ACTing Against Burnout: The Case of Jack
In this clinical case, Jessica Borushok, Ph.D., provides a comprehensive overview of burnout from a practical perspective. She talks about the features and symptoms of burnout through a case study conceptualized from an acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) perspective. She also explores treatment strategies to address work-related and lifestyle factors contributing to the burnout in this case. Specific ACT components such as experiential avoidance, creative hopelessness, values, defusion, and committed action are addressed, to provide you with effective tools to help your clients alleviate burnout.
<> ACT for Burnout: Unfolding the True Values
Uncovering our true values can be challenging. Learn to ask the right questions to differentiate between personally-significant values and those from outside of us.
1. We can draw values from family, culture, faith, and society, which may at times conflict with what is personally important to us.
2. The 80th birthday exercise provides information about values, as well as creative hopelessness, by exploring what the client would want to be said of them on that day, and what that tells them about how they live their life now.
3. If a client has difficulty with visualization exercises, you can suggest such alternatives as listening to an imaginary voicemail or reading an imaginary card received on their 80th birthday.
<> ACT for Burnout: Present Moment Exercises
Learn present moment exercises that can help clients to face struggles in work and in life generally, examining their emotions and behaviors.
1. Understanding patterns of behavior through present moment awareness exercises is a useful way to identify the experiences that lead to burnout.
2. Present moment awareness exercises, such as counting while breathing, brushing teeth with the non-dominant hand, and exercises around identifying moments, can slow down the wandering mind and promote presence.
3. Recording such moments and understanding what thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations come with them provides targets for defusion.
<> ACTing Against Burnout: Final Steps
Learn how to help clients engage with their values, and use awareness and defusion exercises and practices to break the cycle of burnout.
1. Using ACT helps clients to create space from their burnout and bring attention to meaningful behaviors, rather than focusing rigidly on overwhelming thoughts, emotions, and sensations.
2. Making progress requires small, incremental steps of engagement and being present in moment-to-moment experience.
3. Utilizing metaphors, such as names, characters, and animals, helps to make abstract concepts like burnout or the mind more tangible yet usefully distanced for both client and therapist.