Is Burnout Making You Dumber?

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Burnout is a serious mental health condition resulting from exposure to extreme levels of stress over a long period of time. Schaufeli and colleagues (2022) classify burnout as a work-related state of exhaustion that is characterized by extreme tiredness, reduced ability to regulate cognitive and emotional processes, and mental distancing.

This not only affects your mental and physical health, but recent studies have shown it also erodes your cognitive abilities over time. In other words, burnout is making you dumber.

The Impact of Burnout on Cognitive Functioning

See, your brain isn’t built for the relentless strain of nonstop overwork. This overexposure to chronic work-related stress results in excess levels of cortisol being pumped into your system, which not only wears out your mental energy but causes your brain to literally short-circuit and shrink.

This results in significant levels of cognitive decline and impairments. A meta-analysis by Galvin and colleagues (2021) and a systematic review by Renaud and Lacriox (2023) on the impact of burnout on cognitive functioning found that it diminishes your brain power in several notable ways:

• Memory Loss: You used to be able to effortlessly recall details, peoples’ names, and even where you left your keys and cell phone. Now you constantly draw blanks even on familiar people and tasks. Studies find both short-term/working memory and long-term recall are significantly impaired with burnout.
• Difficulty Focusing: You can’t pay attention in meetings and constantly lose track of conversations. Maintaining focus and avoiding distraction becomes extremely difficult with burnout. People also report losing their ability to hyperfocus for longer periods of time.
• Reduced Verbal Skills: Your vocabulary seems to shrink every day. Research shows that vocabulary, word recall, and even verbal reasoning skills decline.
• Impairs Multitasking Abilities: Juggling multiple projects starts to feel impossible. Studies show that it becomes increasingly difficult to switch between tasks, which means you're constantly dropping the ball and missing deadlines.
• Impulse Control Problems: Your patience and tact disappear. You start to snap at colleagues or clients for the smallest things. Research shows that burnout depletes your mental reserves (ego depletion), making people more irritable, impatient, and impulsive. This erodes your social skills and decreases your frustration tolerance.
• Decreased Executive Functioning, Learning Potential, and Information Processing: You find it difficult to learn new skills and may find it even more difficult to take in new information. You may have to read the same paragraph of your favorite book multiple times to comprehend what is being said. Studies have shown that burnout results in a reduced capacity to process new or complex information, impair creative problem-solving, reduce one’s ability to plan/organize/execute and negatively affect other analytical abilities.

Why Does Burnout Reduce Brain Power?

There are various reasons why burnout makes you feel dumber, most of which relate to physical changes that occur in the brain. As mentioned above, chronic stress releases high levels of cortisol (the hormone needed to regulate your body’s stress response) into your system.

High cortisol levels disrupt your neurotransmitters' function, meaning that the connections between brain cells are impaired. Further, these high levels of cortisol literally shrink your hippocampus (the area focused on memory), while also causing changes in the striatum (the area focused on habit formation, rewards, and motor functioning) and the amygdala (the area related to managing emotions).

Burnout also reduces the brain’s neuroplasticity (i.e., the ability to make new connections and adapt to changing environments), hindering learning, problem-solving, and cognitive adaptability/flexibility. People with burnout also suffer from sleep disturbances (e.g., poor sleep quality or sleep deprivation), which further affect memory, concentration, and executive functioning.

Basically, stress fries your brain’s control circuits, making you more scatterbrained, impulsive, and mentally fuzzy. This cognitive decline is hard to reverse once it sets in.

Some studies find brain changes and cognitive problems persist even after individuals recover from burnout. Burnout thus steals much more than just your energy and drive. It robs you of your intelligence, problem-solving abilities, and social skills.

Don’t ignore the warning signs like forgetfulness, mental fatigue, and deteriorating work. If your brain feels constantly fried, it’s time to intervene with serious recovery before the damage is permanent.

Make preserving your brain power a top priority: Your mind is invaluable.