What Works to Reduce Social Workers’ Stress and Burnout? Results from an Intervention Using Mindfulness and Neurofeedback

Social workers’ everyday roles imply facing problems, adversities, and difficult life situations of the service users or their families. The research question we ask is what works better (mindfulness and/or neurofeedback interventions) to decreasing social workers perceived stress and burnout and what is their medium-term effect? We present preliminary results from a three-year project which included interventions aiming to reduce stress and burnout among social workers in Romania. The interventions we refer to in this presentation included 4 weeks in-person MBI (G1, n=10 participants), 8 online sessions (G2; n=28 participants) and a mixed group, of in-person neurofeedback (20 individual sessions) and 8 weeks online mindfulness (G4, n=24 participants). We compare their results with the control group (n=35 invited). Data collection was carried out immediately after the intervention (T1), three (T2) and six months (T3) later. We conducted Independent-Samples T Tests in SPSS 29 to compare groups which underwent interventions and responded to the survey all four times: mindfulness online (n=22), face-to-face mindfulness (n=8), online mindfulness with neurofeedback (n=18) with the control group (n=12).

When comparing online MBI group with the control group, we observe significant differences between the level of perceived stress, personal burnout, and work-related burnout (before the interventions and six months after). The participants to the mixed intervention reported a decrease in personal burnout. Unexpectedly, the participants to the in-person MBI reported increased perceived stress and a (small) increase in personal burnout, while the respondents in the control group report decreased values without intervention. There was also an increase in work-related burnout, while the level of work-related burnout stayed constant for the control group.

Our findings suggest that improving social workers’ wellbeing is not only a matter of supporting individuals, but that structural and organisational changes are needed to improve social workers’ mental health and overall job satisfaction.