Do You Have a Burnout Personality?
Learn about the personality traits that increase your risk for burnout.
KEY POINTS
- Burnout is when you have high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and low levels of personal accomplishment.
- The two strongest relationships between personality traits and burnout are extroversion and neuroticism.
- Resting from an environment designed to foster burnout only puts a small stopper in it. It doesn’t curtail or prevent it.
"Burnout is when you have high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and low levels of personal accomplishment. It’s more than just hating your job. Burnout is a multidimensional construct consisting of three separate but related dimensions that include emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment.
Emotional exhaustion comes from feelings of tension and frustration due to your fears that you will be unable to sustain your past levels of work performance. This internalized stress saps your energy to consider adaptive alternatives. You’re just too exhausted to think differently.
Depersonalization is when you distance yourself from your work by creating dehumanizing perceptions of tasks, clients, or coworkers. By doing this, you create barriers in an effort to lessen some of the negative outcomes you’re experiencing at work.
Lastly, (reduced) personal accomplishment, which is when you have self-evaluative feelings of incompetence and lack of achievement at work. This is a component of the imposter syndrome, which is when you doubt your skills, abilities, or achievements and possess a chronic internalized fear of being “found out” that you’re really a fraud."
These three dimensions, which were assessed using the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI; Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1997), are corrosive to your work life, and the more burnt out you are, the greater the likelihood it spills into your home life and personal relationships.
Emotional exhaustion has been found to be negatively related to extraversion and positively associated with neuroticism. This manifests with feelings of tension and frustration due to your fears that you will be unable to sustain your past levels of work performance, so you seek out solitude, tend to hold things inside while contending with your anxiety, anxious thoughts, and due to this, you become prone to actions without considering the full consequences that come from your behavior.
Depersonalization has been found to be positively related to neuroticism and negatively associated with agreeableness. This manifests as you distancing yourself from your work by creating dehumanizing perceptions of tasks, clients, or coworkers. This results in you experiencing anxiety and anxious thoughts about them and how they perceive you, and this can cause you to feel skeptical about the motives of your coworkers and feel like they may be up to something, and you become cognitively intractable to alternative viewpoints. No matter what anyone says, you cannot be convinced otherwise.
(Reduced) personal accomplishment has been found to be positively associated with extraversion and negatively related to neuroticism. This manifests as you having self-evaluative feelings of incompetence and lack of achievement at work, and even though you’re outgoing, sociable, and try to connect with others in a calm and confident manner, you don’t see the social fruits of your labor. This causes anxiety and a pervasive sense of uneasiness."
Read the full available article on Psychology Today
Reflection: Have you ever felt like you have a "burn-out personality? If so, have you expereinced these three dimensions of burn-out? (Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced personal accomplishment)
#Burn-out #Personality #Dimensions
@professionalVision2624
Yes! I've experiences emotional exhaustion before!
It's important to self-care to avoid burnout. :)
Thanks for the post! 💛💫
@innateJoy9602
I agree! I'm sorry to hear that :( Yes self-care is soo important for our mental health and our wellbeing to thrive
@professionalVision2624 I think burn-out is something we all experience. Generally it is more common or intense for some people than others accoarding to their persoanlity or the co-existence with other disorders. However I think the term burn-out personality is more of a constructed term than an official psychological term, as someone don't need to change their personality to cope with burn out and it wouldn't affect them in other activities apart from work. It's worth wondering though how much time is spent on work, to the point that sometimes it may become "us". In this case we should try to balance things out and start focusing on other aspects of life as well. Thank you for the interesting post!
@calmDew1576
Once again! An awesome answer! I notice you are well versed in the psychology department! I agree, I was thinking about it when I read this article about "Burn-out personality" as it is a way to categorize it in an "unoffical term" so to speak. But it's intersting since we do like patterns and categories to relate to. Like all the attachment styles that has evolved into "Being an avoidant or anxious person". It's all intersting points and topics to discuss.