Taking a Closer Look at Burnout and its Symptoms.

 

Taking a Closer Look at Burnout and its Symptoms.

Those who are experiencing high amounts of stress in their lifestyle need to always be aware of the idea of burnout. While the term ‘burnout’ is often thrown around in discussions of stress, do you really know what it means, and how it’s caused?

According to Herbert Freudenberger, the man who first coined the term, ‘burnout’  is defined as, “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.”

Burnout is extremely common; for example, it’s estimated that 25%-60% of practicing physicians experience burnout!  Just imagine the percentages amongst those who work assembly, production, customer service or other repetitive jobs. The point is, if physicians are burned out, working in jobs they consider to be dead-end jobs, just imagine how stressed out people who work common jobs must be.  Classic symptoms include the following:

•Depleted Physical Energy: Prolonged stress can be physically draining, causing you to feel tired much of the time, or no longer have the energy you once did. Getting out of bed to face another day of the same gets more difficult.

•Emotional Exhaustion: You feel impatient, moody, inexplicably sad, or just get frustrated more easily than you normally would. You feel like you can’t deal with life as easily than you once could.

•Lowered Immunity to Illness: When stress levels are high for a prolonged amount of time, your immune system does suffer. People who are suffering from burnout usually get the message from their body that something needs to change, and that message comes in the form of increases susceptibility to colds, the flu, and other minor illnesses (and sometimes some not-so-minor ones).

•Less Investment in Interpersonal Relationships: Withdrawing somewhat from interpersonal relationships is another possible sign of burnout. You may feel like you have less to give, or less interest in having fun, or just less patience with people. But for whatever reason, people experiencing burnout can usually see the effects in their relationships.

•Increasingly Pessimistic Outlook: When experiencing burnout, it’s harder to get excited about life, harder to expect the best, harder to let things roll off your back, and harder to ‘look on the bright side’ in general. Because optimism is a great buffer for stress, those suffering from burnout find it harder to pull out of their rut than they normally would.

•Increased Absenteeism and Inefficiency at Work: When experiencing job burnout, it gets more difficult just to get out of bed and face more of what’s been overwhelming you in the first place. This may be an unconscious defense against burnout, but those experiencing it tend to be less effective overall and stay home from work more often. (This could also be due to increased illness resulting from lowered immunity, as discussed above.) This is part of why it makes sense for workers to take some time off before they’re feeling burned-out, and why it makes sense for employers to refrain from running their workers into the ground; they might not get back up so quickly!

Burn out is kind of like depression’s non-clinical, less intense cousin that just comes for a visit and leaves when you reduce the stress in your life. But there is hope because burnout is clearly caused by situational stressors that can be more easily eliminated than similar illnesses with biological causes. 

Burnout has many causes. Check with us later to find out causes these causes.