Signs of Burnout at Work: When Stress Turns into a Mental Health Crisis
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Stress is often a normal experience for modern professionals working in a high-speed workplace environment. However, typical workplace stress, which most professionals experience, can develop into burnout. A prolonged exposure to overwhelming stress creates a feeling of complete exhaustion that rest fails to eliminate. This causes burnout, affecting your emotional, physical, and mental state. Ignoring burnout symptoms can result in significant damage to your health until it transforms into a full-fledged mental health emergency.
Burnout develops slowly over time instead of appearing suddenly. It's important to recognise the signs and symptoms before they lead to incapacitating conditions.
The Physical Toll
Your physical health is most affected during burnout situations. You might experience:
Chronic fatigue: Persistent tiredness that remains unrelieved even when you try to rest. The exhaustion can become so severe that you lose your ability to handle regular daily challenges.
Sleep disturbances: Your ability to both fall asleep and maintain sleep (insomnia) becomes a persistent problem.
Increased illness: Burnout weakens your immune system, so you become more vulnerable to infections, including colds, flu, and other illnesses.
Pain: You may experience frequent unexplained headaches, muscle pain, and joint aches. Some people develop gastrointestinal symptoms.
The Emotional Drain
During burnout, you become emotionally depleted while feeling detached from everything. The most noticeable emotional indicators of burnout include:
Self-doubt: You spend most of your time doubting your competence and feeling completely ineffective at everything you do.
Helplessness, hopelessness, and defeat: A pervasive sense that nothing you do matters or that your situation is insurmountable.
Detachment and cynicism: Feeling disconnected from work, colleagues, and activities you once enjoyed.
Loss of motivation and enjoyment: A noticeable lack of enthusiasm, even for tasks or aspects of your job you used to find fulfilling.
Irritability: A state of heightened irritability alongside feelings of intensifying anxiety.
Behavioural Changes to Watch For
Behavioural symptoms of burnout can impact both work activities and your relationship with others. Some common behavioural signs include:
Decreased productivity and poor social relations at work.
Avoiding tasks, procrastinating more, or taking longer to get things done.
Withdrawing yourself from all social contact with colleagues, as well as friends and family members.
Difficulty concentrating, making decisions, or a noticeable decline in the quality of your work.
More lateness and increased absences.
Relying on food, alcohol, or drugs to cope with stress.
When Stress Becomes a Crisis
Normal stress reactions develop from pressure, but burnout indicates that chronic stress has become unmanageable. Untreated burnout leads to serious mental health issues such as depression and anxiety disorders. When burnout interferes with your ability to perform effectively in your personal life and professional role, it becomes a mental health emergency that needs urgent assistance.
Identifying these signs is the first step towards recovery. Understanding and recognising these symptoms when they appear together will help you seek the right help and support.
If you're dealing with burnout symptoms or your stress levels have become too difficult to handle, consider seeking professional help. At The Grove Counselling & Therapy, we provide a secure environment for clients to investigate these feelings while building practical methods to handle stress through holistic counselling. Reach out to us today to discover how we can help you restore your well-being.