A Solution to Burnout That Doesn't Mean Less Work It's the end of the year, and lots of us are feeling a little overwhelmed. Tired, unfocused and ready to take a nice break with our families (or away from our families in some cases). We may be feeling garden-variety stress. Or more ominously, we may be burned out. Although most of us tend to use those phrases interchangeably, researchers say stress is to burnout as feeling a little blue is to clinical depression - a much more serious and long-term problem that doesn't get the attention it should, but can affect all aspects of our lives and workplace. Burnout is not just when you need a vacation to recharge. It's when you feel overwhelming exhaustion, frustration, cynicism and a sense of ineffectiveness and failure. Initially it referred to those employed in the human services - health care, social work, therapy and police work - but has since expanded to all sorts of workers, said Christina Maslach, professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Maslach is a pioneer in the study of burnout, researching it since the 1970s; in the early 1980s she and her colleagues developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which has become a crucial method for surveying professional burnout. The inventory contains 22 elements in the following areas: ■ Emotional exhaustion - emotionally overextended, drained and used up without any source of replenishment. It's the chronic feeling that you just can't face another day. ■ Cynicism or depersonalization - a loss of idealism. Particularly in the health professions, it can manifest itself as having a negative, callous or excessively detached response to other people. ■ Reduced personal efficacy - a decline in feelings of competence and productivity at work. Not enough research has been done in the United States to determine whether burnout is more widespread now than it was 30 years ago, but "people talk about it a lot more," Professor Maslach said. It has also become clear that it's not simply a North American or Western problem. Not surprisingly, interest in burnout corresponds with the economic development of countries - for instance, as the economies in India and China boom, burnout research is growing, according to research Professor Maslach worked on. Some other countries have a better handle on whether burnout is increasing. Michael Leiter, a professor of occupational health at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, has studied the issue for many years in hospitals. He said burnout was certainly growing among nurses, and younger nurses were experiencing it more than older nurses. He attributed that to the push to work harder with fewer resources, less pay and greater job insecurity. Also, as technology allows the lines between work and home to blur, many feel on-call all the time, with no opportunity for respite. Surveys show that more people are also feeling burned out in Europe. In the mid-'90s, when it first began to be measured, 10 percent of the Dutch working population reported feeling burned out, compared with 13 percent now, said Wilmar Schaufeli, a professor of psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. That increase can largely be attributed to more women ages 30 to 40 entering the work force and struggling to balance work and home life, he said. Burnout in the Netherlands first began to be systematically measured when it became a medical diagnosis: If a doctor determines a worker suffers the symptoms of burnout for more than six months - in part by using the Maslach Burnout Inventory - the worker must receive paid time off and help, such as counseling. The same is true in the Scandinavian countries. "Employers, government, unions - all have a vested interested in preventing this," Professor Schaufeli said. A typical response to the problem, he said, would be to give the employee six to eight weeks off, with weekly half-hour counseling sessions to help figure out what went wrong and how it might change. "They may still have the same complaints but they're better able to cope," he said.