How to Recognize Burnout Before You’re Burned Out

The New York Times:

Emma Seppala was working as an intern at The International Herald Tribune (the past iteration of The International New York Times) one summer in college in Paris, shuttling between the newsroom writers and editors on the second floor and the workers at printing presses in the basement.

Ms. Seppala, the science director at the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, mulls the difference between the two starkly different atmospheres in her 2016 book “The Happiness Track”: One floor was raucous and full of laughter, the other floor was solemn and quiet. Can you guess which one she enjoyed being in more?

It was the press workers who had a sideboard covered with wine, cheeses and bread. They were vibrant, Ms. Seppala writes. “I believe most of us want to be like the French press workers: we want to do a good job no matter what that job might be — and we also want to be happy doing it.”

…

The pioneering researcher behind the study of burnout since the 1970s, Christina Maslach, professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a study that concluded there are three major signs of workplace burnout.

Read the whole story: The New York Times