Did you know that you have a psychological immune system that protects your emotional well-being in negative situations?
Me either.
It works similarly to your physiological immune system that helps protect your physical health.
A few weeks ago, I came across an article in Psychology Today that lead me down a rabbit hole of lots of fascinating information about this topic. My burnout and stress spidey senses were immediately triggered.
What is the Psychological Immune System?
Your psychological immune system plays a crucial role in maintaining emotional and mental well-being.
It’s an array of cognitive processes that help you adapt to stressful or negative circumstances. It operates by reframing events, offering alternative explanations, and providing emotional relief – often without conscious awareness.
For example, after experiencing a setback like losing a big client, your psychological immune system might help you rationalize the situation as a valuable learning experience, thus avoiding emotional distress.
This self-protective mechanism tries to help us make the best of bad events. It helps us process a negative environment, assign meaning to what is happening, and find positives.
It’s that thing that’s saying, “Hey Jennifer, this isn’t so bad! Since that client bailed, now you can spend more time figuring out your favorite flavor of ice cream.”
Research done by Daniel Gilbert and Tim Wilson found that we often overestimate how unhappy we will be after a negative event. “We underestimate how quickly our feelings are going to change in part because we underestimate our ability to change them. This can lead us to make decisions that don’t maximize our potential for satisfaction,” said Gilbert.
Basically, your lack of faith in your own resilience leads you to incorrectly expect that negative emotions will always last longer than they actually do. So, you are adding unnecessary stress and anxiety to the situation.
What Does This Have to Do with Burnout?
Your psychological immune system can make your reaction conform to something that makes it more consistent with your outward behavior or reaction, tricking you into thinking you are happier about something than you actually are – which is often what it’s doing when you’re burned out.
Let’s say you have to make difficult decision about whether to stay late to finish a project or leave work on time to see your kid’s baseball game. You may experience feelings of sadness or guilt over the choice you didn’t make. So, if you choose to stay late at work and miss your kid’s game, you will eventually come to feel that finishing your project was more important. You will rationalize missing your kid’s game by saying you can see the next one and make yourself believe you are okay with your choice.
This doesn’t feel the same as being naturally happy or satisfied, nor does it fully rid you of the stress or anxiety caused by the difficult decision. In fact, you’re still feeling this undertow that something isn’t quite right. Your psychological immune system is trying to help you ignore that sinking feeling.
Your psychological immune system can facilitate a path to burnout by:
- Misjudgment of capacity: Since your psychological immune system has an optimistic bias, it can lead you to underestimate the emotional and mental toll of chronic stress, pushing you toward unsustainable work habits.
- Rationalization of overwork: Attempt to manage the meaning of a situation – for example, by downplaying a problem’s importance – can make unhealthy work behaviors seem justifiable or even necessary. This can lead to reinforcing a vicious cycle of overcommitment.
- Neglect emotional cues: The focus on positive or neutral aspects might divert attention away from mounting stress and emotional fatigue, delaying necessary intervention.
It Can Be an Incredible Buffer
Even though your psychological immune system is likely working against you when you’re burned out, you can strengthen it to help you make better decisions when you’re under chronic stress. Since it wants to help you believe in something more positive, use it’s natural pull to get you out of a funk.
Try these three strategies to help neutralize your psychological immune system’s response:
- Move from negative to neutral. Our brains have a negativity bias, meaning we tend to focus on bad experiences more than good ones – especially when we are burned out and our whole world is on fire. Our brains do this to keep us wary of danger. However, if you feel content for too long a period of time, it makes you more likely to slack off and less motivated to work toward your next goal.
In order for your psychological immune system to kick in and move you away from this negativity and feeling trapped, change the narrative you are telling yourself. Your beliefs can be very powerful in changing your mindset.
Rather than leaping straight into positive self-talk in a heightened moment of stress, aim for messaging that is more neutral. Positive self-talk can be jarring when your brain is swimming in negativity. This can look or sound like:
- Practicing gratitude and reminding yourself that you have been through difficult situations before.
- Taking long, deep breaths to get you closer to a neutral calm.
- Phrases like “It is what it is.”
- Be present and live in the now. When we are spiraling in moments of stress – which is all of the time when you are under chronic stress – try to find the present moment, instead of allowing your mind to wander and ruminate about the past or worry about the future. You have to focus on what you can control.
This can be done by:
– Simply taking a sip of cold water.- Focusing on your breath.
- Getting a hug from someone you care about.
- Practice acceptance and compassion. Compassion is key when you are stuck in burnout and chronic stress. When you are burned out, tips and tricks can feel over-simplified or even make a situation worse by suggesting we can “think positive” out of difficult situations. At this point, it’s important to acknowledge your negative feelings and emotions so you can deal with them, rather than choking them down.
This can look like:
- Acknowledging that a situation sucks and the only way out of it, is through it. Have a reward ready for yourself at the end of the journey, so you feel like it was worth it.
Our minds are more resilient than we know. Life is unpredictable and full of things that can stress us out.
Your psychological immune system can be another tool that helps stabilize you in a moment of stress.
Illustration by Yahhya Anas / Vecteezy
