15 Factors of Burnout and What to do About Them
Burnout occurs when an activity that was previously enjoyable or had previously made up a large part of ones identity becomes something they resent, hate, and no longer experience joy when participating. There are four different perspectives of burnout, and they include a percieved stress perspective, overtraining perspective, motivational perspective, and social / self-identity perspective. Burnout can also be characterized by emotional/physical exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment, and sport devaluation. I will cover these perspectives in a different post.
In this text, I am going to focus on the 15 factors that contribute to the development of burnout. The 15 factors are split into three dimensions including individual characteristics, prolonged overload factors, and situational factors.
I will list what each of the factors are in bold, and then explain how you can approach combating burnout’s negative effects on your sporting life enjoyment.
INDIVIDUAL FACTORS:
Tendency for anxiety
Excessive self-criticism (perfectionism)
Unidimensional athletic identity
PROLONGED OVERLOAD FACTORS:
Excessive training
Inadequate recovery
Limited resources and limited ability to cope with a situation
Competing life / interpersonal stress
SITUATIONAL FACTORS:
Feeling trapped in sport
Living up to previous success
Constant monitoring/evaluation
Lack of control over circumstances (lack of autonomy)
Lack of support (physical, motivational, or informational)
Organizational / sport / media pressure
Demanding coaching behavior
Pressure from parents
All these factors in excess or combined can lead to sporting burnout. The overarching theme that leads to burnout is the over-accumulation of stress. Stress can be experienced in many forms (emotional, physical, environmental), and the body can only handle so much at once.
To combat burnout, it is essential to create a multidimensional identity that does not solely revolve around sport. Having a unidimensional athletic identity is a recipe for creating mindblowing anxiety due to fear of failure, as failure becomes an assault on the sole core of yourself. Time completely away from sport is another way to expand your identity and the sources from which you draw your self-esteem. A multidimensional identity ensures that self-esteem is not derived only from the unstable reality of sporting performance. Time away can help prevent these factors from accumulating too much and will keep you mentally engaged in your sport.
Adding rest and recovery periods into your physical training to prevent overtraining is another way to combat burnout. Ensuring you do not train more than your body’s ability to absorb the training requires listening very closely to your body and being honest with how much you can handle. It may take time, humility, and experience to learn when your body is telling you to rest versus keep pushing. It is also important to balance your physical training with your life stress and not take on so much in life that it causes your training to suffer (if that’s what’s important to you). This is more about what you say no to over time. Sometimes agreeing to less is truly more as it opens the space and time to be enageged in your athletic and creative endeavors.
Navigating the environmental stressors of the sporting environment is arguably one of the trickiest areas to prevent burnout. Athletes performing at a high-level deal with mounting pressure from many different sources. The very way in which sport is organized is a pressure cooker for athletes who strive to live up to media hype, expectations from others, or to their previous best performances. Learning how to be intrinsically motivated, mindful, and autonomous are all ways to combat the negative effects of all the pressure.
So there they are, the 15 factors categorized in three dimensions that lead to burnout. Think about how you might be at risk of burnout within each factor, then think of ways you can combat their negative effects. While it is important to be motivated, train hard, and put pressure on yourself to be a high-performing athlete, it is important to keep all of this in check and not push it too far. Burnout has caused many world-class athletes to drop out and leave their sport entirely, and it would be erroneous to think any athlete is immune to the phenomenon.
SUMMARY:
Burnout is caused by:
A unidimensional athletic identity
Over-accumulation of stress
Excessive motivation
Burnout is prevented by:
Creating a multidimensional identity
Balancing out stress of all types with adequate rest, recovery, and time away from sport
Being present, mindful, and acquiring the resources to cope with pressure