Stress & burnout symptoms and phases

The term “stress” (from the French “destresse”) means disaster. From the earlier form (Latin “districtia“) it is tightening, contraction, locking. According to the body’s ability to cope with the demands of the environment, we generally distinguish two conditions:

• positive – energization, concentration towards completing tasks and achieving goals, a feeling of lightness and strength;
• negative – dissatisfaction, tension, restlessness, anxiety, absent-mindedness, insufficient concentration, irritability, and easy fatigue.

In the first state, the organism is in a healthy, tolerable form of stress – the person is self-confident, activated, in a good mood, with high productivity (which is supported by the production of hormones such as adrenaline, epinephrine, cortisol, etc.).

The second state shows that the organism is affected by strong or prolonged stress (distress), as the body begins to fail in many of its functions and the person reacts in the manner described above. Behaviour and thinking can become compensatory – the person tries to mobilize and cope with the increasing demands, and although the tasks may not have been difficult before, the results are worse, the body becomes increasingly stiff, tension increases, number of mistakes appear, negative emotional experiences intensify and the ability to relax is sharply limited. The characteristic in most cases is that the person tries to regain the balance, but because the exhaustion has become greater, and the person has underestimated the signals from the body, the result is exactly in the opposite direction – tiredness, negative emotional response, grumbling, tendency to take risks, abuse of alcohol or drugs, running away from responsibilities, withdrawing from contact with others. This is what we call burnout.

Interestingly, at the beginning, burnout does not show any signs of a serious problem – quite the opposite: the person is in an elevated state, slightly hyper-active, burdened with more tasks, avoids rest, does not consider the signs of accumulating fatigue. We call this first phase of burnout the “honeymoon“. Then stress hits when we start neglecting self-care and not managing to cope with the demanding work load – the stress phase. And the chronical stress phase comes in place when on a purely physical level, could appear headaches, frequent colds and infections, muscle cramps especially during the night, abdominal pain, weight loss or gain, etc.