Burnout is more than just stress and can have long-term impacts on your physical and mental health.
What Is Burnout?
“Burnout describes when we don’t have energy to continue to function mentally, physically, emotionally,” said Michele Thorpe, an advanced practice registered nurse in psychiatry Avera Behavioral Health in Aberdeen.
What Are Common Symptoms?
“Familiar symptoms of burnout that we see are we becoming very irritable or anxious, we can become short with fellow coworkers and, family members, we also are tired, we may try to rest and, sleep more but we still feel that we are just exhausted all the time. Mentally we are not as sharp, we may find we have difficulty focusing and concentrating, things that we do routinely we find that we are making mistakes,” said Thorpe.
How to Prevent Burnout
“It doesn’t matter your job, your career, your social economic status; it’s taking time to reflect where we are at as an individual. Is our plate full? And when it’s full, it’s taking time at that point to maybe start reassessing what we can take off of our plate. Can we delegate people to do things for us? Setting boundaries, so when we are being dumped on sometimes, we have to say ‘time out’ and prioritize what you have. So prevention is really trying to recognize signs and symptoms and then kind of correcting our behaviors before it leads into burnout,” said Thorpe.
What Happens if Left Untreated?
“Burnout is not a disease so there’s no drug or medication that is going to fix burnout. It’s rather symptoms and recognizing those symptoms. If we would leave burnout not treated or not managed. It could lead to depression over time and physical ailments. So people with burnout a lot of times have muscle tension, tightness, migraines, GI discomfort, and all of those things can lead to other medical diagnoses if we don’t recognize and take care of it,” said Thorpe.
Learn more about behavioral health services at Avera.
