Tag Archives: burnout

Pie charts and scribbled napkins

When I see a particular client it doesn’t take me long to find her file in my file cabinet. It’s the one with the colour-coded tabs sticking out. These tabs form part of the many background documents she wrote for me to assist in the treatment process. Meanwhile, I have another client who has yet [...]

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The Yes Man

Stress can be loosely defined as any challenge. The body’s stress response is the alarm that signals a need to act on the challenge. The greater the challenge, the greater the stress. This also implies that a confident person or a person with great skill will feel less stress when facing the same challenge. But [...]

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Batman’s belt

Stress is all about the challenges we face. The greater the challenge, the greater the stress. The negative emotion we feel is usually labelled anxiety when it is acute. In more chronic situations, we feel a general sense of unease which often produces burnout or depression. These negative feelings push us to address the problem and [...]

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How blue is blue: Understanding depression and burnout

Hi folks, Every year the Douglas Institute hosts a series of lectures for the general public called the Mini-Psych School. We then produce DVDs of these lectures and post them on line. In 2009, I gave a lecture entitled How blue is blue? Here it is in two parts. You might want to keep a [...]

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When everything is a priority, nothing is.

Here is a column I published last week. I have been giving a number of talks on burnout and stress recently. It seems that in our modern world of management by objectives, the number of people on the verge of a breakdown is rising dramatically. The source of overwork can come from others (superiors, public [...]

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Depression and Burnout

The Douglas Institute Foundation recently ran a public education and fundraising campaign. One of the topics it chose was “Burnout.”It seems that everyone has a different idea about what burnout is and most people confuse it with depression (and with good reason because “Burnout” is not a well-defined term). In order to help shed some [...]

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