Burnout sounds dramatic, like something smoldering away until the last embers died out, leaving nothing but a pile of ashes. Much like burnout leaves your life in ashes.
Exhausted may be the most descriptive word when it comes to burnout. Sick and tired. Especially sick and tired of being sick and tired. It may be good to know you're not alone when it comes to the mental exhaustion of being burnt out.
Arising from chronic stress, especially in a toxic workplace, occupational burnout has become more prevalent, especially in the post-Covid-19 pandemic era.
But it's not limited to the working world. The same overwhelming exhaustion is a feature of parental burnout which also takes an equally distressing toll. Often leading to the belief that you are a terrible parent, there's an emotional distancing from your children as the mental health challenges turn life upside down, with brain fog preventing any out-of-the-box thinking to get a better perspective- a better handle on things.
Similarly, academic burnout means that the greater the effort that is put in, the poorer the performance becomes because of the stress that students endure. By burning the candle at both ends, that burn will meet in the middle. After the wax has all burned down, those with burnout find they simply have nothing more to give.
Burnout is a syndrome or group of symptoms that characterize it. Whatever the type of burnout, there are similarities in the signs and symptoms and, more importantly, in the ways to heal, before burnout turns to breakdown.
Burnout Symptoms
Burnout syndrome is a person's response to chronic stress. It develops progressively and can ultimately cause health issues and damage to cognitive abilities, affect emotions, and lead to a changed attitude.
Burnout, according to the study, Burnout: A Review of Theory and Measurement, manifests in three main dimensions. There are the burnout symptoms:
Emotional exhaustion: Feelings and sensations of being exhausted, characterized by weariness, fatigue, tiredness, and weakening. Without the emotional energy to cope with tasks, it becomes difficult to adapt to the environment you’re in, whether it’s work, school or college, or in the throes of parenthood.
Cynicism or depersonalization: Being detached, indifferent, and unconcerned about what has to get done, you are likely feeling irritated, have lost any idealism you once held dear, and avoid interacting with others.
Reduced personal achievement: With a negative self-evaluation and doubts about your abilities, and a tendency to evaluate results negatively, productivity slides, and you find yourself with low morale, questioning your capabilities, and coping skills that seem to be MIA.
These dimensions are independent, but connected. Emotional exhaustion often leads to cynicism and depersonalization. Similarly, tiredness and disconnect lead to an increasing decline in meeting goals, depriving the person of the feeling of fulfillment, which eventually leads to burnout.
Burnout appears in three sub-types:
The Frenetic: An over-achiever, the frenetics work at a frenetic pace. Overloading themselves, they drive themselves to do more than their fair share, often into overtime, working intensely until exhaustion. Sometimes they are driven by the fear of losing their jobs, but frenetics are people that are highly involved with what they are doing and their coping style includes actively solving problems. This sub-type has a high prevalence of burnout, abandoning their personal life and health (two aspects that would help to manage stress and subsequent burnout) in the process.
The Under-challenged: Chipping away at repetitive, mechanical, and routine tasks, the sub-type engages in monotonous and unstimulating professions. There is little or no satisfaction in the activities, with boredom, and indifference, combined with low motivation levels to change their circumstances. Cynicism levels are high, and under-challenged people are often escapists, using distraction or cognitive avoidance to cope.
The Worn-out: Pervasive feelings of hopelessness combine with a sense of lack of control over results and lack of recognition despite investing effort. Responding to the difficulty by opting for neglect and abandonment, the people with this profile show less dedication. With a passive style of coping with the stress emanating from inefficiencies, they feel incompetent and experience feelings of guilt.
What Triggers Burnout?
Being burnt out- Burnout syndrome, is first and foremost a consequence of exposure to certain environmental conditions, not an individual characteristic or personality trait, although these can generate or moderate burnout. For example, a lack of self-confidence or the use of stress-avoidance coping mechanisms can make the situation worse, whereas optimism or actively using mechanisms to cope with stress (such as exercise, breathing techniques, etc.) can reduce the negative effects of external factors.
Environmental or organizational factors that trigger burnout
Work Overload: Requiring sustained effort where the workload is effective, the effort comes at a physical and psychological cost and can trigger psychological distancing as a self-defense mechanism.
Emotional Labor: Holding in feelings, or pretending, creates stress. By controlling or hiding negative emotions such as anger, irritation, or discomfort to fit in, meet the job objectives, and adhere to the rules, for example by pretending to empathize with clients to meet unrealistically high targets, people are often driven by fear, or teachers who can't have angry outbursts even in the face of provocation.
