July 11th, 2023
Written by: Morgan Kindel
Burnout, defined by the World Health Organization as a “syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” is becoming increasingly normalized, despite its negative ramifications for mental and physical health. And while society is razor-focused on the impact burnout has on productivity, what is more concerning is why it affects productivity.
Despite what your boss might have told you, burnout is not simply some made-up excuse to take more vacations. On the contrary, burnout is a medically-recognized condition that alters your ability to pay attention, make decisions1, and regulate emotions2. It also impairs your creativity and problem-solving ability3. In other words, when you experience burnout, your ability to fulfill the “thinking” (cognitive) parts of your job diminishes. At the same time, the control you normally have over your impulses and emotions (like suppressing the urge to flip out on a co-worker who has been obnoxiously tapping their pen on their desk for the past three hours) weakens. These cognitive and emotional changes boil down to rewiring connections in your brain that control how you respond to stress.
To understand how and why this occurs, let’s take a step back to briefly discuss how stress generally alters the brain in the short- and long-run.
Despite the negative connotation of the word “stress”, our brain’s stress response serves an important purpose: survival. If you’re hiking and suddenly spot a shape on the ground that resembles a snake, it would not be in your best interest to pause and reflect on whether it really is a snake, consider whether said snake is poisonous, and then decide what to do. Instead, it is much better to reflexively jump away, even at the cost of embarrassment, even if you eventually realize the snake is just a deceptively shaped vine.
What is happening in the brain during this chain of events? In stressful situations, brain activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a region associated with rationality, cognition, and decision-making4, is reduced compared to a low-stress state. Meanwhile, the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with emotion and stress reactivity5, takes center stage, and drives this reflexive and impulsive behavior.
The PFC and amygdala aren’t isolated from one another – instead, they are in constant communication. In a normal (non-stressful) environment, the PFC acts like a “brake” that shuts down the more primitive brain centers, including the amygdala. When you’re in a low-stress state, your amygdala is quiet, and any potential amygdala activity is kept in check by the PFC. When our brain senses we are stressed, however, brain chemicals flood the brain and quiet the PFC2. As a result, the PFC becomes less active and the brake it previously had on the amygdala is lifted. Now, the amygdala is in the driver’s seat calling the shots. This is how stress heightens emotions and dampens logic.
Spotting what you think might be a snake is a finite event: you detect a potential danger, and your brain enters “threat-mode”, However, once the potential threat has passed, your brain switches threat-mode off and returns back to normal. But what happens when we experience a seemingly endless flow of workplace stressors? Threat-mode remains activated for longer than it should be. As the signal from your PFC to your amygdala continues to weaken, your amygdala gains the strength to drive more emotional and impulsive behavior.
The effects of chronic stress are often studied in contexts that are widely regarded as severe stressors: the loss of a loved one, moving to a new place, health, or financial issues. Burnout is not typically viewed on the same level of stress intensity. However, more than one quarter of American workers identify work as being their greatest source of stresses6. In one study2, researchers investigated the emotional and neural differences in burnt out individuals. As you might expect, they found that the burnt-out group was not so great at regulating negative emotions—they were more emotionally reactive when shown negative stimuli than the group that did not report feeling burnt-out/ The more interesting finding was that connections between PFC and the amygdala was significantly weakened—like what has been shown in cases of more “severe” stress.
The good news is that that the long-term effects of chronic stress on the brain are, at least to some degree, reversible. Both animal and human studies have shown that stress reduction is capable of restoring PFC function back to low-stress levels 7,8. We’d like to believe that all those minor day-to-day workplace stressors don’t have long-term consequences. But the science says otherwise. Indeed, burnout powerfully alters how we think and how we respond to emotionally charged situations. Underlying these effects are long-lasting changes to how our brain functions. So, next time your boss makes you feel guilty about taking that vacation, remember, it’s not just the physical vacation that you need, it’s the mental one too.
References
1. Deligkaris, P., Panagopoulou, E., Montgomery, A. J. & Masoura, E. Job burnout and cognitive functioning: A systematic review. Work Stress 28, 107–123 (2014).
2. Golkar, A. et al. The Influence of Work-Related Chronic Stress on the Regulation of Emotion and on Functional Connectivity in the Brain. PLOS ONE 9, e104550 (2014).
3. Morgan, C. A. et al. Baseline burnout symptoms predict visuospatial executive function during survival school training in special operations military personnel. J. Int. Neuropsychol. Soc. JINS 17, 494–501 (2011).
4. Lee, K. S. et al. Selection on the regulation of sympathetic nervous activity in humans and chimpanzees. PLoS Genet. 14, e1007311 (2018).
5. Szczepanski, S. M. & Knight, R. T. Insights into Human Behavior from Lesions to the Prefrontal Cortex. Neuron 83, 1002–1018 (2014).
6. LeDoux, J. The amygdala. Curr. Biol. 17, R868–R874 (2007).
7. Northwestern National Life Insurance Company. Employee burnout: causes and cures. (1992).
8. Savic, I., Perski, A. & Osika, W. MRI Shows that Exhaustion Syndrome Due to Chronic Occupational Stress is Associated with Partially Reversible Cerebral Changes. Cereb. Cortex 28, 894–906 (2018).
9. Liston, C., McEwen, B. S. & Casey, B. J. Psychosocial stress reversibly disrupts prefrontal processing and attentional control. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106, 912–917 (2009).
Cover photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.
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