Researchers disagree on how to define burnout. Helping people cope at work still matters:
When New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who garnered international praise for how she handled the pandemic in her country, recently announced her intention to resign, here's how she summed up her surprise decision: "I know what the job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice."
Social scientists and journalists worldwide largely interpreted Ardern's words in her January 19 speech as a reference to burnout.
"She's talking about an empty tank," says Christina Maslach, a psychological researcher who has been interviewing and observing workers struggling with workplace-related distress for decades. In almost 50 years of interviews, says Maslach of the University of California, Berkeley, "that phrase [has come] up again and again and again."
Numerous studies and media reports suggest that burnout, already high before the pandemic, has since skyrocketed worldwide, particularly among workers in certain professions, such as health care, teaching and service. The pandemic makes clear that the jobs needed for a healthy, functioning society are burning people out, Maslach says.
But disagreement over how to define and measure burnout is pervasive, with some researchers even questioning if the syndrome is simply depression by another name. Such controversy has made it difficult to estimate the prevalence of burnout or identify how to best help those who are suffering.
[...] Some researchers argue that burnout is a strictly modern-day phenomenon, brought on by overwork and hustle culture. But others contend that burnout is merely the latest iteration of a long line of exhaustion disorders, starting with the Ancient Greek concept of acedia. This condition, wrote 5th century monk and theologian John Cassian, is marked by "bodily listlessness and yawning hunger."
The more contemporary notion of burnout originated in the 1970s. Herbert Freudenberger, the consulting psychologist for volunteers working with drug addicts at St. Mark's Free Clinic in New York City, used the term to describe the volunteers' gradual loss of motivation, emotional depletion and reduced commitment to the cause.
[...] Maslach's inventory remains the most widely used tool to study burnout. But many criticize that definition of the syndrome (SN: 10/26/22).
Conceptualizing burnout as a combination of exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy is "arbitrary," wrote organizational psychologists Wilmar Schaufeli and Dirk Enzmann in their 1998 book, The Burnout Companion to Study and Practice: A Critical Analysis. "What would have happened if other items had been included? Most likely, other dimensions would have appeared."
[...] Do researchers agree on any features of burnout? Surprisingly, yes. Researchers concur that exhaustion is a core feature of the syndrome, wrote Bianchi and his team in March 2021 in Clinical Psychological Science.
Research in the past two decades is also converging on the idea that burnout appears to involve changes to cognition, such as problems with memory and concentration. Those cognitive problems can take the form of people becoming forgetful — missing a recurring meeting or struggling to perform routine tasks, for instance, says Charlie Renaud, an occupational health psychologist at the University of Rennes in France. Such struggles can carry over into people's personal lives, causing leisure activities, such as reading and watching movies, to become laborious.
As these findings mount, some researchers have begun to incorporate questions on cognitive changes into their burnout scales, Renaud says.
Is burnout a form of depression? At first glance, the two concepts appear contradictory. Depression is typically seen as stemming from within the individual and burnout as stemming from societal forces, chiefly the workplace (SN: 2/12/23). But some researchers have begun to question if burnout exists as a standalone diagnosis. The concepts are not mutually exclusive, research shows. Chronic stress in one's environment can trigger depression and certain temperaments can make one more prone to burnout.
For instance, scoring high for the personality trait neuroticism — characterized by irritability and a tendency to worry — better predicted a person's likelihood of experiencing burnout than certain work-related factors, such as poor supervisor support and lack of rapport with colleagues, Bianchi and his team reported in 2018 in Psychiatry Research.
Moreover, exhaustion occurred together with depression more frequently than with either cynicism or inefficacy, Bianchi and his team reported in the 2021 paper. If burnout is characterized by a suite of symptoms, then exhaustion and depression appear a more promising combination than the Maslach trifecta, the team reported.
"The real problem is that we want to believe that burnout is not a depressive condition, [or] as severe as a depressive condition," Bianchi says. But that, he adds, simply isn't true.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday February 22, @03:23PM
Burnout is literally just depression, except possibly only related to all things work.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GloomMower on Wednesday February 22, @03:33PM (1 child)
I've been wondering what is causing what I feel is burnout for me. Is burnout just too much emotional baggage?
In order for me to be motivated about a job, I have to make myself care about it, and care about topics around it. After a while seeing things you care about and passionate about not work out or go exactly how you are wanting builds up. So that build up can either destroy me or I have to make myself care less about it and thus less motivated.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 22, @06:27PM
I've mentioned this before [soylentnews.org] -- it's important to distinguish between "depression" as an affective disorder and "depressed". If you can describe the circumstances under which you feel motivated, experience those circumstances, then feel motivated (circumstances p -> motivation q), then it may be a situational condition.
But if you feel unmotivated, and then attribute that as caused by undesirable circumstances (circumstances ~-ish q -> motivation ~-ish p), you might be reverse-engineering how you're feeling into (pick some element of) your current circumstances. But then if you fix those circumstances and your lack of motivation is still there, it could be a persistent mood condition. Just a theory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22, @04:45PM
Humans evolved to be social creatures who hunt and gather. Ever since we built cities, we've been using ourselves in ways we weren't designed. It's been good in many ways. I don't want to go back to a stick-house in the woods. Burnout is one of those things that will happen though.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Wednesday February 22, @04:53PM
I want to write something meaningful about burnout. But I just can't seem to muster the energy. I only wish I was joking.
