“The impact of that article was just huge.” The article led to more research, more books, and more attention from academic journals. “I had not expected at all that kind of reaction,” Maslach said. Maslach received an incredible outpouring of letters and phone calls from people who were grateful to find out that they were not alone in their experience of burnout. The 1976 publication of Maslach’s article “Burned-Out,” published in the magazine Human Behavior, generated a huge public response - popularizing the concept of burnout within the popular press. Much like symptoms of depression, burnout was asphyxiating people’s ambitions, idealism, and sense of worth. In analyzing the interviews, Maslach and colleagues noticed a trend: Workers often reported feelings of profound emotional exhaustion, negativity directed at clients and patients, and a crisis in feelings of professional competence. Many of the symptoms of burnout overlap with the hallmarks of depression, including extreme fatigue, loss of passion, and intensifying cynicism and negativity.ĪPS Fellow Christina Maslach, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the foremost researchers on burnout, began studying this emerging phenomenon in the 1970s through a series of extensive interviews with employees in service organizations. Formerly idealistic mental health workers were finding themselves depleted and weary, resenting patients and the clinic.īurnout is now recognized as a legitimate medical disorder by much of mainstream medicine and has even been given its own ICD-10 code (Z73.0 – Burn-out state of vital exhaustion). The psychologist Herbert Freudenberger is credited with bringing the term “burnout” into the research lexicon in 1974, defining it as the loss of motivation, growing sense of emotional depletion, and cynicism he observed among volunteers working at a free clinic in New York City. Just as the impact of burnout stifles healthy professional growth, emerging research shows that the chronic psychosocial stress that characterizes burnout not only impairs people’s personal and social functioning, it also can overwhelm their cognitive skills and neuroendocrine systems - eventually leading to distinctive changes in the anatomy and functioning of the brain. Using cutting-edge techniques, integrative research teams are demonstrating that burnout is not just a state of mind, but a condition that leaves its mark on the brain as well as the body. Rather, mounting scientific evidence shows that burnout takes a profound physical toll that cascades well beyond our professional lives. It’s a mistake to assume that burnout is merely an emotional response to long hours or a challenging job. A 2013 survey of human resource directors in the United Kingdom found that nearly 30% reported that burnout was widespread within their organization. Recent Gallup research, for example, showed that 2.7 million workers in Germany report feeling the effects of burnout.
Indeed, burnout arguably is reaching epic proportions in many industrialized countries. Global surveys on the state of the working world show that a large proportion of people share the experience that Huffington described. “I hit my head on my desk, broke my cheek bone, got four stitches on my right eye,” Huffington disclosed during an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Just a few years after launching the Huffington Post media empire, company president and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington was so exhausted from running her new business that she collapsed. One of the greatest threats to workplace safety may be from an unexpected source: stress.
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