During the pandemic, I experienced my first real episode of burnout. I was falling asleep every day after work, with fatigue so heavy I’d wake up four hours later on the couch not realizing I’d fallen asleep in the first place. Despite being an expert on the topic, and telling patients they had it, I had trouble turning the lens on myself.
Part of that is just how insidious burnout is. Unlike depression, it’s caused by the systems we work in. It’s considered a workplace-associated condition, including by the International Classification of Diseases, and it isn’t currently in the psychiatric diagnostic manual (a conversation for another time). That’s partly why you feel better on a weekend or vacation, because you’re removed from the stressor. But, if you were depressed, as I tell my patients, you’d still be depressed, just on a beach.
However, burnout is more than just being tired or stressed from work, even if that’s how we’ve come to use the word colloquially. Definitions of burnout typically include three dimensions. The first is emotional exhaustion or feeling spent at the end of the day, which for me, looks like physical exhaustion. When I give talks, I ask people to raise their hands if they’re currently not emotionally exhausted. One or two usually enthusiastically do, and it turns out…
Source: Inside Higher Ed — Read the full article on the original site ↗