Breaking the burnout in advocacy

The Australian Institute for Health and Wellbeing reported in July 2020 that mental ill-health skyrocketed in the past year. And that those already managing mental ill-health faced a further aggravation of symptoms.

Working in isolation from home, travel restrictions, and for many, balancing work, schooling, and childcare without the usual supports have created a perfect storm for burnout.

Burnout shows through exhaustion, a disdain for your job, and reduced personal productivity. It refers specifically to workplace stress, but can cause overflowing effects on other aspects of life. Thus it is not a problem of work performance alone; it is important to manage and reduce whenever possible.

With input from our equity practitioners Amanda Moors-Mailei, Mehal Krayem, and Bilquis Ghani from the Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion, here is some advice on how to avoid and break burnout when working long term as an advocate.

Avoiding burnout

Don’t take on too much

It is important to know your limits and to not take on more than you need. While it’s good to support others when they have reduced capacity, remember your own situation as well. Are you caring for dependents, having health issues, or studying yourself?

Amanda recommends making conscious choices about what work you can take on and self-reflecting frequently to ensure you know what capacity you are at.

Bilquis and Mehal also suggest working from behind the scenes instead of front and centre as representatives of your community.

Walk away when necessary

Some work involves intense emotional labour that stays with us after we clock off. Working in advocacy is a marathon, not a sprint. Taking a break and walking away when necessary is important.

Bilquis advises taking short term breaks early instead of pushing yourself too far to the point you need to take a permanent break.

Taking a short time away to reset your mental health means you can come back and create change on a longer term.

Keep yourself accountable

It is hard to not blame yourself if you are suffering from burnout, particularly with guilt surrounding needing to leave the workplace for a period of time. But burnout can only get worse without treating the cause.

Mehal recommends having co-workers to keep you accountable and check in on you. Especially if you are both members of a diverse group that is visible – for example, cultural and linguistically diverse groups, or having a visible disability – for whom pressures from the general public are constant and ongoing.

Recognise the burnout creep

Burnout doesn’t appear overnight – it comes as an ongoing, creeping presence that is especially prevalent in face-to-face and high emotional capacity jobs. Like many other cyclical spans of mental ill health, burnout creep can only be recognised with self-awareness and experience. But once recognised, it can be easier to stop.

Amanda recommends getting to know yourself to understand how you react. Deep self-reflection helps identify what behaviours and actions in the workplace contribute to stress, and in understanding your reactions to them, know when it’s time to intervene.

Getting back from burnout

Do something that connects you back to your roots

Engaging with your community outside of a duty-of-care context can reconnect you and remind you why your work is so important in the first place.

While there are many ways to reconnect with your culture, Amanda has found connecting to her family and talking to them during burnout, as well as listening to Pasifika music, has helped to re-ground and realign with her values as a woman of Oceania.

Take a break from social media

Social media can contribute to burnout, especially when working in advocacy. Taking to social media to call out or defend others on top of working all day contributes to stress.

Take a break, reduce, or mute. While the feeling is unnatural, Amanda said it helped tremendously, pushing her to re-evaluate the disconnect she was seeing between her real world and the online world.

If you can’t remove social media from your life for a period of time, you can still cultivate your feeds in a manner that inspires your growth and does not mire you in negativity or false information.

Talk about your feelings

Talking about how you are feeling can help reduce the burnout stress, especially when others you speak with are empathetic listeners, or have experienced similar feelings.

And please remember, your workplace may have support mechanisms you can access. At UTS, we have the Employee Assistance Program, or EAP, to provide support for staff when they may be experiencing mental ill-health, including burnout.