Avoiding Burnout In Helping Professions: Treatment and Intervention Strategies

Abstract

Helping professions tend to take a serious physical and emotional toll on those who work in the profession. To establish a lifestyle of avoiding overextending oneself, professionals should work to not only hone their craft, but also learn techniques and strategies to enable self-care. Learning to deploy treatment and intervention strategies to develop a solid self-care regimen will not only improve the level of service provided, but will maintain a more physically and emotionally healthy workforce. This article will explore the definition of burnout and how to identify and combat it, but also offer the opportunity for the helping profession providers to develop self-care techniques and strategies for themselves. By establishing a system and implementation strategy on the institutional level, providers can address the root of burnout. No single intervention will create a culture where burnout does not exist. However, a combination of strategies and interventions among both the institution and the individual can provide employees with a greater sense of meaning in their work, thus providing the personal investment necessary to control and eliminate burnout tendencies. Keywords: helping, emotional, burnout, self-care, regimen, techniques, strategies, investment, meaning