Understanding and Overcoming Burnout with Neuroscience-Based Protocol

There’s one thing that stops 99% of people from working hard and performing optimally, and that thing is burnout. Most people don’t know that burnout is 100% solvable when you understand the underlying neuroscience. What’s more, there’s a way to structure your life and day such that, no matter how hard you push and how high you perform, burnout becomes an impossibility.

This article is adapted from content originally presented in the YouTube video titled “6 Signs You’re Burned Out, Not Depressed” by Rian Doris. For a more detailed exploration of the topic and to view the original content, please refer to the video linked at the end of this page.

Signs of Burnout

Now, you know that state where you feel lethargic yet agitated, feeling cornered by life? Tasks that once fired you up now feel like chores. Your self-belief tanks, you’re worn out, and even cynical. Six cups of coffee barely make a dent in the bone-deep exhaustion you feel.

Distinguishing Burnout from Depression

Now, this isn’t depression; it’s something different, but it’s messing with your life and strangleholding your ambition. So, what’s going on here?

Historical Discovery of Burnout

Well, the real problem is something the psychologist Herbert Freudenberger discovered in the 1970s at a busy and free healthcare clinic in New York City. Volunteers arrived early to help the underserved and the poor out of the goodness of their hearts. Long hours didn’t phase them because the work was so rewarding. But over time, the once lively volunteers started to slowly drift into resentment. Their empathy started to evaporate, and it was replaced by detachment. And this trend started to spread through the understaffed clinic, threatening to deprive patients of much-needed care. Freudenberger began to notice this change, but what’s weird was that these healthcare volunteers weren’t depressed. Freudenberger realized he was witnessing a unique phenomenon. This wasn’t just fatigue or a temporary lapse in morale. It was a profound motivational collapse and emotional void. And that’s when Freudenberger coined the term ‘burnout.’

Personal Experience with Burnout

My first brush with burnout happened as a teenager. I grew up in Ireland, dreaming of one day making it here to the US to make it big, and I just needed to get my foot in the door with an internship in the US so I could land an American work visa and get to the promised land. During college, I applied widely. Out of hundreds of applicants, I lucked out and landed a gig at a company here in California. Now, the internship started out exciting. I was working alongside well-known professionals I had long admired, but within weeks, the shine started to wear off a little bit. My pay was the equivalent of minimum wage, and I had to squander half of what I was earning just on Uber to get to and from the office. Making matters worse, the company culture turned out to be toxic. Leadership gossip and most of the work that I produced ended up being scrapped, with less high-quality work produced by others being used for political reasons alone. Over time, I started to lose belief in my own ability to perform. I was deep in the throes of burnout.

Burnout as a Medical Disorder

Burnout isn’t mere fatigue or temporary stress. Burnout is a recognized and distinct medical disorder. Once you understand the characteristics of burnout and its causes, you’ll also know whether you are at risk of it, how to eliminate it, and how to guard yourself from experiencing it in the first place. There are three things that make burnout distinct, and those are exhaustion, cynicism, and low self-efficacy. You can almost think of burnout as the opposite of flow. Flow being that optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.

Burnout vs. Flow

In flow, you’re deeply engrossed in your task, you lose track of time, and you feel a sense of mastery and control. On the other hand, with burnout, you feel as if you’re just going through the motions, time drags on. Flow compounds gains; burnout compounds losses. And this is what it felt like during the internship. I started glancing at the clock, wishing the day would end so I could get the hell out of there. My work felt increasingly pointless. And the effects of burnout aren’t just subjective or psychological. Burnout actually alters your neural circuitry, forcing a downward spiral of cognitive dysfunction. I didn’t know it at the time, but several things were happening to my brain while I was experiencing this burnout. The first is that burnout actually enlarges your amygdala and weakens its connections with the anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex. Individuals with burnout are more prone to emotional and attentional lapses, and it’s harder for the brain to rein in and control those negative emotions. To put it another way, burnout does to the mind what a bad cold does to the body.

Fact Checking

  1. Burnout and Neural Circuits: A study led by Amita Golkar and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden demonstrated that workplace burnout can alter neural circuits in the brain. Chronic stress seems to dampen neurological ability to recover from negative situations, causing more stress and forming a vicious cycle.

  2. Prefrontal Cortex and Stress: Amy Arnsten’s research highlights how uncontrollable stress affects the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher cognition, abstract thought, working memory, and executive functions. Stress weakens the prefrontal cortex and strengthens more primitive brain parts, affecting one’s ability to control stressors and perceive tasks as overwhelming.

  3. Amygdala Enlargement and Negative Perception: The amygdala, critical in emotional reactions, was found to be relatively enlarged in participants with burnout, with stronger connections to areas linked to emotional distress. This neural change can lead to a heightened focus on negative aspects and interpreting neutral situations negatively.

  4. Chronic Stress and Prefrontal Cortex-Amygdala Circuitry: Chronic stress impacts the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and its outputs to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), among other regions. Research using optogenetics showed that chronic stress altered pre-synaptic glutamate release in these circuits, leading to increased anxiety-like behaviors. This demonstrates how chronic stress can dysregulate BLA-PFC circuitry, contributing to anxiety and related mental health disorders.

