As an organizational psychologist, I’ve spent part of my career studying burnout in schools, fire departments, governments and hospitals. This week on my TED podcast, WorkLife, I explore what we’ve learned about how to fight burnout. My favorite model is demand-control-support: The basic idea is that if you want to prevent or cure emotional exhaustion, you have three options: reduce the demands of a job, provide support to deal with them or increase control over them.

Reducing job demands

This is a structural change: it’s about decreasing the load on the person doing the job. In health care, it often starts with decreasing digital demands. If you want to hear a health care provider curse, try asking them to estimate how many hours they waste a year clicking through electronic health records. At the Cleveland Clinic, they launched a task force to simplify the process. They also introduced some digital solutions to lift the burden of calling pharmacies for refills and insurance companies for tests: now they have automated refills and pre-authorizations.

Increasing support

Here is where cultural change comes in. One of the biggest barriers to support is that people are often afraid to ask for help. People are afraid of being vulnerable and of being a burden to others. They want to look competent and self-reliant. To make sure people get the support they need, it helps to remind them that asking for help is a sign of strength, not a source of weakness. In a study of offshore oil rigs, errors decreased after macho men learned that lesson. In fire departments, units with strong cultures of care had fewer accidents and fewer health problems. In hospitals, my colleagues and I have found that creating a nurse preceptor role — a professional whose job is to help other nurses — facilitates help-seeking.

Increasing control

This is about giving people the freedom and the skills they need to handle the demands of their jobs. It often starts with psychological change: When we’re feeling overwhelmed, it can help to apply some evidence-based techniques for regulating emotions. Two of the most effective strategies for gaining control over our emotions are reappraisal and distraction. An accountant feeling overloaded by finishing taxes remotely might reframe it as flextime or refocus on family time (looks like we’ll all be getting extensions anyway). A teacher feeling daunted by the challenges of delivering online classes might reframe it as an opportunity to build new skills or refocus on topics students have been excited to explore.

Mind your emotions

Another avenue for control is to name our emotions. In one experiment, people with arachnophobia went through a weeklong exposure therapy course. At the beginning of the course, psychologists randomly assigned some of them to simply label their emotional response to spiders. A week later, they were less likely to show a physiological stress response to a live tarantula — and more likely to approach it. Compared with a hairy spider, burnout is less disgusting and more depressing, but it can still help to label it. When you name your exhaustion, it becomes easier to see that it’s not a problem in your head; it’s a problem in your circumstances. You can start to pinpoint situations where it rises and falls — and start doing something about it.