Are You Really Burned Out?

As a respiratory therapist, you regularly work long shifts caring for people who are struggling to breathe. You deal with complicated protocols and equipment. You often face conflicts on the job with coworkers or colleagues.

It’s all a recipe for burnout, but not everyone in the profession gets burned out. Sure, there may be times when they leave work feeling physically and emotionally exhausted, but they never reach the point of losing all motivation or seriously questioning their decision to remain in the profession.

Are these people just more resilient? Or is something else going on?

A study published by BMC Psychology in 2023 suggests the personality traits you were born with or developed over the years may be coming into play.

Their meta-analysis of the literature examined the “big five” personality traits, as defined by the five-factor model proposed by leading researchers, and their relationship to job burnout. The review included more than 3,320 papers with keywords related to work-related burnout and personality traits, of which 83 were included in the final analysis.

The big five personality traits evaluated in the study were:

• Agreeableness: People with this trait are cooperative, sympathetic, tolerant, and forgiving. They avoid competition and conflict, and they don’t like to pressure people or use force to get their way.
• Conscientiousness: People with this trait are precise, organized, and disciplined, and they abide by principles and rules. They work hard to achieve success.
• Extraversion: Researchers measure this trait by the quantity and quality of an individual’s social interactions. People possessing it are more sociable, assertive, talkative, and self-confident.
• Neuroticism: This trait is reflected by a loss of emotional balance and impulse control. People who are neurotic are more likely to experience negative feelings and anxiety, and they attempt to deal with them through maladaptive coping strategies like delay or denial.
• Openness: People with this trait demonstrate intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness, and they tend to favor the untraditional. They are often creative and prefer independence, novelty, and differences.

How do these personality traits figure into burnout? While the authors did find nuanced results (for example, a few traits were linked to key characteristics of burnout in a few studies), overall, four of the traits — agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness — appeared to protect against job burnout. Only neuroticism was found to predict work-related burnout.

The authors believe that assessing personality traits, along with continuous monitoring of occupational stress levels, “could help identify the people who are most likely to develop burnout syndrome to prevent or limit its damage.”

They call for additional research to improve understanding of burnout and interventions to treat it, which may currently be limited by universal approaches that don’t account for its antecedents.

In the meantime, though, respiratory therapists can be reassured that, in most cases, they aren’t really “burned out” — they may just be in need of a little R&R to recharge their professional batteries.