Lack of Autonomy and Influence: Being micro-managed, with the associated lack of freedom, and the inability to influence decisions creates higher levels of burnout. When people experience autonomy and control over their work, there are lower rates of burnout and a higher level of professional fulfillment.
Ambiguity and Role Conflict: Not knowing what’s expected of you, or not having enough information to complete your mission increases the risk of burnout.
Inadequate Supervision and Perception of Injustice: Fair treatment tends to reduce emotional exhaustion in such a way that burnout is unlikely
Lack of Perceived Social Support: Internal conflicts and a perceived lack of support are important triggers of burnout, while increased support puts the brakes on burnout.
Poor Working Hours: When work interferes with family life because of longer hours, shift work, or excessive overtime, heart problems, health complaints, sleep disorders, job dissatisfaction, and diminished attention and performance soon follow. There is also a higher risk of accidents and a higher risk of burnout.
Things That Trigger Burnout
Falling into three broad categories, burnout generally (but not always) develops after being triggered by:
Personality Traits
A person’s personality influences how they perceive their environment and, therefore, how they manage and cope with the demands placed on them and the resources allocated to meet those demands. The personality training in what is called the Big Five Model- extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience, are significantly associated with burnout, but in different ways:
Extroverts are generally protected against burnout.
Neurotic types (who are characterized by emotional instability) are at a higher risk of burnout
Agreeable people tend to experience less burnout than their less agreeable colleagues.
Conscientious, behaving responsibly, and persistently, people in this category have a reduced likelihood of developing burnout.
Being open to experience that includes a breadth of interests and creativity also protects against the effects of burnout to some extent, although the risks are there for those displaying dedication to efficiency.
Burnout is also a feature in :
Highly competitive and impulsive A-type personalities who have high expectations.
People who fear losing control
Higher expectations and higher goal setting lead to greater efforts and thus higher levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.
Over-involvement is a potent trigger, especially when it’s impossible to achieve goals.
Sociodemographic Variables
Age: There are some benefits to getting older. Perhaps along with wisdom people will experience lower levels of burnout as their age increases, but it’s not always so. It depends on finding a balance between depersonalization as part of aging and having a greater sense of personal accomplishment.
Gender: Emotional exhaustion and low professional fulfillment tend to be more common among women whereas men experience greater levels of depersonalization.
Marital status Single people, (especially men) seem to be more exposed to burnout compared to those who live with a partner.
Burnout Coping Strategies
The most established strategies are:
Problem-focused coping which attempts to act directly on the stressful situation. Active and problem-focused coping generally reduces burnout but when there is little possibility of controlling and/or changing environmental stressors, stress is often exacerbated.
Emotion-focused coping seeks to modify negative emotional responses to stressful events and avoid intervening. Avoidance and emotion-focused coping contribute to burnout.
By taking a closer look at factors that are potential triggers, stressors can be identified in your own life that could, or have led to burnout.
Consequences of Burnout Syndrome
Burnout affects the individual as well as the organization in the case of occupational burnout, the family where parental burnout occurs, and the team in the case of academic or athletic burnout. Mental health problems are usually the first red flag, but over time, this morphs into health and other areas:
Psychological Consequences:
Associated with anxiety and depression, concentration and memory problems, a reduced coping capacity, difficulty in making decisions, unhappiness with life, and low self-esteem as well as factors such as insomnia, irritability, and increased alcohol and tobacco consumption burnout can pose a significant risk of suicide
Health Consequences:
Several reviews of studies conclude that employees People with higher levels of burnout are more likely to suffer from a variety of physical health problems that include stomach problems, disorder musculoskeletal pain, heart disorders, headaches, a decreased immune response, as well as insomnia, and chronic fatigue. Increased cortisol levels in the blood, leading to diabetes can sometimes also be attributed to burnout.
Behavioral Consequences:
Job dissatisfaction, low organizational commitment, increased absenteeism (sick leave piling up), staff turnover, and reduced performance can point to burnout. Deviant and counterproductive behaviors such as aggressiveness among colleagues and towards others, alcohol and psychotropic drug use, misuse of corporate material, or even theft can also indicate burnout.
Organizational Consequences:
The low motivation and reduced performance associated with burnout can extend to the organization, causing a reduction in the quality of services. Similarly, employees suffering from burnout influence others, causing greater conflicts or interrupting work tasks, and in doing so production is reduced and the time it takes to produce is increased.
This is known as a “contagion effect”, and creates a bad working environment and significant economic losses.
