What Burnout Does to a Leader’s Brain
Burnout is easy to write off as being tired. For a leader, the harder part is often what it does to your thinking, like how well you catch your own mistakes or how long it takes to settle after a tense conversation. Two studies of people with work related burnout help explain why those changes can show up, and they are worth knowing about if you have been wondering whether something is wrong with you.
What burnout is
The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 describes burnout as a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” It names three dimensions: exhaustion, a growing mental distance or cynicism toward your job, and a drop in how effective you feel at work. The WHO classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, and it says the term should be used only for experiences tied to work. If you see all three in yourself, take that seriously even when your results still look fine from the outside.
Burnout can make stress harder to turn down
In a 2014 study, researchers compared 40 people whose burnout symptoms came from long term stress at work with 70 people who did not have those symptoms. While participants looked at neutral and upsetting pictures, they were asked at different points either to change their emotional reaction or to hold it steady, and the researchers measured their startle response. The burnout group had a harder time turning negative emotion down, although their responses looked normal in the other conditions.
Brain scans taken at rest showed weaker connections in the burnout group between the amygdala, part of the brain’s emotion and stress network, and two regions called the anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. How strongly the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex were connected also tracked with how well a person could calm a reaction. The authors suggested this pattern may help keep the stress going. For a leader, that might look like a hard conversation that stays with you for the rest of the afternoon.
Burnout and catching your own mistakes
A 2017 study tested 80 working adults. Half of them had burnout symptoms measured on the Maslach Burnout Inventory and half did not. Each person did a quick attention task, responding to the direction of a center arrow surrounded by distracting arrows, while the team recorded brain activity with EEG. Both groups made mistakes at about the same rate, but people with burnout were slower overall.
After an error, though, their brain signals looked different. The burnout group showed a stronger automatic reaction to mistakes and a weaker signal linked to consciously noticing them. The authors read this as the brain using more of its resources to react, which may leave less available for staying focused on the goal. They also said plainly that their design cannot show burnout caused these differences, and that the pattern partly resembles what is seen in anxiety and depression.
How our intensives approach burnout
Neither study tested a treatment, so I want to be careful not to stretch what they found. Our intensives work directly with the nervous system alongside counseling. At The Resiliency Co., an intensive runs 6 to 29 days in Redding with a team of licensed clinicians. Every intensive includes 20 hours of neurofeedback, 5 hours of individual counseling, 5 hours of group work and two massages a week, and trauma work with Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) begins within the first few days. You can read about the research behind neurofeedback on our neurofeedback page.
Executive clients are not grouped with first responders, and your company learns nothing about your care, including your dates, unless you sign a release. If you have already tried time off and watched the relief fade, my earlier post on why a vacation will not fix burnout goes into that pattern.
When you are ready to talk, you can learn more about our executive burnout intensive or call our team at 530-338-0087. I would be honored to walk through this with you.
Sources
Golkar, A., Johansson, E., Kasahara, M., Osika, W., Perski, A., & Savic, I. (2014). The influence of work-related chronic stress on the regulation of emotion and on functional connectivity in the brain. PLoS ONE, 9(9), Article e104550. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0104550
Golonka, K., Mojsa-Kaja, J., Gawlowska, M., & Popiel, K. (2017). Cognitive impairments in occupational burnout: Error processing and its indices of reactive and proactive control. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 676. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00676
World Health Organization. (n.d.). Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”. https://www.who.int/standards/classifications/frequently-asked-questions/burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon