Beyond Burnout: How to Flourish in Work and Life

Is burnout an overused term?

I was listening to the podcast Creative Nonfiction the other day hosted by Brendan O’Meara. He was interviewing Sean Enfield, author of Holy American Burnout!, an essay collection that explores race, education, and the experience of American burnout, through the lens of a bi-racial Texas upbringing and a year of teaching English to a group of primarily Muslim students in a Dallas prep school. In the podcast interview, Enfield tells his host that he hates the word burnout, an overused word he feels “says everything and nothing” at the same time.

Defining burnout

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I agree that burnout has become an overused term applied to everything from simple job dissatisfaction to major depressive disorder. Luckily, in the field of health care, we have Dr. Christine Maslach, professor emerita at UC Berkely, to define and delineate physician burnout more clearly and specifically. She describes the three dimensions of burnout as emotional exhaustion, de-personalization, and a lack of personal accomplishment. Emotionally we feel depleted, used up, like we have nothing left to give. We lose some of our humanity, becoming callous and cynical. We feel we are no longer making a difference or that, despite our best effort, nothing ever changes.

When the goal is to flourish

In my book Writing Through Burnout: How to Thrive While Working in Healthcare, my goal for my readers is not simply to provide them with the tools they need to mitigate the effects of stress or prescribe ways to build resilience or heal moral distress. My goal goes beyond trying to simply alleviate burnout. I want my readers to flourish.

What exactly does it mean to flourish? Beyond merely hedonistic happiness or simply being satisfied with our lives, flourishing implies a more elevated experience, more focused on reaching our full potential as human beings. Think Socrates’s examined life. A life centered in creativity, curiosity, and openness to novelty. A contemplative life guided by a strong moral compass and enriched by community, family, and friends. That is what I want for my readers.

Components of the flourishing life

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At The Greater Good Science Center in Berkeley, California, Dr. Eve Eckman has developed a model of flourishing she calls CPR: connection, positivity, and resilience. Dr. Tyler VanderWeele, director of Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, defines flourishing as doing well in these five areas: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. Dr. Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, puts forth a similar rubric he calls PERMA for positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments.

Eckman also notes that the skills and strengths needed to support a flourishing life can be taught and learned with “regular intentional practice.” I posit that a daily practice of reflective writing can be that kind of intentional practice that gets at many of these components of flourishing. By giving ourselves permission to pause, to stay in the moment, and to reflect upon the personal meaning to be found in everyday interactions, the contemplative writing practice can transform its practitioners. In writing about the specific, we connect ourselves to the universal, and in so doing, connect with each other, link ourselves to a common humanity.

How daily writing can enhance relationships

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Even though we write in isolation, reflection enhances our relationships, elevating one of the prime components of the flourishing life identified but several researchers. By writing about our interactions with others, we necessarily view the people we are connected to differently. Having considered encounters from their side, we come to understand and value their thinking. Reflective writing helps clarify our attitudes and identify contextual factors and dynamics affecting aspects of those relationships. As we work these issues out on the page, we draw closer to those we write about or at least offer ourselves the opportunity to do so. In one study of older individuals who journal, several of the participants reported that this kind of reflective writing improved their relationships with family members by helping them to clarify their own feelings about particular issues.

How a reflective writing practice builds resilience and helps us make meaning

Reflective writing provides a clearing in which we can contemplate our encounters, mining our interactions for meaning, identifying personal inner strengths and developing our own practical wisdom. In this way we can build individual resilience, one of Eckman’s components of flourishing. Daily writing about our deepest thoughts and feelings has been found to have physical health benefits, which VanderWeele notes contribute to the flourishing life.

The link between reflective writing, creativity, and a flourishing life

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Magsamen and Ross, in their book Your Brain on Art, add creativity to the mix of contributors to flourishing, noting, “We are a species of makers. We can’t flourish if we’re not creating. Self-expression is crucial to who we are.” Indeed, a daily writing practice gives us that playground on which to explore our deepest values, the canvas on which to paint our examined feelings, and the white space into which to breathe our truth. Much like health is more than just the absence of disease, well-being is more than just the absence of burnout. Flourishing takes us one step beyond well-being and writing takes us several giant steps toward flourishing.