A New Take on Burnout: My Review of Extinguish Burnout

Extinguish Burnout is a guide to burnout prevention and recovery written by Rob and Terri Bogue, a husband and wife team that helps people handle burnout. The most interesting idea in the book is that the authors look at burnout from a different angle than the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the most widely used definition of burnout. The Maslach definition of burnout involves three factors - exhaustion, cynicism, and lack of personal efficacy. The authors think that these three components are correlated with burnout, but not necessarily the causes of burnout.

Instead, the authors put forth a model of burnout based on personal agency. In this model your personal agency can be thought of like a bathtub. It gets filled up by results, support, and self-care and gets drained by demands. When the demands placed on you exceed your capacity to meet them, you start to feel burnout.

I like this model of personal agency. It's easy to understand how losing personal agency can lead to burnout. At the same time, I'm not convinced that it's that different from the Maslach definition of burnout. I feel like the personal agency model is the same as the exhaustion scale of burnout.

After explaining the personal agency model, the rest of the book covers various ways to increase your personal agency. This includes methods such as setting goals, connecting to others, and building resilience. I particularly liked the chapter on recognizing your own personal value and the idea that being enough as a human being does not mean having to be the best at everything.

The book is easy to read and divided into bite-sized chapters. I appreciate that the chapters are quick to get through, but I wish there was more detail in the chapters. There were a few cases where I wasn't sure how the methods directly related to reducing burnout.

If you're interested in short methods and practices for building personal agency, I think you would appreciate this book. You can learn more about the book and the authors at their website here.

This review was done with a copy provided by the author.