Stressed at Work? Study Says Job Burnout Has Negative Effects to Your Brain!

Being stressed at work from time to time is normal — everyone experiences that rough day anyway. However, if you think you can live and work stressed every day, you better sleep it out and re-think.

In a recent study conducted by psychological scientist Amita Golkar and co-researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, it was revealed that workplace burnout can cause nagging effects to ones' neural circuits in the brain which leads to a decreased capability of a person to cope with negative situations, causing the person to stress out even more.

This means that the more stressed and burnt-out you are, the harder it is for you to deal with stressors, resulting to an ill cycle of prolonged stress.

Lingering occupational stress or job burnout is a state of chronic stress that is often characterized with physical and emotional fatigue, depression, feelings of pessimism, isolation, disengagement, lack of productivity and poor work performance.  

The research examined 40 participants who are formally diagnosed with burnout symptoms. All of the participants associated their stress to their job where they worked for over 60 to 70 hours a week for several years. Moreover, another 70 volunteers with no record of stress or other ailments were recruited to serve as matched control group.

As cited by the Association for Psychological Science, each group of research subjects underwent emotion-regulation test sessions using a neuroimaging technique called resting state functional MRI (fMRI). In the test, the participants were shown neutral and negative pictures and were tasked to suppress (down-regulate), intensify (up-regulate) or maintain their emotional response.

However, while the subjects were focusing on the picture, the researchers played a loud stunning sound to measure the participants' reflex reaction to the stressful stimulus. Their reactions were recorded through an electrode placed on their cheeks.

Results show that the burnt-out subjects had a hard time in controlling their reactions to negative stimuli, exposing an inability to suppress their negative reaction. The said participants also had a dramatically stronger reaction to the loud noise when compared to the large group.

In addition, the researchers also scanned the participants' brain areas involved in processing and regulating emotions where they found out that the burned out group has a relatively enlarged amygdala — the part of the brain that plays a key role in processing emotions. They also discovered that members of the stressed group have stronger link to emotional distress.

It was also noted that the burnt-out subjects had weaker connections between the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex, the brain area associated with executive function, which might be the reason for the difficulties they encountered in regulating their emotion.

"An impairment of the ability to down-regulate negative emotions in subjects suffering from occupational stress may render them more vulnerable to depressive symptoms," the researchers concluded.