How Burnout Happens: The 5 Phases and Warning Signs
Do you ever feel emotionally exhausted, trapped, and resentful toward your job? If so, it’s possible that you’re struggling with burnout.
I realized I had burnout when I felt so completely exhausted, it was overwhelming. I no longer cared about work, but was also completely ashamed that my work performance had taken a nosedive. I couldn’t remember the most simple things. All I wanted was to lay down on the couch for a million years.
If any of that is resonating with you, please do keep reading.
This post breaks down each of the five phases of burnout development that researchers have identified. When I learned this information it was like the clouds parted and I finally had the clarity I had been searching for.
Burnout Phase 1 – Being Unable to Recover from Stress
In Phase 1, you experience stressful events but do not have the opportunity to recover from them. For a lot of people, this can look like having stress in both your work life and your home life. You are prevented from getting the space necessary for your body to relax, which begins this process of wearing you down.
For me, I think this was stress at work, and then struggling with my mental health at home. Even if your physical space is not a source of stress, I think that, if your mental experience is stressful, you never really have a chance to recuperate.
Also with my depression, stress causes me to downward spiral faster – so my ability to take care of myself erodes pretty quickly. I remember operating under this feeling that I just had to keep my head down and push forward and someday I would feel better.
What I know now is that if you don’t change your situation or habits or build new coping mechanisms, you will stay stuck in the same place forever.
In our house, we think of stress as our cups being too full. Like, there’s all of this stressful stuff filling up your cup, and eventually it overflows. Also – everyone has a different size cup that allows you to handle different amounts of stress.
I’ve always felt like a weakling compared to other people, but really my cup is just smaller and I can’t handle as much. And that’s ok.
Symptoms of Burnout Phase 1:
Feeling a need for recovery but not being able to actually recover
Feeling an aversion to spending effort (like your body is telling you it’s time for a break)
Burnout Phase 2 – Your Body Adapts to Expect This New Level of Stress
After experiencing chronic stress, your body adapts itself to this new level of stress. Basically, your stress system remains switched on – even though there’s nothing that should be triggering it.
Under chronic stress, your body determines that this new level of stress is normal, so it sets it as your new baseline. (For you biology nerds, this means that you’ve established new homeostatic stress levels.)
You start feeling like you’re wired all the time. You experience hyperactivity, difficulty with sleep, or restlessness. You might feel like you can’t relax, even though there is absolutely nothing consciously stressing you.
With stress making you continuously wired, your body is still giving off a low-grade stress response when it’s time to sleep. And even though you’re exhausted, suddenly you can’t fall asleep. Plus, for a fun twist, this inability to sleep contributes to burnout.
I have ADHD, so a certain level of hyperactivity can feel normal to me. And I had been sleeping poorly for years before my full-on burnout experience. But one of the things that always bothered me was that inability to relax.
I would be constantly trying to lay on the couch and enjoy a movie, or read my book and enjoy a glass of wine – but there was always this feeling like I couldn’t sink into the activity. Like there was another me, floating just above that relaxed state, unable to sink down.
It’s like going to the spa and getting a massage but not being able to really feel any of it…
Or being on vacation but just feeling tense and like you’re still at work the entire time.
I’m now somewhat convinced that I’ve never really known how to relax (for various reasons) and it’s currently a big focus for me.
Symptoms of Burnout Phase 2:
Hyperactivity
Sleep difficulties
Inability to relax
Restlessness
Burnout Phase 3 - Hello Chronic Stress
Phase 3 is where things really crack wide open. When your body has been experiencing a stress response in the long term, you end up with a variety of physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral problems.
The Physical Effects of Chronic Stress
Physically, chronic stress affects your cardiovascular system, digestive system, immune system, endocrine system, and reproductive system.
