“What does Work-Related Burnout do to the Brain?”
“While the behavioral symptoms — including problems with memory or concentration, mood imbalances, insomnia and body aches — are well documented, the consequences of chronic burnout on brain function, and how such neural changes give rise to emotional dysregulation, have been inadequately examined. A recent PLOS One study, by Amita Golkar and colleagues from the Karolinska Institute, sought to better understand how chronic work-related stress alters brain function and emotional processing. While their findings confirm that impaired emotional regulation has neurobiological roots, another expert in the field has raised the question of whether stress may affect additional neural circuits undetected here…
burnt-out workers demonstrated less control over their reactions to negative experiences, showing signs of elevated distress that they were unable to dampen… functional connectivity during rest between the amygdala and several brain regions was altered in patients; most notably, connections were weaker with the prefrontal cortex and stronger with the insula. What’s more, the stronger the correlation of the amygdala with the insula or a thalamic/hypothalamic region, the higher the individual’s perceived stress. Finally, connectivity between the amygdala and the anterior cingulate correlated with participants’ ability to down-regulate their emotional response.”
I also would love to see studies of people who report positive and fulfilling work lives, I suspect that you would see the opposite neurological patterning.
I spent a few months looking at the transcriptional changes that occur in rats when they are caged in enriching vs. normal environments, and I was looking in two sets of rats that were either genetically susceptible to stress disorders or had normal susceptibility.
It was a super preliminary set of experiments that I did, there is a LOT more to be done, but — Interestingly, it looked like enriched environments changed the expression levels of stress-associated genes, but in the opposite direction from the way they change during stress. Even more interestingly, that change was greater for the genetically stress-susceptible rats.
Which is all to say that our environments are important and maybe the right places can make us healthier as much as the wrong places can make us sick.
