That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Burnout

Episode Date: June 3, 2023

Long bouts of stressful work, problems at home, and countless other things can leave you feeling exhausted and distressed. Burnout, the state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion, is becoming more prominent. In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind how we become burnt out and how it affects the brain. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. Hopefully you've never experienced burnout, but maybe you have. burnout, but maybe you have. Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion where you're just completely wiped out, and it's usually attributed to being exposed to excessive and prolonged stress. So on today's podcast, the neuroscience of burnout. neuroscience of burnout. Basically, burnout occurs when you're like completely overwhelmed, you know, work, life, family, you know, you feel emotionally drained and, you know, people keep asking things of you and you're just not able to deliver on it. And it comes, as I said, from

stress. And we've talked about stress on a previous episode. So as a precursor, you might want to go back and listen to the neuroscience of stress and all the stuff we talked about, cortisol being released and the rest of it. But with burnout, it's a step beyond that. And basically you can get to a place where you're no longer interested in life.

You lose motivation and you basically are what we call burned out. Typically what happens is if you think of a work context, your productivity is greatly decreased. You feel like you have no energy. People even get to a point where they feel helpless, right? Life is hopeless. You get very cynical and very critical of people

and typically resentful. And eventually at some point, you just almost come to a complete stop. And what's sad about burnout is it spills over into your every area of life, right? It's your home life, your work life, your social life. And what matters from a health perspective is that people in a burned out state, your body starts to fail. Now, towards the end of the podcast, I'll go specifically into the brain and what's going on. But in terms of your body, basically your immune system gets compromised with prolonged stress, which we've talked about before. But also with burnout, it's even more so.

So you're more susceptible to colds and flus. And it's really important to deal with burnout. One of the reasons I picked this topic is this one wasn't from you, the listeners. This is something I've been burned out before in the past. I've got a demanding job. I'm trying to deliver the podcast to you, of course, but I've got some other stuff going on. I do some consulting work. I actually have a startup company. I've got a son that I'm raising on my own. So yeah, and you hopefully haven't experienced it, but let's go start with something simple, warning signs that you're on the way to burnout. Typically, you get to a place where every day is a bad day. For the minute you wake up, it's just a bad

day and it never goes away. Now, all of us have bad days and that's perfectly normal, but this is something where it's like weeks on end. Basically, you sort of stop caring for yourself. Like at work, you stop doing your job around the house. You just don't do as much. You know, classic signs are like you stop vacuuming. You stop doing laundry. You know, at work, you start missing meetings. Burnout's 99% of the time associated with feeling exhausted all the time. You're just permanently tired. And basically, you find yourself in a place where you can't do much.

Like, you know, everything that you try to do, you're just overwhelmed, right? And you just can't do it. And typically the resentful part is you start to get angry at other people and you feel like no one cares, right? You know, no one appreciates what I do. In terms of the signs of burnout, I want to break this into three categories, right? There are physical signs and symptoms of burnout. I sort of went over these in terms of the warning signs, but once you're actually burned out, you're feeling tired and drained most of the time. You're frequently sick. Like I said, your immune system actually gets compromised when you're exposed to prolonged stress. Headaches are common. Muscle pain. Your body aches for really no reason. You might have a change in appetite or sleep habits.

You find yourself eating too much, eating the wrong things, not eating at all. And typically with burnout and stress, people's sleep habits are disrupted. And again, we've talked about sleep in the past. But sleep, at least according to the research we do in my lab, single biggest determinant of mental health and overall health. In terms of emotional signs and symptoms of burnout, a sense of failure, self-doubt, like you just feel like you're not worth anything and you can't complete things. Typically people feel helpless, like there's nothing that can be done to solve these problems. People typically experience detachment,

so it's sort of like you're all alone in the world and no one's there for you. Motivation always goes with burnout. Basically a very negative outlook on life and feeling like there's nothing worth doing. And generally, even if you do accomplish things, you're not satisfied. You just don't get any satisfaction. I know when I was dealing with burnout, I would lift weights because I like to hit the gym a couple times a week. But normally I feel, yeah, at least I got that done. But with burnout, no, that's not happening.

