Beyond Burnout

What to do when (or ideally, before) stress reaches epic proportions

- By Leslie Finlay

America is seriously stressed out. According to The American Institute of Stress, even before the pandemic 94 percent of workers said that they regularly felt stressed. And more recently, the American Psychological Association reported that the country's collective stress had reached alarming levels. We all get busy sometimes, but feeling constantly and chronically swamped, worried, and overwhelmed can lead to burnout, which can have serious consequences.

Think of burnout as stress taken to another level. "Typically, burnout is defined as an extreme state of psychological strain," says YoungAh Park, an associate professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois. It's a response to facing prolonged, chronic stressors that go beyond your ability or available resources to overcome.

Because so many of us frequently feel stressed, it can be hard to recognize when the line has been crossed.

True burnout is different from feeling overextended. Michael Leiter, a professor of psychology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, explains, "Burnout combines three key dimensions: overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism, and a sense of discouragement, inadequacy, or low accomplishment." Feeling exhausted when you begin working is a red flag. "This is a sign that demands are building faster than you can recover from them," he says.