Recently I had cause to wonder whether I was experiencing the famous “burnout syndrome”. I had been asked to give a talk to an auditorium full of gifted high school students. As I hurriedly prepared the speech – wondering what one should say to gifted children about their own giftedness – all I wanted to tell them was that being an adult is so hard, I don’t know how anyone who’s not gifted even survives in the world. Just being a person is going to be crazy difficult for all of you, I wanted to say.
And if you set your standards to any kind of reasonable level, every week will look like mission impossible, and you will have to run at it full tilt and try to do all the things. If by some miracle you manage it, you will just have to turn around and line up the hurdles for the next week and do it all again.
When you’re an adult, I wanted to say but didn’t, not ten minutes go by when you don’t think, “Man, I gotta get this stupid thing done or I’m so dead.” And if you’re sick for more than a day, the world breaks. I felt myself morphing into the image of the care-worn woman from the Dust Bowl photograph. It was not going to be a barn-burning performance.
According to the literature, job burnout syndrome is comprised of three major components. Emotional exhaustion, cynicism toward others and the job, and reduced personal accomplishment. That description seemed geared toward the caregiving professions, and didn’t quite fit with what I was experiencing. I was accomplishing a lot – the only thing was that I didn’t feel like it was sustainable, and I wanted desperately to sustain it, because I had a sense of urgency about all the things to be done.
Another researcher took an existential perspective, arguing that people try to find meaning in their life through work and when they fail, the result is burnout. Their ambitions and sense of worth fall out from under them. That didn’t fit either – I do find a lot of meaning in my work, it’s just that it sometimes seems to involve more cognitive exertion than I possess neurotransmitters.
More worrying is that long-term burnout is associated with an enlarged amygdala and a reduced ability to regulate negative emotional responses. Other structural changes have been located through R-fMRI. The good news is that with a month or so of recovery, those changes appear to reverse themselves.
So with that in mind, my dears, I will see you in a month.
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this is true. We all are being pushed to the limits and beyond, in order to be more efficient, more productive, more and more and more. I am living in moment in which I have to be an excellent scientist, a devoted husband, an inspiring father of two tireless children who demand a lot of attention (not to mention mundane stuff as moderne clothing, new electronics & games & etc.). As a result of all these demands, I am feeling I am accomplishing well below my self-imposed aims, and as a consequence, am not quite happy these times. Worst of all: how do you stop without huge damage to the system? looks like there’s no way out, you just have to move forward leaving pieces of you behind.
That’s exactly it, Jorge. And those self-imposed aims are what defines us, so the answer can’t be to drop those high standards for ourselves — or at least only as a last resort.
just thank you