The Easiest Way to Beat Burnout Is to Ignore the Annoying Shit and Work.
Everyone has things to do with annoying coworkers, but how you deal with them and adapt will determine whether your day at work is good or bad. A new study says the best way to deal with peers’ stupidity is to simply ignore it and enjoy ignoring it.
The Science Of Us explains in detail, but here’s the bottom line of the study (albeit small and self-proclaimed in nature 🙂
In a new study published in the Health Care Management Review, written by Stat’s Casey Ross, 596 Canadian nurses completed two email surveys over the course of a year. This showed, according to Ross, a “self-fulfilling prophecy”: nurses who thought they could ignore “impolite workplace” (read: their colleagues’ bullshit) were less worried about it and reported lower burnout rates. If you think that your colleagues’ rudeness won’t get under your skin, this is unlikely.
This is a self-reported survey driven study, so it would be great to see an experimental follow-up to better understand how this dynamic works. At the same time, there is reason to believe that nurses are particularly well suited to understanding the interpersonal dynamics of burnout because their work is so social and the medical culture is, unfortunately, still brutal.
This is easier said than done, of course. You can’t just believe that your annoying coworker won’t annoy you to get his behavior to stop or leave, but the more you can convince yourself that they won’t get to you, no matter what they do, the more you will believe it. with time. It’s a growing process, but there are signs that it gets better over time.
A Good Way to Avoid Burnout | Science about us