Counselors are expected to maintain good physical and psychological health but when it comes to the type of work these counselors do, compassion fatigue and burnout are quite common among them and it doesn’t take long for burnout to transform into more serious mental health concerns. Maintaining effectiveness in their profession is a big task for these counselors as working day and night can result in physical and emotional exhaustion. So burnout can be serious and different steps should be taken to minimize it that will help maintain efficacy in their profession.
Following are the few steps and techniques that counselors can take to maintain effectiveness in their profession highlighting burnout.
Ø Reduce workload and take breaks:
Ø A self-checkup and therapy:
Ø Taking a day off:
Ø Develop and try to maintain interests outside of work:
Thanks for sharing
This is extremely important advice especially in this information age.
I've witnessed personally the effects of this in teaching, one teacher I knew personally was very close to burnout and was experiencing serious stress.
Both body and mind seemed to give signals that it was time to draw back and apply those tips you've given. Unfortunately, sometimes we don't always listen to these indicators when we need to, and so it's vital that we understand that life needs to be a balancing act.
Within the context of therapy, listening is an active process where the therapist displays extreme levles of concentration and mental effort to produce change or a alternate way of perceiving external circumstances. This sort of effort cannot be maintained without some sort of downtime and so this post is really useful.
According to studies: having a lazy day per week can avoid burnout. I think health professionals suffer from burnout because they are too over worked.
This is super important! I think what's unfortunate is that in the mental health field many jobs encourage relaxing to avoid burn out but don't give the proper resources to actually do so.