Personal Response to Burnout

Once I realized that this is what I was dealing with, I took a week off, tried to relax by the beach a little bit to recover, because I had to get back on my game fast. But when I returned, although I felt good for a day or two, within a week, I felt just as flat as before. So, what on Earth was happening here? Why didn’t taking a week off work reduce the burnout I was experiencing? Well, years later, I came across the research of pioneering psychologist Christina Maslach. Maslach developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the most widely used instrument for assessing burnout in the scientific community. And Maslach discovered that, like flow, burnout actually has validated preconditions. The six burnout triggers, from Christina Maslach’s research, are as follows:

6️⃣ The Six Burnout Triggers

  1. Lack of control. This is where you lack autonomy, ownership, or creative expression. Maybe you feel micromanaged.

  2. Values conflict, where there’s a disconnect between you and your organization’s core values. Maybe you care about the planet, but your company dumps trash into the nearby river.

  3. Insufficient reward. You feel taken for granted, unrecognized, or undercompensated.

  4. Work overload; your workload is simply too high, too complex, or everything just is too urgent.

  5. Unfairness. Maybe there’s a culture of favoritism, like in my instance in LA, where your boss promotes their cousin instead of you, even though you are the one who actually earned the role.

  6. A breakdown of community. This is where you have to work with patronizing, low-performing colleagues with no mechanism for healthy conflict resolution or feedback.

Another great article: Six early predictors of burnout in the workplace

Christina Maslach original research on burnout triggers

Tackling Burnout Effectively

Now, after I learned about the burnout triggers, the reason for the unresolved burnout when I was interning in LA finally started to click. Lack of control, unfairness, and insufficient reward. Ironically, one of the ones I was least susceptible to was actually work overload. I wasn’t actually having to work too much during the internship. This brings us to an essential key for tackling burnout: you have to solve the root problem to solve the burnout problem. That means isolating the offending burnout triggers within your workplace and then fully addressing each of them. And you don’t want to make the mistake most people make, which is assuming that all of their burnout is just from that one work overload trigger. So many people do what I did; they take a little bit of time off, they come back, boom, they’re burnt out again. And the reason is they’re susceptible to other burnout triggers. So, we’ve got to address them all, and even better, prevent it from creeping in in the first place.

Neuroscience-Based Protocols to Combat Burnout

1. Choosing the Right Kind of Hard

The Importance of Sufficient Reward

Choosing tasks that align with your strengths and are driven by intrinsic motivation is key. This protocol emphasizes the significance of engaging in activities that provide a good return on investment of effort. Tasks should be intrinsically rewarding, align with personal strengths, and be fueled by personal interests and values.

2. Not Staying Too Close to the Line

Understanding Allostatic Load Limits

This approach involves avoiding operating at the maximum capacity for prolonged periods to prevent burnout. Recognizing and respecting your allostatic load limit, the cumulative wear and tear on your body and brain, is crucial. The strategy includes moderating work intensity and avoiding the trap of constantly working at full capacity.

3. When You See a Hill, Sprint

Strategic Workload Increase

Counterintuitively, increasing the workload in a strategic manner can sometimes alleviate burnout. This protocol suggests boosting workload to gain momentum and see significant results, which can be energizing and reduce feelings of burnout. The key is to ensure this increase is temporary and strategically planned.

4. Disarming the Burnout Triggers

Systematically Addressing Each Trigger

This method involves identifying and systematically addressing the six burnout triggers: lack of control, work overload, insufficient reward, unfairness, values conflict, and breakdown of community. Each trigger requires a specific approach to effectively manage and resolve the underlying issues.

Examples for Addressing Burnout Triggers

  • For lack of control, focus on parts of work you can own and negotiate more autonomy.
  • To address work overload, ensure real time off and engage in active recovery.
  • Combat insufficient reward by seeking recognition and optimizing work processes.
  • Address unfairness by resetting perspectives and confronting the source of unfairness.
  • For values conflict, align work with personal values or consider a change in role or organization.
  • To tackle breakdown of community, invest in building stronger team relationships and communication.

5. Building Burnout Body Armor

Emphasizing Active Recovery

Preventing burnout involves active recovery strategies that stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. This includes engaging in hormetic stressors like cold-induced thermogenesis, heat therapy, exercise, and massage. These activities help in physiological burnout-proofing by creating short bursts of stress that combat long-term burnout effects. Hormetic stressors jack up your heart rate in the moment, then result in it dropping over time, with your heart rate variability, a great marker of recovery, elevating afterward.

Hormetic Stressors for Recovery

  • Cold-induced thermogenesis: Using ice baths, cold showers, and cold plunges.
  • Heat therapy: Utilizing saunas, steam rooms, and hot baths.
  • Exercise: Moderate exercise and strength training as essential components.
  • Massage and myofascial release: Integral for maintaining physical wellness and combating stress.

The Role of Hormetic Stressors

These interventions work by temporarily increasing stress levels, triggering a parasympathetic rebound that reduces overall stress and burnout symptoms. Such strategies are more effective than traditional relaxation techniques for those experiencing severe burnout.

Conclusion

To effectively combat and prevent burnout, it’s crucial to engage in tasks that are intrinsically rewarding, respect your personal limits, strategically manage workloads, systematically address burnout triggers, and prioritize active recovery techniques.