One in four people report being burned out at work.
Burnout is now recognised as a chronic medical condition, after being added by the World Health Organization to its official list.
Burnout is a state of mental, physical and emotional exhaustion at work.
It can be caused by unreasonable deadlines, unfair treatment, a lack of support from managers and being ‘on’ 24/7.
Professions with some of the highest levels of burnout include physicians, nurses, social workers, teachers and pilots.
It leads to a chronic lack of motivation, low efficiency and a feeling of helplessness.
The main cause of burnout is workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
The three signs of burnout are:
- feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion,
- increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job,
- and reduced professional efficacy.
Burnout has been linked to a range of physical problems, including immune system disorders, cardiovascular disease and insomnia.
The psychological effects of burnout can include anxiety and depression.
Indeed, the overlap between burnout and depression is so large that some psychologists have argued they are the same.
Burnout can be caused by many factors at work; however, one major cause is a mismatch between an employee’s needs and the demands of their job.
To give a simple example, some people like to have lots of social contact, but may be denied this in their job.
Others may prefer to work quietly on their own, but are forced to work in a noisy, social environment.
One study of burnout asked 97 Swiss people about the demands of their jobs.
It examined how much leadership and social interaction people got from their jobs and how much they implicitly needed.
The results showed that the greater the mismatch between their unconscious needs and what the job delivered, the greater their chance of burning out.
Mismatches were also linked to more headaches, chest pains, faintness and shortness of breath.
Professor Veronika Brandstätter, who led the study, said:
“We found that the frustration of unconscious affective needs, caused by a lack of opportunities for motive-driven behavior, is detrimental to psychological and physical well-being.
The same is true for goal-striving that doesn’t match a well-developed implicit motive for power or affiliation, because then excessive effort is necessary to achieve that goal.
Both forms of mismatch act as ‘hidden stressors’ and can cause burnout.”
Related
- 10 Brutal Workplace Truths: How Jobs Destroy Mental Health (P)
- The Psychological Reason Millions Are Miserable At Work (P)
The study was published in the journal Frontiers In Psychology (Brandstätter et al., 2016).
