We spend a lot of time in medicine talking about "burnout." Since it's not an official psychiatric diagnosis, the diagnosis straddles a murky state between "worked to the bone" and depressed. I did learn that there is an ICD10 code (Z73) that can be used for charting purposes. In comparison, burnout in academic research seems rarely discussed. This recent review of mental health literature amongst postdocs (written by one of my co-interns!) suggests a significant proportion of depression, and a google search shows many forums discussing burnout in this population as well.
I found one blog that talked about the first commenter in this blog about burnout who wrote:
"Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure."
I would rephrase this to say that burnout occurs when you have worked your hardest but have not achieved successes that are meaningful to you, personally.
Different people have different rewards. The newborn nursery is a place where I always feel like I am at risk for burnout even though it runs on a leisurely 7am-5pm schedule, everyone is extremely kind, and the moms and babies are a delight. Every day I dread going. Despite all the lovely things about the newborn nursery, all I can feel is the weight of the paperwork for the high volume of babies we see every day. For me, the reward of a busy workday is an interesting case that I can learn from and increase my patient repertoire (which rarely happens in a nursery where the babies are almost all healthy or have very minor complications). For the attending physians in the newburn nursery, if their personal reward is getting to know a family in a highly emotionally charged time of life, they would not run the same risk of burnout.
The corollary to this theory of burnout is that if we can fit aspects of work that supercharge us into our workday, we will be able to prevent the problem. People feel that if they build in enough time outside of work or have great vacation days, they will avoid burnout, but I think that's simply not true. I'm reflecting on the ways I will structure my days to prevent burnout.
1. Schedule short term projects. I mentioned in a prior post about scheduling both short term and long term projects. Perhaps I have learned to inherently build this into my day?
2. Identify an interesting topic early in the day.
3. Go to teaching conference.
4. Spend extra time to learn about a family.
Regardless, the ability to keep projects going is counted as a success in itself in my book. In a long day, where I feel like I haven't been heard and have just been following other's orders and doing the medical paperwork along with it, it feels like a success to have connected to a collaborator, to have identified some new samples, to have written a new paragraph in my paper. It's funny because I'm not sure that if my life 100% revolved around science, that I would psychologically perceive those things as successes and register them the same way. As paradoxical as it sounds, I think that the extra time I give to pursuing projects makes my day to day life more enjoyable.
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