Treating burnout syndrome

  Treatments for burnout syndrome incorporate both cognitive and behavioural components. These include stress reduction programmes and general stress management techniques such as physical exercise and relaxation training. It is also associated with patterns of over-commitment to work such as perfectionism, unrelenting standards, workaholism, over-identification with work and a Type A behavioural pattern (described in Chapter 9). Modification of these patterns of over-commitment can help reduce the symptoms of the burnout syndrome.

Treating the hostility syndrome

  The hostility syndrome is characterized by feelings of chronic anger, irritability, frustration and the desire to fight perceived injustices. In the work context, overt displays of aggression are usually not tolerated and are channelled into alternative displacement behaviours, which collectively may be called letting off steam. Examples of such displacement behaviours include banging the desk, raising one’s voice, slamming a door to vent angry feelings and the proverbial ‘kicking the cat’. The person may verbalize a desire to punch someone on the nose, engage in sarcasm directed towards the perpetrator or become increasingly cynical about their work or those they work with. However, of greater concern is the possibility that workers may find more destructive outlets through which they can displace their angry feelings onto their work colleagues or onto others in their personal life (family, partner or children). In one’s personal life this could take the form of physical abuse and domestic violence. In the workplace it could manifest itself in more subtle forms of aggressive behaviour, such as bullying, harassment, humiliation, interpersonal conflicts, passive aggression and acts of rebellion, which are more difficult to quantify.

The experience of anger is usually triggered by the perception that one has been treated unfairly. This results in a number of systematic biases in thinking, which lead to demonizing or monsterizing the perceived perpetrator. They condemn the whole person, magnify all the negative aspects of the other person, mentally filter out all the positives, polarize and blame the person to whom they attribute the injustice. The key point is that the negative distortions about the alleged perpetrator are often very much exaggerated. Physiologically the angry individual experiences a heightened state of arousal, which may be experienced as a range of bodily symptoms such as the body tensing up and the heart thumping.

Treating the hostility syndrome involves the individual learning a number of anger management strategies. Most anger management training packages consist of a number of components such as relaxation training and breathing techniques to reduce physiological arousal, coping skills such as social skills training, assertiveness skills, effective communication and negotiation skills, which are all aimed at broadening the individual’s repertoire of coping responses (see Chapters 6 to 8). In addition, cognitive therapy techniques are used to help the individual address their dysfunctional assumptions of justice, fairness and moral codes of right and wrong, which underlie aggressive reactions and serve to perpetuate the problem. These include techniques such as looking at the evidence for and against, alternative ways of seeing the situation, advantages and disadvantages and correcting distortions as outlined in Chapter 9. The individual practises these techniques in real life situations in order to consolidate the skills learned.

If the individual is still having difficulties in managing their anger after going through their anger management routine, they need to learn to exit themselves from the triggering situation in order to ensure that they do not act upon their aggressive inclinations and only to return to the situation once they have calmed down. They should then be able to deal with it in a more rational and objective way than they would when they were in a state of heightened arousal.