Do you dread going to work and lie that you are sick to avoid the office? Do you fantasise about starting a new life on a tropical island or in a faraway city to escape the bullying, overload or boredom of your workplace?
JULIET ROWAN talks to people in a range of industries who tell stories of being burdened to the point of incapacity by their jobs.
Paula* owns a busy Bay business. She is a social butterfly and charming host, but under the charismatic veneer lies a woman who often feels exhausted and dreams of escaping to somewhere faraway, into silence.
Paula calls it "people overload" and says it probably affects anyone working in the service industry.
It's like you really have to force yourself to get out there and participate...You actually sort of shut down and become slightly reclusive.
"It's a point where you're at the end of the day and you simply can't face speaking to another person."
She carries the exhaustion home and says it takes a toll on her family and friends.
"It's not very good for the social life. You come home and you don't answer the phone. You don't want to talk to anyone about anything because you've just been small chatting all day to people."
In contrast to her past, going out socially is a chore.
"It's like you really have to force yourself to get out there and participate...You actually sort of shut down and become slightly reclusive."
Having easy-going friends is necessary, she says, "because if you don't, people just don't understand you.
"You need to be able to feel like you can be around people where it's actually okay not to be talking. You get worried if people start demanding your time. You just feel like, 'Oh my God, I've already given so much of my time and myself today, I can't possibly give any more'."
Paula regularly dreams of selling her business and moving to the other side of the world.
"You just think, 'I'm just going to get away from everything and everyone I know and then I will be fine and safe and no one can call me, no one can ask me for anything, no one can whinge at me'."
LUCY* works in a busy Tauranga office where the pressure is constant.
Things came to a head last year when she fell victim to a workplace bully, and found herself unable to cope with the stress of dealing with someone who belittled her on top of her unrelenting workload.
"There'd be days you'd wake up and go, 'What can I do to get out of going to work today? Could I accidentally trip myself up on my morning walk and break my ankle so I wouldn't have to come to work?' It was really bad," she says.
It was a struggle, literally forcing myself out of bed, [thinking] 'You have to get out of bed now, go for a walk, get the blood pumping, then go to work'.
Lucy felt defeated and sapped of energy at the end of each day and used all her sick leave to get respite.
"I'd just take days off because I couldn't handle going in every day. I needed a day just to unwind and lie in the sun and go for a walk on the beach, just to turn off everything."
At the height of her burnout, Lucy continually searched for different jobs and imagined herself overseas with friends, "always thinking it'd be better if I was there".
When she looks back now, she realises she spiralled into depression.
"You never realise at the time, and then you come out of it and you're like, 'Holy shit, I was so depressed.' It was a struggle, literally forcing myself out of bed, [thinking] 'You have to get out of bed now, go for a walk, get the blood pumping, then go to work'."
Although the bully is gone, Lucy's heavy workload remains and she often feels panicky and unable to concentrate.
ANDREW* is one of many Bay tradespeople personally feeling the pressure of soaring demand in the building industry.
"On a day-to-day basis, I'll come home wiped out, mentally and physically," he says.
No matter how fast you work for the day it's never going to be fast enough to catch up with the workload.
"The trade in this area is ridiculous at the moment. There is so much demand. We don't have enough staff. We don't have enough companies to provide services. We'll arrive for jobs a week or two weeks late, so when you show up on a site, they're already angry with you."
Andrew routinely works 12-hour days and rarely catches up with friends outside work. "I'm too knackered," he says. "You resent it taking up your personal life."
He also feels intense dread about going to work. "You know there's constantly going to be people frustrated at you the entire day. No matter how fast you work for the day it's never going to be fast enough to catch up with the workload."
Other tradespeople stand over him waiting for jobs to get done so they can start, while bosses expect employees to sign off work that has been done in a rush.
"That makes you resent them because they still want you to put your name on it and if anything goes wrong, it comes back on us, not them."
Andrew dreams of leaving his job "on a daily basis" and is actively looking to change careers.
"You hear the grass is always greener in Australia and you always hear the workload is a lot less and you get paid a lot more. There's always temptation hanging over your head to jump ship."
IN THE PAST, work burnout tended to affect isolated professions, such as doctors, nurses and others working long hours.
