A burnout usually does not arise solely from work, but rather from the sum of all the stressors to which we expose ourselves. Eéone of these factors may well be the literal drop that causes the bucket to overflow, but even then it is important to include ALL the factors that lead to overpressure in the treatment plan.

Since usually ééone expert can almost never be top expert in all of these areas, it is often wise to engage a professional online self-guidance program because it can guide you or your employee across all of these areas of expertise.

How does work stress or work pressure arise?

We distinguish between employee-related risk factors, leadership-related risk factors in the manager or team leader, team-related risk factors and organization-related risk factors.

Employee-related risk factors

  • perfectionism at work
  • poor time management or time management at work
  • poor priority management at work
  • poor communication about priorities and expectations
  • unrealistic expectations
  • realistic expectations but an unrealistic roadmap to reach your goal. 

Leadership-related risk factors with the manager or team leader

  • unclear goals for each employee
  • non-adapted leadership style to the employee's professional development stage 
  • lack of consultation 
    • about the order of priorities
    • about the degree of perfection of execution per priority
    • about the effort per priority
    • about the number of priorities per day, week, month, year per employee

Team-related risk factors

  • unhealthy collaborative culture in the team
  • lack of cultural management of the team by the manager or person in charge
  • unclear agreements about who does what and when
  • too little flexibility in the team's collaboration to balance between working together versus each taking individual responsibility
  • lack of solution-oriented team culture. This can be addressed by teaching team members to think solution-focused through a online solution-focused program

Organizational risk factors

  • unclear strategic formulation at the CEO level 
  • unclear communication of the strategy by the CEO, supported by HR and all management levels
  • lack of solution-oriented company culture. This can be addressed by teaching team members to think solution-focused through a online solution-focused program

How does family stress arise?

  • wanting to meet too many expectations at once from those around you
  • wanting to score or advance in too many areas at the same time: building a house, top career, extensive social life, children who (must) excel in all kinds of sports and activities and who must be taken there by parents, …

How does personal stress arise?

  • unrealistic expectations about what goals you can accomplish by when
  • unrealistic goals about how much you can accomplish in a day, week, month or year
  • lack of choice about what you want to be a perfectionist in and what aspects you should not be a perfectionist in. 
  • lack of acceptance of your (current) limitations
  • lack of solution-focused ability
  • lack of emotional self-management
  • genetically increased risk in conditions such as ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) or OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), often accompanied by an increased tendency to perfectionism from a desire for greater certainty and control over the environment or context)
  • .
  • Lack of solution-focused thinking and solution-focused flexibility

How does digital stress arise?

  • social media stress
  • permanent 24/7 accessibility to both friends and colleagues’s, without giving your brain the natural break that the mammal ‘human’ needs.
  • Our brain needs a naturally cyclical rhythm like the seasons and the fluctuations between day and night, or the lesser known 90-minute cycle of increasing attention spans interspersed with the need for a short mini-break;
    • Engineers at most large Internet companies often deliberately program many of these tools to be addictive. They often know that this makes our brains sick. Yet their shareholder expects short-term quarterly results that are better off with ‘programming to addiction’ than sustained programming. 
    • This necessitates people and businesses to take responsibility themselves to protect us from this sickening influence of many technologiesën.The evolution of these technologies is currently moving faster than humanity's ability to adapt. Nature's response is to pull the emergency brake in the form of, among other things: burnout! The useful function of burnout is to warn us in a (clumsy) way that we are going over our limit and need to catch our breath or take a break. Unfortunately, the stage of burnout is often already an almost irreversible condition if one is not careful. Therefore, we recommend, for example, to take a professional online self-test monthly to preventively measure your invisible stress level.