How psychological hardiness can help to protect against burnout

Over the past 30 years, psychologists have studied a factor called hardiness, which is best understood as a mindset or attitude about stress that influences how you interpret the world and make sense of your experiences. Your hardiness level determines how you react and respond to stressful and unexpected situations.

Three components make up your hardiness level:

1. Seeing change and new experiences as opportunities to learn and develop.
2. Control: Belief in one’s ability to control or influence events and outcomes.
3. Commitment: A tendency to see the world and day-to-day activities as interesting, meaningful and having purpose.

Together, these three factors work to make up your total hardiness level, which has important implications for coping with stress and burnout.

Hardiness protects against burnout

In a recent study, our team measured the relationship between hardiness levels and burnout experiences in employees. Burnout generally means experiencing high levels of emotional exhaustion, cynicism and low professional efficacy.

We found that people who are higher in hardiness (compared to those who are lower in hardiness) reported being:

• Less likely to feel overextended and exhausted by their work.
• Less likely to have an indifferent or distant attitude towards their work.
• More likely to be satisfied with past and present accomplishments and expected to continue to be effective at work.

Why does hardiness protect against burnout?

People who are higher in hardiness are more likely to engage in active coping and positive reframing or reimagining strategies when faced with stressful situations.

Consider a leader who needs to take on the work of employees until they can hire new replacements. When faced with this stressful situation, a leader higher in hardiness would be:

• More likely to take direct action to tackle the problem (e.g., start working with Human Resources on hiring replacements immediately) and look for something positive in the stressful situation (e.g., they now have an opportunity to bring in some fresh perspectives to the team).
• Less likely to ignore the situation, hope it resolves itself, and take on the mentality that someone else will do the work to fix the problem for them.

Hardy people interpret stress as something to overcome rather than to avoid, and this positive and problem-focused approach helps them experience less burnout in the workplace.

Beyond burnout: the benefits of hardiness in the workplace

Although a person’s hardiness level plays a critical role in their tendency to experience burnout, there are additional benefits to having hardy employees and leaders. In our research, we found that people who are higher in hardiness are more likely to:

• Report success in their jobs.
• Report being engaged at work.
• Indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic made no change or had a positive shift in their workplace performance and employment stability.

The good news is that, with some effort, hardiness can be developed, and people can be trained to take on a hardy mindset to tackle stressful situations.

Dr. Steven Stein is the co-author of Hardiness: Making Stress Work For You to Achieve Your Life Goals and several books on emotional intelligence. More at https://mhs.com.

Advertising feature produced by Randall Anthony Communications. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.