Our brain is always playing tricks on us. We think it’s on our side but often it’s on a track of its own, leading us to making a bad decisions or misinterpreting signals. Here are two biases that smoulder when burnout affects us, our families, or our colleagues.
Hostile attribution bias - the burnout canary
Have you ever been in the situation where you asked, perfectly politely, a colleague to help you do something? Perhaps find the notes on a patient? Maybe they blanked you and dashed away. Maybe you detected a dirty look or a sneer. It’s a busy day on call and you are feeling stressed and harried. Perhaps you’ve worked the last two weekends and, to be honest, you are bone tired.
Your anger and frustration bubbles up. How dare they?
Hostile attribution bias is when children and adults are much more likely to interpret actions which are ambiguous or neutral as hostile. It was first described by psychologists Nasby, Hayden and DePaulo in 1980. They were researching the behaviour of aggressive boys and it’s a serious problem that has mortality implications - one study showed adults with hostile attribution bias were four times more likely to die by age 50.
Now, no one is suggesting you will die young because you get snappy with a colleague. However, there is evidence that burnout makes you more likely to fall into a pattern of lower level bias where neutral acts are interpreted as being hostile. That can worsen your feelings of burnout as you become more angry and possibly isolated.
Watch out for that malignant smear of hostile attribution bias… it could be the canary in the coal mine, a marker of burnout in yourself or others.
Omission bias
Imagine the scenario: you are starved and stopped from going to the toilet for your basic ablutions; any food you get is crappy junk from a vending machine; a little device bleeps at regular intervals and stops you sleeping; and you can’t exercise. It could be any torture camp at the end of an extraordinary rendition flight.
Welcome to a night on-call for a junior doctor.
By any reasonable definition those are unpleasant events. We accept them as an inevitable part of the job and they are downplayed. But when portrayed like they are in the first paragraph they are acts of commission.
In many work environments we frame them as acts of omission; healthy eating, sleeping, and exercising are quietly dropped from our routine.
We have a tendency to be more judgemental about acts of commission.
We are far less judgemental about acts of omission. The natural bias is to accept them and place less importance on them. Push back against these omissions. On an individual level there is scope for planning to mitigate the harms but it’s also necessary to build system level solutions.
Burnout is not just about the individual. The systems in which we work need improvement. Managers need to have their omission bias pointed out to them and don’t let them skew your thinking.
Nirvana fallacy
I offer this one as a final informal fallacy to consider. There is no perfect solution to burnout. The nirvana fallacy or the closely related perfect solution fallacy are arguments against change because the problem can't be completely fixed. And, it’s true. We will not ease the problem of burnout in a single swoop.
Do not let that stop you from improving your own situation or the workplace and system in which you work.
Dr Euan Lawson writes at www.blokeology.io on evidence-based health, fitness, and lifestyle. There’s a podcast too….