Burnout versus depression, how do you tell the difference?
That's what I'm talking about today.
I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist,
and this channel is about mental health education
and self improvement.
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Burnout is usually thought of as something
that happens professionally and caused by work stress,
but the way it makes you feel can feel
very similar to depression.
A common definition is that it has three components to it:
exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.
Let's look at the two side-by-side.
Here are the nine symptoms of depression.
It takes five of them to be considered as having
a major depressive episode.
So as you can see with depression,
you have both mental and physical changes.
It's more than just thinking, I hate my life.
But it includes physical changes in the way
your body functions, like with your appetite,
your sleep and your energy level.
With burnout, you get emotional exhaustion
in response to a prolonged stress.
You get depersonalization or cynicism as a negative response
to your job and others around you.
I talked about depersonalization in a previous video
that I'll link in the description and I'll link
in the corner of this video, but depersonalization
is the experience of feeling detached from yourself.
It can seem like you're just observing yourself
in the world, and you're not really inside of yourself.
For the person who's burned out,
you can feel like you're just going
through the motions everyday,
and you're not really living it.
Now, a person who's depressed can have
depersonalization experiences, but they're gonna,
there's so much else going on that the depersonalization
is not a prominent feature, but with burnout,
it's a prominent feature and it's usually related
to the stress in your work, or the demands of your work,
or even the demands of your home life.
And the last feature of burnout is a reduced sense
of personal accomplishment, and it's what I called earlier,
is the inefficacy.
It's like you're just chugging along, turning out work,
and doing all the things everyone wants you to do,
but you're just not getting anything out of it.
What's the point?
One of the ways to tell the difference between depression
and burnout is that with depression,
you usually have trouble getting pleasure from any
of the things that normally made you feel good before,
and this is an any setting,
so a person in a deep depression can be flown
to an exotic island, and with their own lounge chair,
and that person can sit there and still feel miserable,
whereas, with burnout, the sense of exhaustion,
stress and dissatisfaction is closely connected
to the stress so you can take that person
and say, hey, we've made arrangements for someone
to take over all of your work,
and we're gonna fly you off to Bora Bora for a week,
and when you get back, you'll have a clean slate.
There will be no work that's piled up,
because Jane over there is gonna take care
of all of your work and she's not gonna get mad about it,
and you're gonna have this whole week paid for.
Now, you may say, well, who wouldn't love that?
Well, with the depressed person, none of that stuff matters.
The darkness is still in your head, so,
but the burned out person can go on that kind of trip,
sit in the lounge chair,
and be completely rejuvenated and relaxed.
In fact, often, people who are in the early stages
of burnout can have a complete relief of their symptoms
on the weekends, if they're not working.
But then, they can have the Sunday evening dread.
Now I mention the early stages of burnout.
People who are burned out can become depressed.
It's not as though you can only have one or the other,
but it can start as burnout and progress to depression,
especially if you're someone who's previously been depressed
in the past, or you're prone to developing a depression
independent of any of your circumstances.
Depression doesn't have to be the result
of something bad happening; it can just be its own thing
without any negative situations causing it.
Another way to tell the difference between depression
and burnout is that with depression,
you can have feelings of self loathing and worthlessness
that are pretty much generalized,
but with burnout, your self esteem is usually preserved
but if you do have any feelings of worthlessness,
it's usually only connected to your value and in your work,
and it's not to your overall value.
Why does it matter to distinguish burnout from depression?
If a person's burned out but not depressed,
they don't need to be treated
with antidepressant medication.
The way to address the burnout is to address the factors
that led to the burnout.
So that leads to the question of why do people
get burned out in the first place?
Christina Maslach pioneered the research on burnout,
and I have one of her articles in the reference section
of the description.
She called burnout the erosion of engagement with your job.
When there's a poor job/person fit, you're less likely
to cope with the stress of your workplace.
In other words, when your character and your temperament
don't match well with the demands of, and the culture
of your workplace, you can become burned out
when the demands of work outstrip your ability
to compensate for these things
that aren't clicking well for you.
So it's not just a matter of having a lot
of work to do, or being in a stressful environment.
People can hold up well under great amounts of stress
if they're feeling personal satisfaction from their work.
The way to reduce burnout is to change the individual
or to change the environment.
You don't have a lot of control over your environment
unless you're self employed, so then the focus becomes
learning the different ways to cope with the work setting.
How you change yourself to better adapt
to your work environment is going to be an individual thing,
but here's some general ideas.
For example, setting time boundaries.
Don't allow yourself to be infinitely available to people.
We've developed the expectation that if you text
or email someone, you should get an instant answer.
But we trained people to believe this
by instantly responding, but suppose you check
your messages four times a day in batches.
The people who reach out to you will come to expect you
to respond in a more extended period of time,
and stop expecting an instant response.
If you're always allowing yourself
to be instantly available,
you're never giving your mind a chance to unwind,
and an overactive mind leads to stress, anxiety and burnout.
Some other self help interventions would be things
like prioritizing your sleep and making sure
you get seven to nine hours.
If you're always sacrificing sleep
because you're working late, you become inefficient
because of the sleep deprivation, and then that inefficiency
makes you need to work longer hours,
because you're not thinking as quickly.
Taking time to exercise also helps relieve stress
and improve your mood.
Taking 10 minutes in the middle of the day to decompress
with meditation can go a long way in recharging
and rebooting your mental energy.
Apps like Headspace are great for helping you
be able to do that in a guided fashion.
Now all these things are ways to change you,
but sometimes, changing you isn't the final solution.
You may need to take a hard look at whether or not
your job is really a good fit for you.
Can you imagine this level of work
for another five, 10 or 15 years?
You may say, well, I have to work.
Of course, most people have to work,
maybe the change, though, is a matter of changing
your work environment or finding a different company
that does similar work.
Maybe it's similar work but in a different industry,
and I know these aren't easy answers,
but burnout and depression have negative consequences
to your body, and if they persist over a long time,
it's like trying to push a square peg into a round hole.
If you push hard and long enough, you may get that square
to go through the hole, but you'll lose the edges
of the square and it will be negatively changed
when it comes out on the other side.
If you notice that you're feeling more generally hopeless
and taking a break from work doesn't help,
then talk to your doctor.
You could start with your primary care doctor,
or you could see a therapist, to see if you're starting
to develop a depression.
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions
about this, and for more on depression,
check out my depression playlist.
I have a lot of videos there
on different aspects of depression.
See you next time.
(upbeat music)
♪ I am what I am today ♪
♪ 'Cause I did it my way ♪
♪ Nothing y'all can say ♪
♪ In this life or the next one ♪