What is employee burnout?
Burnout is a set of psychological, physiological, emotional, and behavioural states associated with the inability to effectively manage stress hormone release into the body. The stress hormones are adrenaline and cortisol, and they are principally responsible for activating our fight, flight, and freeze responses. Cortisol in particular can have negative impacts if there are elevated levels over a long time. It can lead to physical and mental ill health.

• The psychological or cognitive states include disaster thinking, black and white thinking, filtering out positive aspects of life and only seeing the negative, thoughts of self-harm or of being better off dead, belief of being a failure, belief of being a burden, sense of impending doom or disaster, perception of others viewing self in negative terms (mind reading), belief the world is a dangerous place (paranoia), inability to concentrate
• The physiological states might include palpitations/racing heart or panic attacks, inability to relax or sit still, unexplained illnesses/somatisation (colds, coughs, cold sores, stomach, and digestives issues) lack of energy and over tired muscles, shortness of breath
• Behavioural states might include, isolating and avoidance, self-medicating on alcohol or recreational drugs and sex, procrastination around everyday tasks both personal and work, poor sleeping habits, drop off in self-care and personal hygiene, poor hydration, and bad eating habits
• The emotional states might include dysregulation (general rise in irritability and anger), emotional lability (overly emotional at small triggers both positive and negative), general feelings of fear and or general feelings of negativity, lack of motivation, sense of victimisation, sense of danger and hyper-vigilance, enhanced startle responses (easily spooked)

If you are experiencing any combination of these from all four axis over a two week or more timescale, then it’s important to seek a proper psychological assessment of need.

How to avoid burnout
Essentially the way to avoid burnout is double pronged: improve individual personal resources in terms of stress management (including knowing when to get out of a difficult situation) and the organisation to audit it’s work processes to ensure healthy work practices are followed. It’s the same principle that is applied to workplace health and safety, employees commit to ensuring they work in safe ways and the employer commits to putting out the necessary warning signs, safety gear etc.

So, a simple health and safety example might be, a cleaner puts a sign indicating a floor has recently or is currently being cleaned, (caution wet floor: cleaning in progress) the employee notes the sign and takes care when using that part of the building. Seeing psychological distress (in this case burnout) within the context of a psychosocial health and safety issue that can be audited and mitigated against in the same way as a wet floor can, is a much more effective way to deal with the issue.

IOS 4003:2021: psychological health and safety at work
There is a new IOS 4003:2021 standard for conducting psychosocial assessments in the workplace within the context of broader health and safety processes which works towards mitigating against the obvious psychosocial risks present in organisations aiming to reduce the incidence of the psychological equivalents of ’slips, trips and falls’. Moving to understand psychological distress risk is inherent in the workplace and aiming to develop a safety partnership with staff to reduce incidence is the best way of dealing with the issues.

While unpleasant for the individual, burnout can also damage an organisation. Spotting the early warning signs can avoid or reduce overwhelm for the individual and a good support system is essential.