Session 2: Perspectives of burnout

Introduction

At the start of this session you will hear about the case of Open University student and leading cyclist, Elinor Barker, who describes her early stages of burnout. She subsequently recovered to win an Olympic gold medal. This account is used to illustrate how burnout can be understood through different perspectives, and you will build on your understanding of the stress-related burnout research that you read about in Session 1.

Figure 1 How much does looking through a different lens result in seeing something differently or more clearly?

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A person’s hand holds up the lens of a camera so you can see through it. In the background, there is a vista of out of focus mountains, trees, a wooden building and a lake.

Figure 1 How much does looking through a different lens result in seeing something differently or more clearly?

The lens through which you look at any complex phenomenon influences the likely explanations you will provide for it. In this session, you will start to appreciate the different ways in which burnout is experienced, which will lead towards the question: ‘how might burnout be measured?’ and you will try out a questionnaire that attempts to measure it. You will also consider a list of fifteen factors that influence burnout. With this session’s focus on burnout explanations, measurement and causal factors, you will be getting to the heart of the topic.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

• explain four different perspectives of burnout and fifteen factors that influence burnout
• discuss how burnout can be gauged using physiological or questionnaire measures.

Watch this video in which Kate Goodger introduces the session further.

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Transcript: Video 1

KATE GOODGER

Burnout isn't something that happens overnight. It's a gradual process. It's also not something that's down to one single factor. It's a combination of factors that creates an environment around athletes that deplete their personal resources.

In this session you're going to learn about the factors that contribute to burnout or put people at risk from experiencing burnout. These can be divided into three different groups. The first group that you'll learn about will be overload-based factors. So that's typically around things like training volume, recovery rates, and under-recovery that an athlete is experiencing. But it can also be the additions of stresses and strains around things like exams and working life.

The second set of factors are situational factors. Typically these relate to things like the athlete's training environment or competition environment. But they can also relate to the type of support systems that sit around athletes. The third set of factors are the individual factors. So these are much more the personality-based factors for that individual athlete, such as perfectionism, or athletic identity, or motivation.

So as you go through the session, you'll learn about those different factors and how they can put an athlete at risk from burnout. You're also going to learn around the theoretical perspectives of burnout. What that means is the way different researchers have gone about explaining how burnout happens, and also what the burnout experience is like for different individuals. So you'll learn a range of approaches to explain that.

Alongside giving an explanation to burnout, these theoretical approaches are also used to be able to assess and analyse different cases of burnout. So by the end of this session, you'll have learned about the factors that put people at risk from burnout, an explanation of how burnout can develop, and also what that experience is like for different individuals and how to measure it through those assessment approaches.

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