Do you know the difference?
Burnout is defined by the World Health Organisation as being “a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
Today, I want to give you the information you need to recognise burnout in yourself and be able to delineate between feeling stressed and feeling burnout.
Energy depletion and exhaustion
Primarily, it causes emotional exhaustion, but it also can encompass physical and mental energy depletion too
Increased mental distance from your job
Persistent feelings of negativity or cynicism related to your job
Reduced professional efficacy
Reduced ability to achieve the desired or intended result, whatever that is in your professional role
So, to put it simply, if you’re feeling exhausted most of the time and feel flat, perhaps even empty inside, you’re starting to hate your job, and you’re beginning to feel less capable at work, you’re showing signs of burnout.
Chronic stress is stress that lasts for weeks or months. Whilst our bodies were beautifully designed to withstand short bouts of stress followed by a period of recovery, today in the modern world, we are bombarded by small to large stress triggers that induce a stress response at a biological level. The problem with this is that when our body is exposed to continuous stress, it starts to go through a process called GAD (Generalised Adaptation Syndrome), which has three phases – alarm stage, resistance stage and exhaustion stage – whereby our body is trying to adapt to cope with the stressor but eventually, if the stressor sticks around for long enough, the body’s defences dwindle, our internal environment or ‘homeostasis’ becomes disturbed and this is where we start to hit problems like burnout.
Stress itself isn’t the problem, it’s about how much stress you’re enduring and for how long that dictates your burnout risk. Too much stress and for too long a period (weeks to months) is one of the biggest predictors of work burnout in staff.
Stress isn’t the same as burnout. Stress involves too much of everything, but with stress, there’s an end in sight; we can still imagine that if we get everything under control, we’ll feel better again.
Burnout, on the other hand, is about not enough, feeling empty, exhausted, devoid of motivation and almost beyond caring. People experiencing burnout feel there’s less hope for positive change.
Here are some ways of delineating between the two.
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Stress |
Burnout |
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So where are you?
Stressed or burning out?
Knowing the difference is critical.
