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Understanding Burnout - How Neuroscience Can Help You Develop a Stronger Default Response
In today's fast-paced and high-stress world, burnout has become a common problem that affects many of us. It can leave you feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and detached from your work or personal life. In this blog post, we'll explore the science behind burnout and how you can use neuroscience to prevent it.
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Stress Buildup Leading to Burnout
The stress buildup that leads to burnout is associated with specific patterns of neural activity in your brain. Neuroimaging scans of individuals in a high state of stress reveal less activity in the modern areas of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, and increased activity in the primitive and reactive amygdala.
The explanation of these changes is attributed to the brain’s neuroplasticity. Picture your brain as a constantly-evolving machine, always trying to streamline its operations. Its catchphrase is, "neurons that fire together, wire together," which essentially means your brain is constantly rewiring itself to be better at processing whatever gets thrown at it most often.
A Dominating Primitive Brain
Encountering obstacles while striving to attain unrealistic objectives or facing an increased workload causes your primitive brain to dominate over your modern brain more frequently. As a result, you lose touch with the brain areas responsible for higher-level thought and decision-making.
It becomes harder and harder to see the problems you face from a logical and pragmatic point of view. Your realistic perspective on the issues you face wanes, and it becomes more challenging to solve problems creatively.
With less input from your modern brain, disappointments can be magnified and misconstrued as personal defects. These heightened emotions and stress trigger the reinforcement of reactive neural pathways, accelerating your deadline with burnout.
Developing a Stronger Default Response
The good news is you can use what you've learned from neuroscience to take charge of your emotional well-being and regain control of your decision-making processes. With increasing successful experiences in achieving goals, the same neuroplasticity that previously enabled your primitive brain networks to dominate in burnout mode can be used to construct a new and stronger positive default response.
Your brain's powerful drive for intrinsic neurochemical rewards, specifically dopamine, can help you develop a stronger default response. Dopamine is associated with a deeply satisfying and motivating pleasure, released in bursts when your brain recognizes accomplishments. This intrinsic satisfaction can increase your motivation, curiosity, perseverance, and memory.
To receive this pleasure response from achievements, you'll need to plan for your brain to receive frequent recognition of incremental progress. Setting goals requires you to consider how meaningful they are to you and whether they can be broken down into smaller chunks. Goals that can be easily identified with every incremental success allow you to experience the pleasure burst of dopamine accompanying your brain's recognition of achievement.
Conclusion
In conclusion, understanding the role of neuroplasticity and dopamine in our brain can help us develop a stronger default response and take charge of our emotional well-being, thus reducing the risk of burnout. By setting meaningful goals and recognizing incremental progress, we can experience the pleasure burst of dopamine that accompanies our brain's recognition of achievement, leading to increased motivation and perseverance.