Oh boy, I experienced so many different problems with my body during my chronic stress experience. One time, I couldn’t eat anything substantial for three weeks without getting stomach pains and crazy diarrhea. So I lived off of crackers, coconut water, and Pepto Bismol. I thought I had caught something or eaten something bad… But then we went on vacation and literally as soon as our plane landed in another city I was ready to house a burger and fries. (Stress-related much??)
My sex drive was essentially non-existent and no amount of supplements was fixing me.
Next, my cardiovascular system. Around the same time as my three-week digestive upset adventure, I was having this recurring thought. Each day, as I was walking from my car to the house after work, I would have this unbidden thought. It was like a little voice in my head would mumble, “It feels like my heart is dying…”
I didn’t really know what to do with this and obviously, it was a pretty soul-crushing thought. Then, about six months later I attended this workshop where I learned that stress causes your body to start breaking down your muscle mass. Especially the muscle in your chest region. The teacher made this tongue-in-cheek joke: “Can anyone think of any muscles in your chest that you don’t want getting broken down?” (He was talking about your heart muscle.)
The Mental/Neurological Effects of Chronic Stress
Chronic stress affects you neurologically by degrading your cognitive function. It especially impacts your higher-level processes such as executive functioning. In turn, this affects your work performance, which can cause you to force yourself to work harder to make up for mistakes.
Like I said earlier in this Burnout blog post series, I was tuned in to my brain not working as well as it should. It was embarrassing and I would make mistakes at work. This led me to feel ashamed of myself and work hard to cover up my declining performance. This led me to get trapped in this imposter syndrome whirlpool which made work become this place of almost paralyzing fear.
The Emotional Effects of Chronic Stress
Chronic stress can reduce your ability to control your emotions. You start to feel overwhelmed by your emotions and can have intense emotional reactions – where you didn’t before the chronic stress.
Finally - chronic stress can lead you to start having behavioral problems. This often starts in your personal life. People with burnout tend to go to great lengths to maintain social function at work, so a lot of the conflict tends to concentrate in your personal life. This can look like conflicts with your friends, family, or in your romantic relationship. It can also look like overdoing it with alcohol or quitting your hobbies. Or all of the above.
One of my favorite hobbies is going backpacking in the mountains near where I live. I knew I was in trouble when I realized I had no desire in me to go do that. Worse, the idea of doing it sounded terrible and draining – when before it had been one of my favorite things.
Symptoms of Phase 3:
Physical:
Headaches
Digestive issues
Stomach upset
Muscle tension or pain
Chest pain
Fatigue
Reduced sex drive
Getting sick more often
Mental:
Difficulty concentrating
Being forgetful or absent-minded
Trouble staying focused
Struggling with indecisiveness
Impaired ability to learn new things
Difficulty with planning
Emotional:
Feeling frustrated and angry
Being irritable
Overreacting
Feeling upset or sad without knowing why
Feeling unable to control your emotions
Feelings of anxiety and/or panic
Behavioral:
Unusual (i.e. “new”) social conflicts
Withdrawing socially
Over-consuming food, alcohol, or drugs
Quitting your hobbies
Burnout Phase 4 - Pseudo-Psychopathology
Pseudo-psychopathology is a fancy word that means “fake psychopathology”. A psychopathology is a maladaptive personality trait like obsessive-compulsive disorder or narcissism.
The researchers explain that stress causes us to cope by trying to reduce the complexity of reality through applying rigid problem solving methods and over-simplifying. Which can make it look like you have a personality disorder.
These effects of stress drastically reduce your ability to be creative, engage in empathy, and reflect on complex problems or on your own behavior.
The problem with this is that it can lead people to think that the source of burnout is the personality disorder and not the other way around. So you end up trying to fix yourself as if you are the problem – rather than working to fix the situation you are in and the burnout it caused.
Plus it gives your work the opportunity to blame you for your problems, rather than your unmanageable workload.
