According to a recent study by the World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization (ILO), overwork is increasing our risk of serious disease. People around the world who work more than 55 hours per week have a higher risk of ischemic heart disease (heart attack) and those who work more than 49 hours per week have a higher risk of stroke. This study leads to other questions – what other physical conditions are caused by overwork? What about our mental health and the growing epidemic of career burnout?
Another recent study from 2020, shows that 32% of respondents believe that overwork leads to burnout. While the burnout story is more complex for most people, overwork often plays a big part! For many of us who are mid-career professionals, we rarely think about what “overwork” looks like or take the time to evaluate if we are working too much. As home/family responsibilities increase in our 30’s and 40’s, we just adapt. In most cases, people can cope with the increased demands; however, if we pass the tipping point of what our bodies and minds can handle, we cross over into burnout. For many of us, unrecognized burnout has been slowly taking over our lives and careers!
When I started my first professional role in healthcare research, I was in my early 30s, in grad school, engaged to be married, and my fiancé and I were getting ready to buy our first home. I was very motivated to succeed in my career and had worked for several months in an unpaid medical research internship before being hired permanently in my first salaried position as a research assistant. At that time, my colleagues and I were working on a large research project and our leadership indicated that we should expect to work overtime. If we were regularly working over 45 hours per week and struggling with life balance, we were instructed to have a conversation with our boss to see if the workload could be managed better. This became a pattern in my organization. I heard and saw that salaried work equaled at least 45 hours per week. Being a high achiever my whole life I was OK with this and went well beyond the 45 hours per week of “work” because I was also writing my master’s thesis (which was connected to my job) after the technical work hours were over. During this time, I started experiencing severe bouts of stomach pain which I describe as “feeling like someone poured hot coals down my throat.” This was diagnosed as Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD) and I was put on a double dose of an acid reducer (Prilosec). This was supposed to be for a few weeks to get symptoms under control, but it ended up being a long-term medication that I couldn’t get off of. As time went on, I finally recognized my GERD symptoms were related to work stress, but I felt unable to do anything about it. I deeply believed that I was responsible for getting my job and thesis work done regardless of the stress or long work hours.
This pattern of long work hours and high stress continued after I completed my master’s degree and accepted my first leadership position as supervisor of oncology clinical trials. I would volunteer to do extra work myself and was hesitant to put more work on my staff. I didn’t want them to be overworked – I thought overwork/stress came with the territory of being a manager and I needed to protect my team. While this sounds noble, what was really going on is I hadn’t learned the necessity or art of delegation. I was still under the belief system that “if you want something done right, do it yourself.” After going through several months of audits and required internal changes, I started to learn how to train/mentor and delegate but not to the extent I needed to. I was ambitious and wanted to climb the ladder. I thought that working hard, working overtime, and being completely dedicated to the organization was the way to do it.
However, as my 30’s passed and I entered my 40’s, I started to experience fatigue. I no longer had the energy to work long hours and maintain the rest of my life. Friendships, community involvement, exercise routines, healthy eating and time for hobbies all started to slide. My husband and I had also been on a difficult journey since our mid-30s of going through infertility treatments, pursuing adoption, and then finally getting pregnant at 40 only to lose our baby early in the 2nd trimester. Work stress probably contributed to both infertility and possibly to the loss of our pregnancy. On the other hand, infertility made work less meaningful because my emotional energy was being drained and there wasn’t time to truly process the pain and grief that came along with infertility and the loss of a desired pregnancy. We were also pursuing adoption through foster care which is a time-intensive and emotionally charged journey.
I decided to re-focus on my career direction in my early 40s because it felt like this was “all I had” in some ways. I took one final leap into a senior program manager position in healthcare quality and analytics. The work was exciting, but I had been warned by our director that it was going to be a challenging 6 months! Challenging was an understatement! We were completely redoing our internal processes to submit our publicly reported quality metrics (“HEDIS,” which is a famous/infamous acronym in the healthcare world)! We really needed about 12 months to do this work, but we had 6! We all worked 50-60 hours per week on a regular basis and worked 70-80 hours on some weeks. We were successful in completing our deadline and then had a few months to recharge and take vacation time before the next annual cycle started. I gave myself permission to evaluate whether I wanted to stay in this position over the next annual submission cycle. I decided to stay for the next year, and I made this decision every year for the next four years. The overtime decreased as the team gained experience, but we all knew that between December 1st and June 15th we were in for a busy, stressful time with multiple deadlines and a lot of fire drills! During this time, I started noticing a 2nd digestive condition – my gallbladder wasn’t functioning as well as it should. I was referred for surgery to remove my gallbladder but felt it was “under control” most of the time by diet so I lived with it and the occasional episodes of extreme pain that came when I was too busy to watch my diet and exercise.
Somewhere during my 2nd year in this position, I had a moment of clarity. I remember sitting at the stop sign at the start of my 1-hour commute to work and feeling like there were strings attached all over my body trying to pull me in multiple directions. If one thing pulled too hard, I was going to fly apart into a thousand pieces. I had the distinct thought that “this life is not sustainable.” I would say this was the moment I started realizing that I was burned out and started thinking about a career change. However, I stayed for another 3 years because I couldn’t bring myself to leave my colleagues and didn’t feel like I was done training/mentoring others to take over the position. It took dramatic changes in my workplace and a crisis in my personal life for me to finally fully admit that I was burned out and needed to start taking steps to address the burnout.
コメント