What are the 3 Types of Burnout? Stress and Mental Health at Work and Play

Dr Marianne Trent (: 00:00

Did you know that there is not just one type of burnout? Coming up today - We are looking at the three types of burnout that are distinctly different from each other. I hope you find it so useful.

(: 00:23

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent, and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. I love that every day is a school day and that we might have felt like we had a reasonable understanding of a particular psychology or mental health concept. And this is going to be a brilliant episode guiding us through the fact that there are actually three different types of burnout. So this can crop up for us at any stage of our life or career. You might notice this for your own personal insights for your life, or you might notice it for your professional life. And I have loved learning about this. This is one of our special Burnout bites series, which is hosted for us expertly by Dr. Claire Plumbly, who is the author of a brand new book called Burnout, how to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You. And I'm taking a little bit of time off over the summer and passing the hosting reigns over to Claire. You absolutely don't need to commit to listening to all, watching all six of the episode, but understandably, they do build upon one another, but they are all standalone too. I can't wait to learn more about what these three types of burnout are. So let's crack on and I will catch you on the other side.

Dr Claire Plumbly (: 01:45

And welcome to Burnout Bites. This is number three in this series of six little episodes where I'm bringing information to help you understand burnout and ultimately look after yourself so that you don't burn out. My name is Dr. Claire Plumbly. I'm a clinical psychologist and I specialise in trauma, anxiety, and burnout. I've recently written a book, a book's called Burnout, how to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You. And in this book I bring my knowledge and learnings from my experience in trauma therapy and I bring this to this topic of burnout. There's a link to it in the show notes. In this episode, I want to talk to you about the three different subtypes of burnout. Now, I found this really useful when I learned about this because think burnout is often considered as a kind of one type of thing, mostly exhaustion, but actually this research by Barry Farber profess of psychology and education into specifically therapists and teachers, showed that it's not actually like that there are three dominant subtypes, and these are different ways of reacting to work related to stress.

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He also pointed out that we might oscillate between these at different times, and I have recognised all three of these patterns at some point in my life. So be interesting to see what you think here too. So let's have a look. We've got three subtypes are frenetic, under challenged and worn out. So the first one, frenetic also often talked about as overburdened, is the subtype that we most commonly experience as burnout or looks most familiar when we use the word burnout. Well, frenetic working, working harder and harder in response to stress. It happens when the demands of work outweigh the resources that we have access to do it comfortably and often is married up with an ambition to do well. So your work-life boundaries start to slip. Work becomes all encompassing. If you really passionately care about what you do, you're going to be vulnerable to this type of burnout.

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The typical trajectory of this through the domains of burnout tends to be that you start with the high anxiety irritability where you're frenetically working hard and your stress levels are high. This is followed by becoming physically exhausted by all of that energy output. This then leads to more emotional numbing and becoming cut off from it all. Generally starting to disconnect from others from your surroundings. And that cynicism starts to set in of note is that this is particularly a problem in staff who are new to their jobs or have a new career and they're building their career because this is when we are particularly passionate and we've got that steep learning curve where we are trying to absorb a lot of information and do our best and often prove ourselves and work our way up the ladder. So it's really important that you know about this if you are an aspiring psychologist, potentially more vulnerable to this right now.

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Second, we've got under challenge burnout. This is sometimes I've heard referred to as bore out. So burnout doesn't just occur as a result of being overstretched, monotonous work or work where there's no prospect of self-development. It's really under stimulating. If you carry out repetitive tasks and there's a lack of variety in what you do, this can lead to this type of under challenged burnout. You're not being mentally stimulated enough. Now, the trajectory through this is that the tedium is what makes you cynical towards work. This then leads to feeling exhausted and detached. And generally you start to become less effective because you're not maybe doing things as well as you used to. You're not really bothered. So you might not prepare for things like you used to, might forget to do things you said you would. Perhaps a detachment is experienced as more of an indifference.