You just don't get that little sense of accomplishment. And this would be true of work or school tasks as well. And behaviorally, typically you walk back from life. You stop doing things you're supposed to do. Like from a school perspective, you might stop doing schoolwork or skipping tests. From a work perspective, you know, you're just, you're missing meetings and making up excuses. Like I said before, you're isolating yourself. Procrastination's big. When you're burned out, typically, you know, you watch a lot of Netflix, right? You're just sitting there and you just can't get off the couch. A lot of people use food or drugs or alcohol to cope with burnout.

Of course, these are all things you shouldn't do if you're burned out. We'll talk a bit about that at the end. Typically, you get frustrated and kind of blow up at people. You know, you get angry very easily. And these are some of the behavioral signs of burnout. The biggest thing to realize is that stress and burnout aren't the same thing. All right. With stress, typically you get into a place that it's just too much, right? And this is like I said in that episode we did on it, cortisol releases in the brain and some other things. But stress you can still cope with. You can get things under control. Burnout is more about just not enough is a classic phrase that you use. You're just empty and you just can't do anything. You're exhausted. You don't have motivation. Like we've said, you just

don't care anymore. So stress leads to burnout, extreme and prolonged stress, but they're not the same thing. It's kind of like the next phase after being extremely stressed. In terms of what causes burnout, because there's things you can look for in your life to try to avoid being burned out. Situations at work or school where you feel like you have no control over what you're doing. This one's a bit beyond your control, but typically work or school situations where you're never recognized or never rewarded when you do things right. Typically, if you have job situations

where it's unclear what you're supposed to do, all right, or it's just simply too much, the person that's given it to you doesn't realize what they've actually asked you to do. Work that's monotonous or unchallenging can lead to burnout. if you do the same thing every day, all day. And typically work environments that are very chaotic and high pressure. One interesting research study I found looked at burnout in investment bankers,

and apparently it's quite common because that chaotic and high pressure thing is ticked every day. In terms of lifestyle and what you can do about your own lifestyle, well, working too much without taking time off to unwind, like you have to take time off, you just socialize or relax. Typically, people that get burnout on average have more or less, I guess is a better way to put it, less good relationships in their life. or less, I guess is a better way to put it, less good relationships in their life. You know, they don't have people they can go to to sort of say, gosh, this is really bad. Taking on too many responsibilities. This is one I can speak to personally, where you just keep saying yes to things and then all of a sudden there's not enough to do. And another common

one is because you're taking on all these responsibilities you don't get enough sleep and everyone on the podcast has heard me talking about this before um and even your personality itself and personality traits can be really hard to change but people that are more susceptible to burnout tend to be perfectionists all right just they just never feel everything is good enough if you're extremely pessimistic, that can lead to burnout because you reinforce the negative outcomes when they happen. People that tend to have to be in control, and that leads to the last point, is high-achieving type A personalities tend to be more susceptible to burnout.

Now, that's a lot about what burnout looks like and causes of burnout and be more susceptible to burnout. Now that's a lot about, you know, what burnout looks like and causes of burnout and things that contribute to burnout. But let's, you know, it's that neuroscience guy. So let's talk about what's going on in the brain. You know, the short version is when you're experiencing burnout, your brain is not going that well, all right? Your brain is not functioning that well. And because of the stress issue, you know, increased release of cortisol is very common. So that low sort of level of neurotransmitters at a higher level because of the emotional aspects of burnout and the negative emotional aspects. The amygdala typically is firing erratically and typically decreased firing. So a classic study that I've read and used when I teach sometimes is that someone that's burned out, if you show them an emotional picture, for instance,

in an MRI scanner, you'd expect to see a large emotional response in the amygdala, but it's blunted. And that's what's driving people not feeling like anything they're doing is worthwhile is they don't get this positive emotional response to things. Neurotransmitter issues, you know, basically neurotransmitters across the board are reduced or being released sporadically, typically like a decrease in dopaminergic release. And we've talked about dopamine being associated with reward in depression. And typically you see reduced releases of dopamine, but this is also true of norepinephrine and serotonin and all the other neurotransmitters we've talked about in the past. So that whole system is disrupted. Impaired prefrontal cortex. So basically the frontal part of your brain that you use to solve problems, and we've talked about this a lot, so I don't want to review it too deeply, but you know,

