Last week, Apple announced a timely new iPhone update: ‘Focus Mode’ will stop devices from sending notifications from certain contacts or apps outside of working hours.
ork emails, office chat services and other means by which your boss can trouble you in your downtime will be more easily filtered out. Ignored, even.
If your first thought is “what if I miss something crucial?” and your second thought is “what if I lose my job as a result?”, read on. The innovation comes in response to the growing phenomenon of burnout — fuelled by precisely this inability to switch off.
As ever with tech, it is canny at providing the solutions to the problems it has helped create: in this case, our ‘always on’ culture. But as we reach the second summer of the pandemic, the increasing recognition that permanent connectivity could actually be bad for us extends beyond this.
Burnout was attracting attention before Covid, but experts agree that the shift to working from home — which is being embraced as a long-term model by many employers — is a major driver of the apparently soaring numbers suffering from it. Research has shown that when we work from home, many of us toil for longer hours and struggle to maintain work-life boundaries.
Adam Grant, a leading organisational psychologist whose 2020 TED talk Burnout is Everyone’s Problem helped ignite an ongoing debate, warns the merging of work and life can be problematic.
“If I think about the big reasons why people are burning out during Covid, I would say lack of boundaries is a huge factor,” he says. “Being overworked is a major problem. Empirically, people seem to be working two to three hours longer on average [than pre-pandemic] and some of that is because they’re not commuting, so they’ve shifted that time to work, but also because no one’s going anywhere.
“Everybody’s available all the time and it’s easier to schedule unwanted meetings early and late, and you don’t really have an excuse to say no.”
The unsettled economic climate, meanwhile, fuels fear among many about the safety of their roles if they don’t make themselves permanently at their employer’s disposal.
“For a lot of people in precarious jobs, there’s concern they may lose their jobs if they don’t prove they’re working all the time,” says Grant. “That’s also contributing to the ‘always on’ issue.”
Even when we’re not working, we can’t switch off.
Experts say our slavish relationship with screens, using them for everything from shopping to dating, perpetuates feelings of exhaustion. For many of us, our sense of identity has become bound up in frenetic, goal-oriented activity, both at work and outside of it. “There’s a badge of honour in being busy,” says psychotherapist Simon Shattock. “What’s it all about? Who are we doing it for?”
How do you know if you’re burned out rather than simply stressed? According to the World Health Organisation, burnout results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and is characterised by the following: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativity or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy.
It is defined as an occupational phenomenon rather than a health condition. But if left unchecked, it can be detrimental to health.
“We know burnout is a predictor of depression, not surprisingly,” Grant says. “Exhaustion often leads people to become really sad and the loss of energy is a big part of that. There’s evidence burnout also contributes to memory loss. When we’re exhausted, we don’t commit things to memory as well as we did before.”
Research has also linked burnout to sleep disturbances, weakened immune systems and a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease. Grant recommends speaking to colleagues about the problem and collectively raising it with your employer.
“As an individual, you may not have that much power [to change the working culture], but as a group, you have a voice,” he says. “Talk [to your employer] about the cost for motivation, performance and productivity if burnout is there.”
Shattock advises that, on a personal level, we try to strengthen the distinction between work and life.
“Establish your own cut-offs and say ‘I’m not going to be working past [such and such an hour]’, and let your employers know that,” he says. “You could say, ‘I will respond to emails between this hour and that hour’. Stick to it. Be clear with yourself, your family and your employers.”
We must ensure we build in downtime, which is crucial for brain function, allow ourselves to spend time with friends and family, go for a walk, or undertake charitable endeavours. “Things that make us happy,” says Shattock.
(© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2021)