The 4 Levels of Burnout
Just as people are not the same, burnout manifests differently in different people. The four levels of burnout are:
Mild: Mild, unspecific physical symptoms ( back pain, low back pain, headaches), with fatigue.
Moderate: Associated with insomnia together with attention and concentration deficits. Detachment, irritability, cynicism, fatigue, boredom, and a progressive loss of motivation lead to emotional exhaustion, bringing on feelings of incompetence, frustration, negative self-esteem, and guilt.
Severe: Includes increased days off work, aversion to tasks, and depersonalization. Alcohol and psychotropic drug abuse become prevalent.
Extreme: Extreme behaviors of aggressiveness, isolation, chronic depression, and suicide attempts, combined with an existential crisis.
How To Fix Burnout
Some interventions can improve your emotional and physical state, but you must make that choice, deciding what will work for you and a course of action or a combination that resonates. It's not a one-size-fits-all miracle drug, but there are ways to treat burnout syndrome:
Physical exercise: Getting moving, it's one of the hardest things to do when you're stuck in a low energy with zero motivation But for burnout, it's one of the best things to do. Not only is it good for body, mind, and soul, but getting out and walking or going to the gym gives you opportunities to meet and interact with people, making inroads into the numbness of the disconnect you're feeling.
Mindfulness: Not just the airy fairy practice that some may think, research supports the finding that practicing mindfulness is effective in reducing burnout syndrome, mitigating its negative psychosomatic and emotional effects of the syndrome Positive results are reported in increasing empathy and concentration. Being grateful, even for the tiniest thing, and living in the present moment, without the baggage of the past or the burdens of the future, is a liberating experience.
Self-assessment: By keeping a diary, or even a notebook (that could double up as a gratitude journal) of stress symptoms and events related to them, with thoughts, feelings, and ways of coping, there’s a way to measure the degree of burnout and gauge not only the progress of the syndrome, but also the progress of the healing, and making comparisons with others in the same boat.
Psychotherapy: Only carried out in the most severe and serious cases (i.e., when the syndrome and its consequences are already being suffered), psychotherapy is generally based on the principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and includes:
Developing emotional self-regulation and relaxation skills
Problem-solving
Assertiveness training
Development of self-efficacy
How Long Does Burnout Last?
It lasts about the same length of time as a piece of string. In other words, it can be any length. Difficult to pinpoint its inception, burnout syndrome accumulates over some time and it's only when the signs and symptoms become severe enough that they are noticed either by the person with burnout or those around them, such as their employers, that healing modalities can be sought. Healing is an intensely personal process, and we all respond to different interventions, or clusters of interventions, and at different paces.
Burnout syndrome lasts until the symptoms are no longer present. That could be when healing has been successful, or when the burnout turns into a breakdown, with added levels of symptoms that are more complex to address.
12 Stages of Burnout
A chronic condition that develops over a long period, burnout syndrome was first noted in 1974 by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger. Building on his ideas in collaboration with Gail North, a 12-stage burnout model was developed that laid out the progression of the syndrome:
Compulsive Ambition: A driving need to prove yourself.
Working Harder: Pushing your boundaries to take on and do more.
Neglecting Needs: Ignoring self-care by not making time for it (There's always time)
Avoiding Conflict: Denying that anything is wrong (despite everything being wrong)
Revising Values: Prioritising the wrong things
Denying Problems: Blaming others rather than taking responsibility
Withdrawal: “Leave me alone! I’m fine.”
Concerning Others: Telling others not to worry
Depersonalization: Just getting through the next day, hour, or minute.
Sense of Emptiness: Feeling nothing
Depression: Finding no joy or meaning in life, nothing that matters.
Final Stage of Burnout: Breaking down because you just cannot continue another day, hour, minute, or second.
Burnout and PTSD
Studies indicate that burnout can lead to PTSD. In fact, there is a significant increase in the possibility of PTSD symptoms manifesting in burnout syndrome.
Both burnout and PTSD (or C-PTSD) can damage relationships, sometimes irreparably.
Burnout To Breakdown
The long and painful period between burnout and breakdown is debilitating and carries significant risks. The sooner it's acknowledged- in itself a difficult thing to do as denial is a recognized symptom of burnout syndrome, the quicker complete breakdown can be averted. More importantly, difficult though it is, the healing journey offers unexpected rewards on the way to becoming a whole and happy person once again.
Maybe it’s time to do something about it? You are the most important person to yourself, and probably to many others, even if you don’t realize it or acknowledge it. Even the guard that you greet at the gate going into work may miss your greeting. You do yourself (and them) a disservice when you ignore warning signals.
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