the prefrontal cortex is the part that allows you to switch between tasks. It allows you to come up with problem-solving strategies. It helps with goal-setting, all of these executive function. Well, the prefrontal cortex is typically impaired in people with burnout, and it's not permanent impairment, but it's impaired because of the state of burnout. And it's not permanent impairment, but it's impaired because of the state of burnout. And we'll talk about what you can do about burnout just at the end when we wrap up. And then a lot of the things that you see, the sleep disruption and these kind of things come from the midbrain. And in the past, we've talked about the hypothalamus and the thalamus and the midbrain regions. Well, those midbrain regions, if you remember, they control sort of day-to-day life,

I like to think of it, like your sleep-wait cycle, hunger, thirst. All of these things are controlled by the midbrain structures to a large extent. And those systems are also not functioning correctly. So that state of prolonged stress that leads to burnout, basically it results in your brain not functioning well. So that's a bit on the neuroscience of burnout. And last of all, what can you do about it? So if

you do experience burnout, what can you do? Well, it's becoming a bit of my mantra, but sleep number one, you got to get your sleep sorted and make sure you're getting good sleep every night. A diet when you're feeling burned out, just like if you're feeling stressed, it's not the time to, it's a time to try to be as strong-willed as you can and eat healthy because that supports good mental health and brain function. And of course, exercise.

Exercise has such a massive positive impact on things that even though you're exhausted and you feel tired, you gotta force yourself to hop on the bike or go for a walk around the block or hit the gym. There's two other things that are really important as well, which I talk about a bit, but not as much. Number one, try to change your work patterns or your school patterns, whatever it is. And for athletes, because athlete burnout's a real thing, try to change your practice patterns as best you can. because athlete burnout's a real thing.

Try to change your practice patterns as best you can. And sometimes it's hard to reduce work across the board, but that's where you get used, you force yourself to take the occasional afternoon off. You make sure you don't work on the weekends. You know, for the athletes out there, you find breaks in your training schedule where you truly unwind, because you just can't go all the time

in a high stress environment because you'll get burned out. And perhaps the most important one, and this is one that we're doing some research on now in the Craig Olson Lab, but talking to people, you know, COVID-19 and the pandemic highlighted the importance of social interaction. And with burnout, it's entirely true. Like I said earlier in the episode, people that are burned out tend to withdraw from engaging with other people. Well, if you start experiencing burnout, that is not the time to withdraw. That's the time to engage more. So there you go. A bit on the neuroscience of burnout. At the highest level, if you want the

elevator pitch, it's caused by extreme and constant exposure to stress. And if you keep doing that with no breaks, eventually you end up burned out. And hopefully for all of you out there, you're not dealing with burnout. And if you are, remember sleep, diet, exercise, change work patterns and engage socially. We had a little break in the release schedule. We thought we were starting season five and this episode's a bit late. We're going to get back on track.

Just a weird combination of Matt and myself both being away at the same time. So our apologies, but we will get the episodes out and coming. Remember the website is there, thatneuroscienceguy.com. You can support us on Patreon. The link is there.

Remember all the money goes to graduate students in the Kregolson lab. There's also a link to our Etsy store. If another request there is remember show ideas. Most of season five is being planned by you. The listeners, you can follow me on Twitter at that neuro side guy and just DM me. I've tried to respond to as many people as I can send in some ideas, but here's a good shout out.

Matt and I were talking about this just yesterday. If you have ideas for stuff on the Etsy store, a t-shirt design or something else, please let us know. We're just about to launch a new t-shirt. That neuroscientist in training we came up with, which we think is hilarious and hopefully you do too. And finally, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Please subscribe. My name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Please subscribe. My name is Olive Kregolson, and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you soon.