The relationship between burnout and irritability

This is how burnout syndrome and irritability interact on a daily basis.

Burnout syndrome is one of the psychological disorders linked to the workplace, but its implications go beyond the professional world. In fact, those who suffer from this maladjustment tend to behave differently also in their personal relationships in their private life, since the wear and tear they suffer does not disappear when their working day is over.

In the following lines we will go into one of the psychological consequences of burnout syndrome that has a greater capacity to damage personal relationships: irritability..

What is the burnout syndrome?

Burnout syndrome, also known as burnout syndrome or professional burnout syndrome, is a set of symptoms of a psychological nature that arise from continuous exposure to a work context that emotionally wears out the worker and is linked to high levels of stress.. This concept is described in the International Classification of Diseases, although it is absent in the DSM-5, another of the most widely used diagnostic manuals in the field of mental health.

On the other hand, research on burnout syndrome shows that certain professions are more likely to facilitate the appearance of this psychological problem. For example, healthcare workers seem to be especially vulnerable to suffering from this phenomenon, something that is not surprising considering the level of responsibility that a single person can have in this type of work.

Similarly, those jobs in which there is an excessive workload in general (taking into account the resources at the person's disposal and the relative lack of (taking into account the resources available to the person and the relative lack of possibility of delegating tasks) also tend to generate burnout syndrome. And something similar occurs with professions in which there is no clear separation between the hours of free time and those of work performance, something that can be associated with Parkinson's law: work tends to expand until it covers all the time available to perform it.

On the other hand, the work is kept at high levels of demand without clearly offering the possibility of improving the work situation in the short term, so that the person is subjected to a constant torrent of tasks that is almost never interrupted, nor does it make it possible to stop to see everything from a distance and in a more global way and make strategic decisions (the worker under pressure tends to focus on urgent obligations because he or she feels overwhelmed).

Thus, in the burnout syndrome, the following three fundamental psychological characteristics are present three fundamental psychological characteristics:

• A large amount of work to be done.
• An insufficient amount of incentives spread over the short, medium and long term.
• Being in a situation in which the person would feel bad if he/she were to delegate (or directly cannot) or take time off.

How do burnout syndrome and irritability interact?

In psychology, irritability is the propensity to respond with hostility to social interactions that are not self-initiated, or to attitudes respond with hostility to social interactions that one does not initiate oneself, or to attitudes, reactions and consequences that are out of character when socializing or interacting with the that are out of the ordinary when socializing or interacting with the environment. That is, it is associated with an interest in keeping interactions to the minimum necessary to achieve a particular purpose, without having to devote more time and effort than necessary to it; any situation in which this is not met generates discomfort and a tendency to blame others or objects for such "mishaps".

Thus, irritability is clearly linked to anger and a predisposition to react with angry outbursts to unforeseen situations, some of which in other circumstances would not even be considered a problem.

Although some people are prone to be irritable, irritability also depends on the context, and the fact of having developed burnout syndrome facilitates its appearance. It is believed that the cause of this is that, due to the psychological burnout generated by this experience, the person feels that he/she cannot take on other "fronts" of work that are seen as extra problems..

Due to the physical and/or mental fatigue he suffers, he adopts a mentality from which he tries to compensate for that discomfort by being very sensitive to situations in which he could blame his environment for the setbacks that arise in his path.

• Article related: "Attacks of anger: why they arise and how we can manage them".

What can be done about this problem?

Before the syndrome of burnout, it is important to have professional help in the context of psychotherapy.. In this way, it is possible to train stress and anxiety management skills, as well as time management and optimization methods.

However, in many cases the solution also involves making changes in the professional environment, something that can be facilitated by the process of introspection and prioritization of goals that occurs in psychotherapy.

Are you interested in having professional psychological support?

If you want to start a psychotherapy process to overcome a problem related to anxiety, work stress or other psychological alterations linked to the world of work, contact us, get in touch with us.

In our Psychology Center we attend people of all ages, and we offer individual, family and couple psychotherapy. You can find us in Irun, or hire our services in the online mode through video calls.