Personality disorders manifest when you are a teenager or young adult. If your current state is not how you have been since those ages, then it’s likely that burnout is the culprit. The researchers strongly emphasize that people experiencing chronic stress or burnout should not be evaluated for a personality disorder until the chronic stress or burnout has been resolved. So that you can avoid a misdiagnosis.
The false personality disorders that can show up as a result of burnout are: obsessive-compulsivity (ex: becoming compulsive and rigid), dependent (ex: excessively needing to consult others in order to make a decision), and paranoid (ex: being unnecessarily suspicious).
These things disappear once a person has recovered from burnout.
I have definitely experienced a dramatic loss of my creativity because of burnout. My brain used to feel like a vibrant explosion of ideas and the excitement each would bring. Now…nothing. Honestly, sometimes it feels like I’m listening to dead air on the radio.
Since I’ve been working on my recovery, it is slowly coming back – little by little. Some days I’m scared I will never have a unique idea again. But these things take time.
I also feel like I totally lost my ability to reflect on myself and the bigger picture. I used to be able to zoom out and consider all things. But now it feels like I’m looking at my life and myself through tunnel vision. Again, these things take time.
Symptoms of Phase 4:
Compulsive and rigid behavior
Dependence on others
Being more suspicious than normal
Reduced creativity
Reduced empathy
Reduced self-reflection
Burnout Phase 5 - Clinical Burnout
In all of the previous phases, you have only been in the process of burning out.
If you’re in Phase 5, you are officially “clinically burnt out”. At least in Denmark, where they can officially diagnose you and provide health care coverage for such things.
This is where our worker bee – dedicated to putting out high-quality work – gives up. Something pushes you over the edge and suddenly that hyperactivity driven by chronic stress evaporates.
You become passive and cease to feel motivated by anything. You may also experience learned helplessness, where you feel like you have no control over the situation and give up on the idea of even coping.
Science shows that this impaired motivation may be somewhat permanent.
I originally did not think that I ever reached this stage. But after typing this up, I’m thinking that I really was experiencing passivity – I just didn’t care anymore, and I was invested in covering that up. I arrived at the notion that I could no longer do my job well, and ended up leaving before things got too embarrassing.
As for motivation, that’s a toughie for me. With ADHD, I will feel motivated by whatever thing I’m excited about, but I also feel like I used to be able to manage myself better. It used to be easier to get myself to do the boring things.
However, I have never felt helpless. I felt that there were many things I could do to help myself feel better – and I think this is the case for you as well.
Symptoms of Phase 5:
Emotional breakdown
Severe fatigue
Passivity
Inability to motivate yourself
Learned helplessness
Mood Problems
Bear in mind that everyone is different. You might only experience some of the signs of each phase or you may experience all of them. You may move through them quickly or never move all the way through them. Each of us has different histories, coping mechanisms, and capacities.
And lastly, I want you to know that it’s important not to blame yourself for struggling with chronic stress or burnout. I was so ashamed of myself while I went through this process. I often wondered, “Why can’t I just be fine like everyone else?”
It’s important to remember that you may be dealing with more than the people around you – you may have more “invisible” things on your plate. For me, I was struggling with depression and ADHD as well as chronic stress – which I was hiding from those around me. My plate was full-up with other invisible burdens, and yours might be as well.
Next, your coworkers may also be struggling with chronic stress and on their way to burnout – but they might be hiding it too. There is a lot of guilt and shame built into the experience of burning out, and that causes us to suffer in silence. If you’re feeling this way, it’s likely that your coworkers are too.
In the next post, I cover the stages of burnout recovery that have been defined by scientific researchers who study burnout.
Your Next Step
Figuring out how to overcome burnout on your own can feel impossible. I know, I’ve been there. And I definitely wasted a bunch of time confused and unsure of what to do and too exhausted to take action. I wish that I had had someone there to help guide me on the path — and that’s why I started my coaching business. Take the first step today and sign up for your free 30-minute coaching call. Together, we can embark on a journey to create the life you’ve always dreamed of.