But in the 21st century, no profession is immune to the problem, says leading Tauranga psychologist Dr Adriaan Engelbrecht.
He says teachers, chefs, farmers, salespeople, shop workers, truck drivers, builders and his fellow psychologists are among those vulnerable to occupational burnout.
"It's mainly around an overload of demands," he says. "Just simply the amount of tasks we constantly need to do is excessive."
Dr Engelbrecht, who oversees 25 psychologists working at the Bay of Plenty District Health Board and also operates a private practice, says otherwise resourceful and resilient people can burn out when demands get too high.
We have extended our work day way beyond a typical 8 to 5 through the fact that we sometimes remain on-call, like a medical doctor 24 hours of the day and even over weekends.
He says those demands can include the demands of life outside work, while the wrong skill level for a job can be another factor in occupational burnout.
"For some people, it is being overly skilled and under-utilised so boredom starts setting in. For other people, it's simply being too long in the same job and you get worn down by that. Bullying might contribute, or otherwise, especially working in big organisations, the individual often gets a sense of not being in control anymore."
"People fatigue" or being inundated with contact with people and the demands they make is a major contributor, as is information overload. People are constantly processing information in our job tasks, but nowadays with electronic media, we are bombarded by an overload of electronic information and unfortunately that often doesn't stop in the afternoons. People carry that home with their smartphones, with their iPads ... We have extended our work day way beyond a typical 8 to 5 through the fact that we sometimes remain on-call, like a medical doctor 24 hours of the day and even over weekends."
Allowing yourself to work into the evenings at home is a trap, says Dr Engelbrecht.
"You're no longer protected in your safe zone and if you find a problem or a distressing-type situation at 8 o'clock at night, that from then impacts on your sleep pattern, and worry, all those type of things, start setting in."
He emphasises that burnout is not only caused by severe events at work.
"It doesn't need to be an extreme stress. It's just the day-to-day processing of slotting through a huge amount of work that wears you down over time, and you don't notice it. Because you've coped with yesterday, today was not much more difficult, but it wears you down ... And if you then on top of that go home and there are children at home with their difficulties, their challenges, you simply run out of capacity to deal with things. Sometimes people literally almost become allergic to dealing with a further problem."
He says the modern family, specifically the rise of nuclear, single-parent and mobile families living away from relatives, has exacerbated the problem because people lack the mitigating support of the past.
Occupational burnout can also develop into depression or anxiety conditions.
It's a tightness that sits in the stomach, that sits in the chest, shallow breathing, and cognitively, just one of dreading to climb this huge mountain yet again.
DR ENGELBRECHT lists a range of symptoms associated with burnout [see box at side], and says it is characterised by a level of exhaustion.
"For some people it creates a sense of hopelessness, of powerlessness, for others, it creates a sense of apathy. They've lost interest in life ... and often [have] a sense of dread."
Irritability and reduced tolerance of noise is another symptom. "The noise of your kids, or just people talking, irritates people quicker, and again, it's just simply, the brain is overloaded by demands constantly, and that's just another sensory demand that's being made."
Negativity escalates to a state of constantly anticipating the worst, and then as a way of coping, people start exhibiting avoidant behaviour, including procrastinating on chores and avoiding socialising.
This happens "if you're constantly talking either in helping professions or so many other people-related [professions]."
The other major coping response is alcohol or drugs, which he says just worsens the pattern.
"It makes us relax initially but then impacts on the sleep pattern. Broken sleep starts setting in and then for the next days, we've got reduced mood, energy, etcetera," he says.
And, in the midst of burnout comes escapism.
"Escapist thinking is almost the one of thinking about Lotto, thinking about that tropical island on your own for a long time, or thinking about a different career, job, city, relationship. It's almost saying, 'I wish I could go to sleep for a hundred years and never wake up'."
Dread about going to work is common, as are accompanying physiological reactions. "It's a tightness that sits in the stomach, that sits in the chest, shallow breathing, and cognitively, just one of dreading to climb this huge mountain yet again."
Dr Engelbrecht says unless burnout is addressed, it runs the risk of escalating and negatively affecting health, and he says the first step is examining whether the situation can be resolved.
'At times, it literally means resigning from a job that is no longer tenable, that is only going to cost you your health [or] your relationship," says Dr Engelbrecht.
