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Lim didn’t realize at the time, but she was living through the first stages of burnout — a condition she would spend the following years trying to overcome.

“The work of trying to overcome burnout, it’s a lifetime journey,” Lim, currently an emergency physician at University Health Network said. “It’s something that you need to actively work to prevent.”

Contrary to what many might think, burnout can have very real consequences for your health, experts said. What’s more, the longer you stay burned out, the more serious the symptoms — and the tougher it becomes to dig yourself out.

What causes burnout?

Ever since the pandemic, Donna Ferguson has seen a dramatic rise in burnt out patients showing up at her clinic.

“I think part of it was work from home and hybrid work, and people not really having a good sense of work-life balance,” noted Ferguson, a clinical psychologist with Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The ensuing economic turmoil and string of global catastrophes only helped fuel the fire, she said.

Ferguson defined burnout as, essentially, a “state of mental, physical and emotional exhaustion” usually sparked by a period of prolonged or repeated stress.

The World Health Organization counts burnout as an “occupational phenomenon,” specifically defining it as a result of “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” But in reality, burnout can often happen outside of work — and despite not being counted as a medical condition, it can affect your health in unexpected ways, Ferguson explained.

“It can come about through work, through caretaking, through romantic relationships, through parenting,” or any other situation where you’re under constant stress for long periods of time, she said. “People don’t realize that caring for kids or caring for an elderly parent, that it’s not the same as work. It’s a different kind of prolonged, repeated stress — but it (can still lead to) burnout.”

In the workplace, burnout can often happen when we’re saddled with unclear, unreasonable or demanding job expectations, or when we have little or no control over our workload, noted Suze Berkhout, a psychiatrist and researcher at UHN’s Centre for Mental Health. It can happen when we’re overworked or not challenged enough, or when we feel helpless or incompetent.

But while we may think of these as individual problems, they’re really the results of systemic challenges at the workplace — and as such, may be difficult to escape, she continued. 

For Lim, her burnout was partly sparked by the long wait times in the emergency department: “I put stress on myself to see patients quickly,” she said, “and I was so irritated by people interrupting me and asking me how long it would take to see me, that I ended up snapping at people in the waiting room.”

How burnout can affect your health

Do you feel tired or even exhausted at work? Are you often overwhelmed by requests that would have previously seemed routine? Have you experienced chest pains and stomach aches with no apparent cause?

You may be dealing with burnout. The exhaustion at the heart of the condition can make life more difficult and strain interpersonal relationships, the experts say. It can even change our personality.

“Things that you normally would have been able to do become harder,” Berkhout explained. “And as a result of that, you become much more depleted from doing it.”

This could then foment feelings of inadequacy and impostor syndrome — which can, in turn, worsen burnout.

Similarly, it can also cause us to grow more cynical, apathetic and numb, which can spark a downward spiral further into burnout: ”(You might) feel like nobody’s on your side, feel like there’s no value to doing anything. It’s like a very nihilistic sense of, like, ‘What is it that I’m doing here?,’” Berkhout said.

Less discussed are burnout’s physical symptoms, according to Ferguson. She frequently sees patients experiencing chest pains, stomach aches, headaches, dizziness and other physical symptoms that have been associated with forms of stress.

“They might lose their appetite. They might suffer from sleep issues like insomnia. They might have weight loss. They might have like issues around like panic or heart palpitations,” she continued. “It might manifest itself in some pretty significant ways for people.”

Burnout and chronic stress can also weaken our immune systems, leaving us more vulnerable to infections like the cold or flu, Ferguson said. 

burnout can also heighten one’s risk of heart disease, including increasing the risk of hospitalization due to cardiovascular disease by 10 per cent and higher-than-normal blood pressure by 85 per cent.

 that burnout can often lead to stomach and digestion issues like constipation, diarrhea or indigestion, along with back, joint and limb pain.

How to recover from burnout

Unfortunately, there’s no switch we can flip to instantly cure burnout. The condition can drag on for years at varying levels of intensity; it took Lim three to five years to recover.

She, like many others, started her road to recovery by focusing on her health fundamentals — including getting enough sleep, nutrition and exercise. “Even a small workload can feel overwhelming... when you are personally not feeling well,” she said.

Lim took up hobbies that she enjoyed and found meaning in, like photography and writing. She reconnected with and sought support from friends and family. She even took six weeks off work to go on a trip to Spain. 

Slowly, Lim began to recontextualize her relationship with work. “I felt as if the health-care system needed me to go fast. But I wasn’t practicing in a way that was aligned with what I valued,” she said.

By slowing down and finding a sense of connection with each patient, she slowly rekindled her passion for her job.

In its early stages, burnout may be resolved through personal changes, like getting more sleep, eating better and getting daily exercise, Berkhout explained. Once it becomes entrenched, it can be far more difficult to resolve, she explained.

It’s why she recommended watching for early signs of burnout and acting quickly. This might mean sudden feelings of incompetency or a change from your mental baseline; maybe you’re feeling more cynical or irritable than normal.

In the workplace, it’s key to foster a sense of fulfilment and accomplishment, Berkhout continued. Part of this involves building some kind of connection to your task, “whether it’s social connection, spiritual connection, connection to things that are sort of bigger outside of ourselves.”

“There are certainly individual things people can do... but it can’t only be on the individual,” she said. Because many causes of burnout are systemic in nature, individual changes “need to be supported and nurtured by institutional change and structural changes.”

This could mean workplace policies where people with caregiving obligations are given more flexibility, or where mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, she said.

“If it’s years in the making, it’s going to take more to resolve,” Berkhout explained. “And I would say the longer the chronic stressors have gone on, the more the resolution is going to rely on structural changes.”