Colleagues quarrelling, feeling weary?: Don’t look now
Posted on Feb 01, 2010 by Peter Totterdell
Do you sometimes feel exhausted at the end of a day? Perhaps you do a job that requires lots of physical exertion or one that taxes you mentally, but then again maybe your job has high emotional content. There are many jobs and work situations that involve dealing with emotions and it is recognised that this can lead to feeling fatigued and drained. Research on emotional labour has shown that this outcome is more likely to happen when: the job entails lots of contact with other people, the emotions that have to be expressed in the job role differ from what the person feels, or the emotional feedback from colleagues or clients is unrewarding. But how can emotions lead to fatigue? Well it is probably not the emotions per se, but rather the fact that the emotions have to be controlled that leads to fatigue, because control requires effort and effort is fatiguing. In fact research has found that all forms of mental control – physical, mental, and emotional – appear to rely on the same energy resource. So if you engage in one form of control, it leaves less resource available for the same or other forms. But there are ways to replenish this resource; apparently even a glass of lemonade can help (Gailliot et al., 2009).
If it is control (or regulation) of emotions that matters when it comes to feeling exhausted, what sorts of emotion control are we talking about? First, if your job or situation is making you feel unhappy or anxious or is inducing other unpleasant emotions, then you will expend effort on finding ways to counter those feelings. For example, you might try to think about things differently (cognitive effort) or do something that makes you feel better (physical effort). Second, if your job requires you to express emotions that you don’t feel (for example, being polite to a rude client), then you will expend effort on faking your feelings and hiding or suppressing how you truly feel, or you may try to change how you feel to come into line with what you have to express but that will also require effort. Third, you may attempt to change how others feel. For example, you might find a way to cheer someone up or you may make someone feel bad in order to focus their attention. This also requires effort. The more of these things you do during the day, the more depleted you are likely to feel at the end of it.
Intriguingly, though, there may be another way in which emotion regulation can lead to fatigue. It is possible that witnessing emotion regulation taking place in or between others may also be depleting. A recent laboratory study by Ackerman and colleagues (2009) found that when people watched others engaging in self-restraint (which is a form of self control) they became more depleted themselves, but only if they imagined themselves in that situation.
As part of a research collaboration (with Sandy Hershcovics and Tara Reich at the University of Manitoba) we are conducting a research study to see whether this also applies to witnessing emotion regulation, and importantly whether it occurs naturally in the workplace. It certainly seems plausible that jobs that involve witnessing unpleasant emotional exchanges between others can have a depleting effect, and perhaps even that more empathic people may be more susceptible to such depletion, but we shall see. We may be wrong.
References:
Ackerman, J. M., Goldstein, N. J., Shapiro, J. R., & Bargh, J. A. (2009). You wear me out: The vicarious depletion of self-control. Psychological Science, 20, 326-332.
Gailliot, M. T., Baumeister, R. F., DeWall, C. N., Maner, J. K., Ashby Plant, E., Tice, D. M., Brewer, L. E., & Schmeichel, B. J. (2007). Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy sources: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 325-336.
Please leave your comments on this article below.