But in less extreme cases, he says, people need to look at the possibility of reducing demands, or "juggling less balls".
"Because let's face it, some of us can juggle a number of balls well, but only for limited periods, and we can't do it prolonged, over a long time, it becomes exhausting."
Regular breaks are crucial to preventing information overload and getting quiet time out. That includes not only breaks during the day, but regular holidays.
Previously, in days gone by, the moment 5 o'clock comes, you walk out of the office. You would no longer have been contactable.
"Even just the act of planning breaks already improves your current situation. If you know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel in three weeks, that I've got a weekend away in Taupo, it already assists you at present."
People need to change their mindset to create clear boundaries between work and home.
"It's starting to safeguard one's weekends or one's times off, and especially the moment you step out of the workplace, the work stops."
He recommends switching off the work phone and only turning it back on the next morning, and not checking work emails at home. Doing so extends the high-intensity stimulus overload environment of work back to home and starts intruding on family time.
"Previously, in days gone by, the moment 5 o'clock comes, you walk out of the office. You would no longer have been contactable."
Companies also need to limit demands on workers in their free time.
"Managers need to get out of the mindframe of believing that you can still make demands of employees electronically outside their working hours."
Long-term, he believes people need to make lifestyle changes, such as scaling back their days of work as they get older (a common practice among senior doctors).
"For me, it is managing ourselves as a sustainable human resource. We think sustainability in terms of our fisheries and nature conservation and all those type of things, but we need to start thinking sustainability over the lifetime of our careers ... Only if we manage ourselves as a sustainable way as a human resource do we extend our lifetime, our happiness, and everything that goes with that."
Just those little things are making such a big difference. Really simple stuff that can bring you so much joy and you can forget about everything.
Business owner Paula* recognises her escapist fantasies about moving to the other side of the world are not reality and has begun making a concerted effort to regain work/life balance.
"I have to stop this one-way street of just constantly being out of balance," she says.
"You divide your life up into a pie really, don't you, and three-quarters of the pie was taken up with work. You need to balance that pie."
When we spoke, she had just got back from a game on the beach with her family, and had enjoyed another evening of building sandcastles with her kids earlier in the week.
"Just those little things are making such a big difference. Really simple stuff that can bring you so much joy and you can forget about everything."
I've got to go to work and work, but then leave work at work and not take it home with me.
Some things, though, remain difficult to control, like calls outside of work hours about sick staff, broken equipment or a fire alarm going off in the middle of the night.
"We can't really filter anything because generally it's a drama that needs to be sorted."
Lucy* is also learning to manage her stress and says the key for her is positive thinking and creating a clear delineation between work and home.
"I've got to go to work and work, but then leave work at work and not take it home with me, and that's turning off the phone at night and not worrying."
She says in the past she thought about nothing but her job but is now living by the adage "You don't live to work, you work to live".
She has also learned the importance of looking after herself physically.
"I know if I don't get up and exercise, I'm going to feel like shit all day at work."
She is also taking care to drink lots of water and limit her coffee and sugar intake.
-Names and some identifying features have been omitted from this story to protect people's privacy.
BURNOUT SYMPTOMS
* Routinely exhausted/fatigued.
* A sense of hopelessness, powerlessness, apathy, lethargy or lack of enjoyment.
* Dread about going to work.
* Irritability and reduced tolerance of, for example, noise and conversation.
* Avoidance of tasks and people.
* Use of drugs and alcohol.
* Escapist thinking. Eg. fantasising about moving to a tropical island.
* Physiological reactions, including tightness in the stomach and shallow breathing.
DEALING WITH AND PREVENTING BURNOUT
* Consider retraining or resigning if your job is going to cost you your health or relationships.
* Look at reducing demands and "juggling fewer balls".
* Create clear boundaries between work and home - switch off your phone and avoid checking work emails at home.
* Quiet time and time without digital devices are necessary to prevent people and information overload.
* Regular cardiovascular exercise, good nutrition and sleep management are crucial.
* Take regular breaks, not only during the day, but plan weekend breaks and holidays.
* Increase level of fun and enjoyment in life.
* In the long term, look at lifestyle changes and managing your workload sustainably. Eg. cutting back to four days a week.
Source: Adriaan Englebrecht