(: 05:12

So it might be very subtle, but watching out for that could be a sign that you might be in burnout. I've often seen this in people, for example, like parents or informal carers where they've got high need dependence. There's a lot of repetition in preparing meals, cleaning up, tending to hygiene, personal hygiene. This can feel really monotonous without the intellectual stimulation going on. But it can also happen in workplaces where you've got people who appear to have quite intellectually stimulating jobs, but actually specialised or got to that level where they've not got as much variety in their day anymore. So in my book I talk about a vet, a friend of mine who had a specialism but actually said that her workload had become very, very sy. So it's kind of a double-edged sword with specialising. I guess. And this is exactly what Barry Farber's work said, that people who are high achieving can be at greater risk of burnout because needing that challenge and that stimulation to thrive, and if you've been in your job a long time, you know everything back to front and inside out, you might need to find ways to keep yourself protected from this.

(: 06:10

And obviously that is a little bit of a double-edged sword because I found when I moved into private practise that this under challenged type of burnout happened when I was just seeing one-to-one clients face-to-face. Having left the NHSI wasn't doing all the variety of things I used to do supervision meetings, all sorts of different away days and all these fun things. And although I really enjoyed my work, I wasn't being stimulated in the way I needed. And this is where I then started to take on other projects. I started to do social media, started to run a group, started to write a book, and then I had tipped into the kind of more frenetic burnout. So yeah, finding your balance between these is something I think that maybe is an ongoing lesson for me and something I'm always working on, but helpful for maybe you to be mindful of as well.

(: 06:52

Mindful. So finally, we've got the worn out type of burnout. I've heard this referred to sometimes as brown out. So this isn't about the volume of work or how stimulating it is. Rather it relates to how aligned your work is with your personal values or sense of achievement you're getting from it. For example, I worked for a department set up to help people improve their mental health with therapy. This was back in the NHS several years ago. But the targets that were pushing down on us affected how much I could see a client and how many sessions I could offer. This really did not work with my values. I wanted to offer good quality therapy in line with nice guidelines, and instead I was being told I could only see them for X number of sessions for 45 minutes. I didn't have as much time to plan the sessions as I wanted.

(: 07:39

And so I felt really frustrated in my ability to achieve what I wanted with my clients. So the typical trajectory here might be emotional exhaustion as a starting point, you're feeling kind of low. This then physically weighs you down, you become detached and the detachment is a form of self-protection. Protecting yourself from caring so much because caring isn't getting you anywhere that you want. And again, more experienced staff might be more susceptible to this. I think there are roles where all three of these can happen at once. So for example, imagine a gp. A GP only has 10 minutes to do their consultation. They might also end up seeing very similar cases day in day out. So there we've got the frenetic burnout where they've got too many people to see not enough time to do the work they want. We've got the worn out burnout where they're not aligned with the values giving their patients the amount of time that they would like.

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And you've got the under challenged burnout where they're not really doing enough that might stretch them unless they're involved with other projects. So whilst Barry Farber talked about oscillating between them, maybe it's possible to have all three at once triple whammy of burnout, which is really unpleasant. So I hope this has given you a bit of food for thought, maybe thinking about how to protect yourself from all three of these burnouts and being careful if are trying to protect yourself from one that you don't inadvertently step into another one. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode when I'm going to talk about the five stage model of burnout.

Dr Marianne Trent (: 09:06

How brilliant was that? I'm sure as you listened to or watched that content, you were able to think about how this might crop up for you in many areas of your life, both personal and professional. And I think they're really useful points to consider when you might be working with clients or when you might be chatting with your friends to think that actually, I wonder if this could be burnout. Thank you so much to Claire for episode three in this series. If you have enjoyed this episode, please do check out the other two that are already available and the next episode will be available from 10:00 AM on Saturday on YouTube where I am Dr. Marianne Trent, and from 6:00 AM wherever you get your podcasts. For the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast, do come and follow me and Dr. Claire on socials. She is Dr. Claire Plumbly and I am Dr.

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Marianne Trent. Do also come and join the free Facebook group, the Aspiring Psychologist Community with Dr. Marianne Trent, which is the exclusive home of Marianne's Motivation and Mindset Sessions, which happen once a week. If you love this sort of content, I think you'll really enjoy the Aspiring Psychologist membership and if working towards your goals for professional and if working towards your career goals in psychology is something on your to-do list, then please do consider joining us, which you can do from just 30 pounds a month with no minimum term. Thank you so much for being part of my world, and I'll look forward to catching up with you soon.

Jingle Guy (: 10:46

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