Burnout is often a skills or information gap
When work becomes emotional, work is hard
Burnout is a mismatch between skill level and challenge. Typically, when we feel burnout it is the opposite of flow. Let’s define flow:
Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi, the father of flow, describes eight characteristics of flow:
Complete concentration on the task
Clarity of goals and rewards in mind and immediate feedback
Transformation of time (speeding up/slowing down)
An intrinsically rewarding experience
Effortlessness and ease
A balance between challenge and skills
Actions and awareness merged, losing self-conscious rumination
A feeling of control over the task
The wrong blend of challenge and skill results in an emotional experience, and the lack of clarity in an emotional experience can be a culprit of burnout. We attribute burnout to workload — but an excessive workload may be attributed to a lack of clarity, skills, or challenge.
Couldn’t agree more as this is my lived experience doing a PhD. I’ve spent the first two years in utter confusion and unproductively but I’ve finally found clarity . I can see it’s a direct effect of having more knowledge and acquiring more skills in my field