Is it stress…or is it burnout?

This is a question that plagues many workers in today’s hyperactive, 24/7 workplace. Although stress and burnout are related, burnout is the über stress: extremely high feelings of stress that affect your emotional, physical, and psychological well-being. 

Due to the literally thousands of chemicals that surge through your body when you experience high stress, it’s no wonder that you are psychologically depleted and physically drained. 

In fact, one of the first warning signs of burnout to many people is a feeling of exhaustion– particularly when they don’t feel refreshed after a good night (or weekend) of restful sleep. While you might be able to “sleep off” the effects of a highly stressful day, burnout is connected to often extreme changes in your sleep habits. This is a crucial difference between “routine” fatigue and burnout exhaustion. 

The types of sleep disturbances vary, depending on the individual. They can range from chronic insomnia to narcoleptic sleeping as well as waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep. This starts a dangerous spiral where the über stress of burnout contributes to your sleep issues AND your sleep issues prevent you from getting the much needed rest to break out of burnout! 

But don’t beat yourself up if you’re burned out! Burnout is NOT an individual’s maladaptive response to stress – in fact, it can be the result of a toxic work environment. The burnout epidemic is real and it affects not just the individual employees, but has significant financial and quality outcomes for the organization as a whole.

Coming up next...

In this lesson, we’ll dive into some of the other common signs of burnout, as well as identify 7 personality and situational conditions that cause burnout. We’ll also explore how the burnout epidemic is affecting the competitive capabilities and financial profitability of the modern work organization.