Burnout and Resiliency

What is burnout and resiliency? 

Sometime during the semester you might find yourself feeling “over it,” tired, and ready to quit.  That’s burnout!  That’s when we need resilience.  When we are resilient, we may still experience burnout and exhaustion, but we pause, take note, and make a plan to rest and get the support that we need to push through it. Maybe we need to cut back somewhere so we have the energy to finish other things.  Maybe there is nothing we can cut back on, and we need to ask for help. 

How can I explore this further? 

There’s a short exercise that you can do either on a piece of paper or in your head to take an inventory of where you are.  This is an adaptation Dr. Stevan E. Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory.  

We experience stress at three times: 

1. When we lose resources 
2. When we expect to lose resources 
3. When we work but fail to gain new resources 

We can think of these resources like buckets. We cope with stress when they are filled and experience stress when they are drained.  Taking a personal inventory of what is currently filling and draining our buckets can help us make a game plan to conserve resources so that we can finish strong.  

Links and Citations: 

Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American psychologist, 44(3), 513.