Word-Of-the-Week #947: Burnout

September 29, 2022 by · Comments Off on Word-Of-the-Week #947: Burnout 

Burnout physical or emotional exhaustion, especially as a result of long-term stress. 

Has the pandemic caused you to experience heightened personal and professional demands? Have you felt a diminished sense of personal accomplishment? 

This week features excerpts from Washington Post, “What burnout really is. And ways to prevent it,” by Angela Haupt.

“Summer Sides is a go, go, go type of person. But by late last year, all the fitness instructor wanted to do was pass mindless hours in her home, undisturbed – venturing no farther than her backyard. She was suffering, she said, from massive burnout. 

Sides, 37, who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, had opened a yoga studio on March 1, only to shut it down 18 days later and pivot to the Wild West of online programming. At the same time, she was taking care of her dad, who had suffered a stroke the previous year. 

She started getting migraines, and brain fog clouded her days. By winter, she was utterly depleted. 

“I didn’t mentally have the capacity to figure out another piece of spaghetti to throw at the wall,” she said. “It was like a pressure cooker: One thing after another kept getting added in, and all of a sudden there wasn’t enough space, and the lid was going to blow.” 

As weary Americans emerge from a harrowing global pandemic – and, in many cases, a period of heightened personal and professional demands – experts say burnout is a common affliction. 

“People are overwhelmed and exhausted and still feeling like they ought to be doing more,” said Amelia Nagoski, who wrote the 2019 book “Burnout” with her sister, Emily Nagoski. “I think it’s almost everybody everywhere. 

  • Defining burnout 

Burnout has become a popular catchall phrase in the “language of the people,” said Christina Maslach, a professor emerita of psychology and a researcher at the Center for Healthy Workplaces at the University of California, Berkeley. 

“Some people use it to mean they’re bored – like, ‘Oh, I’m getting so burned out on Pilates.’ Or, ‘I haven’t had a creative idea all week.’ So, it’s like a lightbulb has burned out as opposed to a fire that has burned out,” she said. It makes sense that people have latched on to the term: “It’s very catchy – the visual imagery of flames and ashes and all that kind of stuff.” 

According to the Maslach Burnout Inventory, burnout occurs when three factors are present at the same time: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment. In 2019, the World Health Organization recognized burnout as an occupational syndrome – not a medical condition – based on those same three components. 

Emotional exhaustion is characterized by feeling depleted and like you don’t have any energy, Maslach said. Depersonalization, which is also referred to as cynicism, is “a hostile, take-this-job-and-shove-it attitude,” and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment means, well, exactly that. People experiencing professional burnout will be overwhelmed by their own alleged inadequacy and notice that their productivity plummets.

This week’s focus is on burnout. Do you ever feel depleted and like you don’t have any energy? Are you feeling cynical with a hostile attitude about work? Do you feel overwhelmed and stressed out often?

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