Occupational burn-out is a relatively new concept. Find out more about its symptoms and solutions.
You’ll find many ‘burn-out’ news stories across the media: from athletes, to social media stars, from television personalities to politicians. And more worryingly, in places where it has far-reaching consequences: the NHS, law enforcement and at air traffic control.
You’ve probably read about front line medical staff working around the clock during the pandemic, which gives you a good idea about how burn-out can occur. In recent months, senior leaders in the NHS have flagged serious concerns about the wellbeing of staff.
But just how big is the issue and what can be done about it? Could it affect you and what could you do to prevent it? And where did ‘burn-out’ come from?
Defining burn-out
To make sense of burn-out, the first step is to identify and define it. Today, mention ‘burn-out’ and people understand the term in its psychological context, although it’s interesting to note that the terms ‘burn-out’ or ‘burnout’ were used primarily in relation to fire-related events and aviation matters until almost 50 years ago.
The syndrome was first identified in a 1974 a research paper ‘Staff Burn-Out’ by New York-based psychologist Herbert Freudenberger Footnote [1]. In the following years, research primarily focused on burn-out associated with doctors, broadening the scope to teachers, the armed forces and managers as the decades rolled by.
However, many of these studies rarely sought to define a precise mental state that differentiates burn-out from work-related stress, anxiety, or chronic fatigue syndrome. In short, ‘burn-out’ became a contested diagnosis, the subject of a wide range of causal explanations and medical speculation. However, the question remained: was burn-out a specific medical condition?
Official recognition for burn-out
In 2019, the authoritative World Health Organization settled the issue by including burn-out in its 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases as an ‘occupational phenomenon’, concluding that it is not a medical condition Footnote [2].
It’s now officially defined as ‘a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.’ In short: think burn-out, think about your job and workplace.
The World Health Organization has thrown the ball back to employers and employees to manage their time and work pressures, so that burn-out doesn’t happen. So how do you know when burn-out syndrome strikes?
How to avoid burn-out
Burn-out syndrome has three key characteristics:
- feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
- increased mental distance / negativity / cynicism from one’s job; and
- reduced effectiveness in your profession.
The difference between burn-out and stress is that burn-out is effectively at the opposite end of the spectrum. If you’re stressed, you respond a great deal to what’s happening. With burn-out, you don’t respond because your capacity to do so is seriously depleted.
When you’ve been under a high level of stress for a considerable period of time, you can get into a state of physical and psychological exhaustion, left with an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. That’s burn-out; you’re so far from stress that it simply doesn’t matter anymore.
So, if you’re working long, difficult hours, avoiding breaks while feeling under pressure and completely exhausted, it could be early signs of burn-out syndrome. Please take a look at our Aviva Mental Health Hub article on stress and some of the potential solutions may be able to help. It’s very much a case of stopping things getting out of hand early before things get worse.
