibility. You can be more proactive by taking steps and trying to move out of this situation. If you are tired and worn out and saying to yourself, ‘I am a victim’ then nobody will help you. But if you come to an interview full of energy, happy and ready to accept it as a challenge then you are already halfway there. You may not get the job, but you can still come out of the interview feeling satisfied. Self-responsibility gained from our tool will also help the unemployed.

What is Vivamea’s long-term vision?

We would like to work with the EPFL to develop a virtual coach with artificial intelligence so you can gather your life history. The history will then be put into the system, meaning that you become your own GPS. It will ask you questions, you feed it with information and it will help you navigate your way through different situations. It will be purely online and a way to navigate through unknown situations.

Also, I think we will put a ‘driving school’ in place to help people drive themselves. In sport, we learn the hard way. When I was young, I got up at six o’clock in the morning and went training five times a week regardless of the rain, sunshine, winter or summer. It was about discipline. When you learn a discipline it becomes a routine, the same as driving a car, meaning that you do not have to think about doing it, you can just enjoy it. I think that the world needs this because as the world gets more stressful and edgy, people become less tolerant and more violent. I think we need to learn that the world and humans are very rich. We can go far and learn from each other.

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