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When people are highly stressed for prolonged periods of time, they can sometimes experience a state known as burnout, characterized by pronounced emotional, mental and physical exhaustion. The stressors leading to burnout could be personal, such as family conflicts or the end of a relationship, as well as academic or professional, such as studying a lot for exams or working long hours while taking very few breaks or vacations.

Individuals who are experiencing burnout typically find it difficult to concentrate on their everyday activities, can take longer to complete tasks or might feel that they are not performing as well at work or school. While burnout is fairly common, it can be very debilitating for some. Understanding the factors driving its emergence could help to devise more effective prevention strategies or interventions designed to help people get back to their baseline energy levels and efficiency.

Researchers at Bielefeld University recently carried out a study aimed at exploring the relationship between burnout, self-esteem and repetitive negative thinking, the tendency to frequently think about stressful or distressing topics. Their findings, in Communications Psychology, suggest that a lower self-esteem is linked to greater feelings of burnout and negative thinking patterns mediate this relationship.

"Low self-esteem and repetitive negative thinking are associated with higher burnout risk among university students at the between-person level," wrote Malin Brueckmann, Justin Hachenberger and their colleagues in their paper. "However, there is increasing evidence that associations identified in between-person analyses do not always reflect processes occurring within individuals. Therefore, we conducted a four-week ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study with N = 96 students during an examination period."

While several past studies have explored the link between burnout or other forms of psychological distress and self-esteem, most of these studies explored differences between different individuals or groups of people. As a result, they sometimes fail to capture changes that can occur inside the same person over time and their effects on burnout.

To also investigate these changes and inner processes, Brueckmann, Hachenberger and their colleagues relied on a method known as EMA. This is an experimental approach that entails repeatedly collecting data in real-time as participants are engaged in their daily activities, throughout the duration of a study.

The researchers recruited 96 students at Bielefeld University and asked them to periodically answer questions designed to assess their stress levels, exhaustion, self-esteem and the extent to which they engaged in repetitive negative thinking patterns. They then analyzed the data they collected to explore the relationship between these different variables.

"Results showed that higher self-esteem was followed by feeling less burnt out on a within-day and day-to-day level," wrote the authors. "Also, higher self-esteem was followed by lower repetitive negative thinking (i.e., rumination on the within-day level and pre-sleep worry on the day-to-day level), which in turn was followed by feeling less burnt out."

Essentially, the researchers found that when students felt better about themselves and held themselves in a higher regard, they appeared to be less prone to burnout, even if they were under similar levels of stress. The team also performed further statistical analyses to determine whether repetitive negative thinking partly explained the observed relationship between self-esteem and burnout.

"Mediation analyses showed that a substantial proportion of the associations between self-esteem and feeling burnt out was mediated by repetitive negative thinking at both the within- and between-person level," wrote Brueckmann, Hachenberger and their colleagues.

"In addition, we also found evidence of a reverse temporal sequence. Higher levels of burnout were followed by an increase in repetitive negative thinking, which in turn led to lower self-esteem. Finally, self-esteem instability partially moderated the associations of self-esteem and subsequent pre-sleep worry and burnout at the within-person but not between-person level."

The results gathered by this team of researchers hint at the possibility that low self-esteem is linked to more repetitive negative thinking, and high self-esteem to less repetitive negative thinking. Rumination (i.e., dwelling on past problems) and worrying about future events, both of which are repetitive negative thinking patterns, appear to in turn contribute to burnout, by perpetuating mental and emotional distress.

In their future studies, the research team could explore the observed dynamics more closely to gain further insight into the psychological factors contributing to burnout. Their work could eventually inspire the development of more effective counseling or psychotherapy interventions aimed at preventing or addressing burnout in academic and professional settings.