6 Less Obvious Signs of Burnout You Should Definitely Pay Attention To
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Loading... - Ella Jones
- 28 Oct 2022
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There’s this feeling I get when I know something is…off. When I don’t want to talk to anyone or do anything other than sleep and watch Bravo. It’s like all I have the capacity for is going to work and coming home, but I’m emotionally exhausted by and disconnected from my job too. That experience has a name: burnout. And even as a person who is an actual expert on the topic, I needed someone else—my therapist—to name it for me.
Burnout can be tough to identify because, culturally, we have a very loose definition of the term. “Colloquially, ‘burnout’ has become almost synonymous with any experience of work-related stress,” Colin West, MD, PhD, medical director of employee well-being at Mayo Clinic, tells SELF. “It’s a bit like the common ‘I’m so depressed’ statements people make in daily life, which are often expressing something much more general than true clinical depression.” The problem with referring to burnout so casually is that it may minimize our experiences and allow us to view them as simply a normal product of our work environment. We may even see our burnout symptoms as a badge of honor: “I’m working hard, I should be tired from work.”
Job burnout isn’t a medical diagnosis, or even a psychiatric one, but it’s so much more than stress or distress from work. As defined by the 11th Revision of the International Classifications of Diseases (ICD-11), burnout is an occupational phenomenon that has three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased cynicism or a distant or indifferent attitude toward work, and declining work performance.
“I think of burnout as becoming exhausted by your job and losing the ability to care about your work and the people you work with,” Bradley Evanoff, MD, MPH, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, tells SELF. “Once you're burned out, it’s hard to gather the energy or the enthusiasm to do a good job.” It’s also a struggle to keep working: According to data from accounting firm Deloitte’s annual Global Gen Z and Millenial Survey, burnout is one of the top three reasons young people are quitting their jobs. Read More...