I will say though that I suspect Long COVID is causing burnout-like symptoms in a lot of people now, probably some who aren't even aware that that's what's causing it.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 22, @06:43PM (5 children)
I think what they're trying to say is: "Working as hard as we do makes people tired, sick, and unhappy." There are some solutions to that, but those are incompatible with capitalism's need for constant growth and expansion and increasing "productivity", so instead we're going to frame it as a mental health problem with the people experiencing it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 23, @02:11AM (4 children)
You're begging the question. Capitalism doesn't need constant growth and expansion any more than you do. It works in a variety of environments. Here, I think there's an expectation of indefinite future growth, but I think it's reasonable since we are growing for real with almost everyone on the planet heading towards a developed world lifestyle, longer life spans, and continued technological development. That won't go on forever, but it will go on for decades in the absence of self-inflicted disasters like nuclear wars, political messes/corruption, or even climate change (though I continue to think our evidence doesn't support that as a serious concern).
The emphasis on growth in developed world societies is more part of using the power of the state to enforce a set of expectations - low risk and indefinite growth.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday February 23, @04:09AM (3 children)
Yes it does. It demands it. Because what happens to any company that doesn't grow or expand fast enough ("enough" being defined by how much investors think they can get elsewhere) is that its investors pull their money for some other business that they believe is growing faster, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the company collapses. Management, knowing that, pushes for growth and expansion at all costs, especially costs that will be borne by anyone or anything other than the company's bottom line.
This can even happen on an industry level: The popularity of a particular kind of product goes down, so now everybody who makes it or anything like it gets screwed by the investors as they move their money to what the hype machine has convinced them is the next big thing, even if their own company is totally profitable and efficient.
And you might think "But what about privately owned firms? They don't have to contend with this." Yes they do, regularly, because they almost definitely rely on bank loans for at least some of their operating funds, and the banks can pull the same maneuvers, or just mess with the interest rates because they can.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 23, @06:10AM
To the contrary, there are millions of businesses throughout the developed world that don't grow and their investors don't pull their money. They do ok.
But even if we consider businesses subject to the above dynamic, what exactly is wrong with the model? There are close analogues in the natural world. For example, a typical forest consists of trees that are either growing or dying. Seriously, it's that stark - any tree that's not growing is dying. Are forests bad as a result because of the importance of growth to healthy trees?
As a result of that churn of trees going through from seed to tree to deadwood, the forest can adapt to long term changes in climate. For example, where I live in Yellowstone, there are petrified trees in the northern part of the park. These date from when the Rockies were a coastal mountain range 50 million or so years ago with volcanoes much like what are on the coastal ranges of the US today (such as Mount Rainer, Mount St. Helens, etc). It turns out that the species back then are very similar to the species today. For example, among the fossil trees in the park, there are redwood variants and something very closely related to the present day Douglas fir. So over 50 million years, including 5 million years of ice age oscillation, we still have those trees today (just further west). Forests are remarkably adept at adapting to extraordinary changes in climate over time periods of thousands of years.
But would that be the case, if trees firmly toughed it out for millions of years, preventing any movement or adaptation over that time? I don't recall the climate variations that happened prior to 5 million years ago, but even if a forest cruised through all that, it won't have any luck with a kilometer of ice. Those trees would become extinct rather than thriving today (in the same sort of coastal ranges that they were in before).
This is what gets missed in your assertion that constant growth is essential to capitalism. Constant growth is not part of capitalism - growth and decline are. And there's no reason you can't have a bunch of good years in between unlike the trees of the forest. As a result, economies can adapt and benefit people for a lifetime. Maybe it's growing, maybe it's not. But it wouldn't be healthy to be stagnant - because the world isn't stagnant.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday February 23, @07:20AM
Depends a bit on your definition of capitalism. I'm a member of 2 cooperatives, one in renewable energy, and one in investigative journalism. In a cooperative, you also provide market services, but the profit motive is limited (the yearly return to shareholders is capped at maximum 6%, and decided upon by shareholder vote). Growth is nice, as are shareholder returns, but not a requirement.
From an EU Parliament report [europa.eu]:
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 23, @01:59PM
And I still would think that. Once the owners aren't growth obsessed, you've lost most of the alleged problem. It really is a very large set of counterexamples despite your assertions.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 22, @06:46PM
I say make two tracks in those professions:
You don't get paid on the second track, but
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gznork26 on Wednesday February 22, @09:15PM (1 child)
In the 80's I was on a software contract at a defense subcontractor. I was also working on a complex novel in my spare time, and the two sides of my life were vying for my attention. On the job, I was leading one team (of two) while consulting to the team I'd been part of previously, so there was a lot of pressure, but I was enjoying the task of the new team. One day it came to a head; after work, I threw rice into a pot and stood there watching it float.
For me, burnout was reaching the limit of my ability to maintain focus on so many things. I decided to negotiate an end to my contract when the work of the new team was complete. That game me a path out of the squeeze, which was enough to keep me going as I finished up the contract, after which I spent several months just decompressing and working on the book.
It also set me on a course of drumming up independent tech work for a time. But depression wasn't a part of it.
YMMV, of course.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Thursday February 23, @07:36AM
You were wise and/or lucky.
Friend of mine had the same issue: managing 2 contracts at 2 different companies at the same time. It was, ofcourse, only for a limited time: he just temporary helped company A out, they really needed his help.
That was about one and a half years ago: he's now divorced and in treatment for alcohol addiction.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 23, @08:16PM
The term started in the sixties, and referred to someone who was so drugged out all the time he was barely functional, but the term has morphed from "too many drugs" to "too much of anything".
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience