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. If you don't wanna miss
a video, click subscribe and the notification bell. 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 ♪
