Avoiding burnout
Learning Objectives
After considering this resource, you should understand the pressures of social work and how best to manage them and yourself in order to avoid burning out.
Social work, like other caring professions, can be an incredibly stressful environment, as you are working with individuals who are in difficult circumstances. You can run the risk of exhaustion or emotional fatigue; in other words, of burning out. But this is not just an individual phenomenon, but also an organisational one, or even, as Maslach et al. suggest, a wider ''social'' one. But it is not inevitable. Institutional support and good practice can help allow social workers to fulfil their professional obligations effectively without pushing themselves beyond emotional and physical limits.
This quick guide suggests a number of individual and collective actions that can be taken to prevent yourself from burning out.
Reflective Questions
- What rewards do I gain from the work that I do?
- What challenges do I face in my work?
- What support do I need from (a) my colleagues, (b) my line manager (or practice teacher) and (c) my employing agency to help me work well and safely?
- What kind of social worker do I want to be and how far am I prepared to go, individually and collectively, to achieve my professional goals?
Reference:
Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W.B. and Leiter, M. P. (2001) 'Job burnout', Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 397-422.