How to Avoid Burn Out: Running Out of Steam

Running Out of Steam As a nurse, wife and mother, Doris Young, 53, of Norfolk, Virginia, never stopped caring for others. "I worked in the hospital during the week," she says, "attended graduate school on weekends, went to my son's soccer games and always made sure dinner was on the table. I was never happy unless everyone in my life was." But after decades of dedication, she ran out of steam. "I had to take a month off. I didn't have enough energy to even get out of bed and clean my house." The self-described superwoman was burned out. Millions of other Americans are at risk too. In a recent national poll by , more than half of workers said they're under a great deal of stress; 77 percent reported feeling burnout sometimes. And no one is immune, regardless of age, gender or job. Mothers and managers, firefighters and flight attendants, teachers and telephone service reps may feel the flames of too much stress and not enough satisfaction.

"Burnout is an equal-opportunity condition," says Stephen Hinshaw, PhD, chairman of the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley -- and that holds true whether you work in an office or at home. "Many people, especially those caring for others, get to a point where there's an imbalance between their own feelings of being human and their confrontation with difficult, distressful issues on a day-to-day basis. Things go tilt." If you don't recognize what's going on and make some changes, he cautions, your health suffers, the quality of your work suffers, and you spiral downward.

After her bout with burnout, Young had to confront a painful truth: "My life was not working. A counselor asked, 'What do you want?' It was a light-bulb experience. I'd never thought about what I wanted." Over the course of five years, Young, author of , reshaped her career to become a coach helping nurses prevent and overcome burnout.