34 | New Scientist | 6 February 2021I
AM not just busy, I am being overwhelmed
by an onslaught of requests like yours...”
There is a certain irony to the email I
have just received: the pioneer of burnout
research is feeling utterly swamped by work.
Christina Maslach, a psychologist at the
University of California, Berkeley,
spearheaded the study of burnout back
in the 1970s and has been working on ways
to tackle the problem ever since. Her expertise
was already highly sought after even before
the coronavirus pandemic. Now she can barely
move under the weight of her inbox.
It is hardly surprising. In the year since the
word lockdown became ubiquitous, it seems
as if almost everyone has hit the wall at least
once. But amid the emotional roller coaster of
work stress, homeschooling, social isolation
and the not inconsiderable fact that there is
still a pandemic raging outside, how can you
tell when you have reached the end of your
tether? When does feeling understandably
stressed in difficult times turn into an
irretrievable case of burnout? And
what can you do to protect yourself?
Thankfully, five decades of research
means we have a fairly good idea of what
burnout is and what causes it. According to
Maslach’s Burnout Inventory, an assessment
tool she co-developed, burnout arises when
three factors coincide: an overwhelming
feeling of emotional exhaustion, feelings
of cynicism and detachment and a feeling
of lack of accomplishment. For those
experiencing burnout, these criteria
might manifest in feelings like being
exhausted even after plenty of sleep,
being emotionally distant from lovedFeatures Cover story
ones or no longer caring about jobs that
need doing.
This definition, like most of the research
that has been done on the subject, focuses on
burnout in the workplace. In 2019, the World
Health Organization chimed in, classifying it
as “an occupational phenomenon” that results
from “chronic workplace stress that has not
been successfully managed”.
Yet, while the situation we find ourselves
in now is about much more than work stress,
Maslach says that the experience of burnout
is the same. “What’s different is that it’s
happening more,” she says, and in response
to new types of stress.Hidden picture
Exactly how much more is hard to ascertain
in terms of hard data, not least because we are
still in the eye of the storm. But some strong
trends are emerging from studies that have
been investigating people’s emotional state
before and during the pandemic. For instance,
one survey of more than 17,000 adults in the
UK in April 2020, a month into the country’s
first lockdown, found that mental health had
already deteriorated considerably compared
with before the arrival of covid-19.
However, according to Carmine Pariante, a
psychiatrist at King’s College London, the UK
population as a whole has been remarkably
resilient to the changes it has faced. But when
you drill down into the detail, there are two
very different pictures hidden among the
averages. “For some populations, like young
people, women with small children and people
with pre-existing mental health problems, theHeading for burnout?
As the pandemic wears on, many of us are feeling burned
out – but there are things we can do to protect ourselves.
Caroline Williams reports
NATH
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IE^ LEES“