How Burnout Affects Mental Health
We've all experienced periods of intense stress and feeling overwhelmed by the nonstop demands of work, family, and life in general. A certain amount of periodic stress is unavoidable.
However, when that severe strain becomes a chronic state without relief, it can progress into a more serious condition known as burnout. Burnout goes beyond just feeling stressed - it's a syndrome characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, detachment, and a profound lack of accomplishment.
At its core, burnout represents the depletion of your mental, physical, and emotional resources, making it difficult to cope with excessive, prolonged stress. Left unaddressed, burnout poses a threat to your overall mental health and psychological wellbeing.
What is Burnout?
Burnout isn’t just a result of working long hours or having a stressful job. It's a gradual process that occurs when you experience chronic stress from the overwhelming demands being placed on you over an extended period. The key phases of burnout include:
Excessive Fatigue: A near-constant state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion resulting from excessive workload and stress. It leaves you feeling depleted, with little reserves to keep going.
Cynicism & Detachment: Due to this chronic depletion, you start to develop an increasingly negative and cynical outlook toward your work and life circumstances. You begin withdrawing and detaching from responsibilities as your motivation wanes.
Feelings of Inefficacy: As burnout progresses, your sense of effectiveness and accomplishment plummets. This can severely impact your productivity, job performance, and self-confidence.
A person deeply entrenched in burnout may feel like they have completely run out of fuel – their internal resources and motivation utterly drained by chronic stress demands. Simple daily activities feel arduous and an almost paralyzing sense of dread can set in.
Causes of Burnout
While excessive, prolonged stress is the primary trigger for burnout, there are several key factors that can make individuals more susceptible according to research:
Lack of Control
One of the biggest contributors to burnout is a lack of autonomy and perceived control over your work and life circumstances. Having little ability to influence decisions that directly affect you may lead to much higher risks of burnout.
Researchers describe burnout as a circumstance of "subjective powerlessness" - a feeling that emerges when you feel trapped in demanding situations with seemingly no way to change or escape the conditions. This mismatch between a high level of responsibility and a low level of power to change circumstances creates chronic stress.
Work Overload
Unsurprisingly, one of the main catalysts is simply being overworked and having excessive, unrealistic demands. Taking on too many responsibilities without adequate resources sets the stage for physical, mental, and emotional depletion.
Some occupations are inherently more at risk due to high-pressure, fast-paced environments, such as jobs in healthcare, social services, and first responder work. However, any job or role with routinely heavy workload can lead to burnout over time.
Lack of Social Support
Having little to no supportive social networks, whether from coworkers, friends, or family, is a risk factor. Loneliness and isolation intensify the strain and makes it harder to disengage and recharge.
Work-Life Imbalance
When you chronically prioritize work over all other life dimensions like hobbies, health, and relationships, it produces a severely lopsided imbalance. This relentless grind without adequate reprieve leaves you prone to burnout.
The research shows meaningful work-life balance and dedicating time to restorative activities is protective against burnout.
Am I Burnt Out or Just Stressed?
It's important to differentiate burnout from regular periods of high stress. Some key distinctions:
Burnout is about what has accumulated over time from the prolonged, unrelenting stress. Regular stress can come and go without severe lasting impacts.
Stress may cause you to occasionally disengage briefly to recharge, but burnout represents a chronic disconnection and decreased effectiveness in most domains.
When stressed, you probably still have hope and motivation that conditions will improve. With burnout, you feel completely depleted with little outlook of positive change.
Some subtle signs of burnout include overwhelming fatigue, frequent illness, change in sleeping/eating habits, increased cynicism/irritability towards work/life, and feelings of hopelessness.
While temporary stress can be unavoidable, burnout signals the need to make significant lifestyle changes before more severe consequences develop.
The Mental Health Impacts of Burnout
Experiencing the physical and emotional depletion of burnout is psychologically taxing and can contribute to several concerning mental health issues:
Anxiety and Depression: The excessive strain and perception of constant demands create the perfect conditions for anxiety and depression to take over. Burnout fuels irrational fears, restlessness, concentration issues, hopelessness, and detachment from previously valued activities. (More on anxiety in the next section)
Chronic Fatigue and Insomnia: The complete depletion of mental resources leaves you in a constant fog of weariness and mental fatigue, struggling to accomplish basic tasks. At the same time, burnout disrupts sleep patterns leading to insomnia that prevents you from properly recharging.
Cognitive Impairments: Severe burnout can contribute to issues like impaired concentration, reduced attention span, brain fog, and struggles with memory and decision making. This cognitive impairment impacts all aspects of functioning and productivity.
Emotional Dysregulation: As your typical coping abilities become drained, emotional dysregulation becomes prominent. This can lead to unpredictable mood swings, frequent irritability/anger outbursts, emotional numbness/detachment, and cynical attitudes toward others.
Burnout and Anxiety
There is a strong interconnected relationship between burnout and anxiety disorders. Existing anxiety issues can make someone more susceptible to burning out due to disproportionate worrying, overthinking, and difficulty managing stressors.
However, the chronic strain and perceived lack of control during burnout also directly exacerbate anxiety symptoms:
Irrational fears and worst-case thinking intensifies
A near-constant state of physical restlessness/tension
Sleep disturbances and insomnia
Difficulty concentrating due to worried/racing thoughts
Increased irritability and feeling on edge
This vicious cycle can make recovering from burnout and managing anxiety extremely challenging without proper intervention. Addressing the two in tandem is often required for meaningful improvement.
Finding Solutions for Burnout
If you recognize the signs of burnout impacting your mental health, it might be important to take proactive steps toward prevention and recovery before more severe, long-term consequences arise.
For prevention and addressing burnout early on:
Implement strict boundaries and learn to say no to excessive commitments
Build in more self-care activities like exercise, meditation, restorative hobbies
Cultivate a strong social support system to avoid isolation
Work on prioritizing and eliminating unnecessary stressors
Consider therapy to work toward a better work/life balance
For those already entrenched in a state of burnout, therapy can be a huge help. Therapy can help you address many aspects of burnout, such as:
Techniques for reducing anxiety/depression
Developing healthy coping mechanisms and stress management
Solutions for improving self-care, including sleep, nutrition, exercise
Processing trauma/grief that may be fueling the burnout
Building in recovery periods and restoring work/life balance
Dealing with barriers that are preventing you from developing stronger social support
Left ignored, burnout can spiral into far more serious physical and mental health issues ranging from complete job burnout and breakdown to clinical anxiety/depression disorders. Taking a proactive stance and prioritizing your psychological wellbeing can be incredibly helpful in reducing the duration and impact of burnout.
Making lasting lifestyle adjustments to reduce burnout's impact may require temporary accommodations at work, setting firm boundaries, eliminating draining commitments, and focusing intently on true self-care.
If you feel that you might be dealing with burnout or anxiety, reach out for a free consultation to see if therapy could help. Recovery is very possible, but it requires a substantive approach.
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