“How people fall apart”: Yale faculty discuss the impact of burnout on the brain - Yale Daily News
Understanding the neuroscience behind burnout could help people accept their resulting behavior and thought patterns as natural responses of the brain.
Kayla Yup 10:45 pm, Mar 29, 2022
Staff Reporter
Burnout can make one feel helpless, incompetent, emotionally exhausted, isolated and cynical. Yale faculty provided insight into the neurobiological basis behind symptoms of burnout — and what can be done to reverse it.
Professor of neuroscience and psychology Amy Arnsten’s decades of research on the effects of stress on the brain were inspired by seeing “how people fall apart,” she said. When her father was very ill, Arnsten witnessed the process by which people who are normally “very rational” can suddenly become “emotional tornadoes.” Through volunteering in her local state psychiatric hospital, she further witnessed how even small stressors had immediate effects on thought patterns. Arnsten found that understanding the effects of stress on the brain would provide vital clues as to how higher brain functioning is regulated.
