If you experience a short-term stressful event, the brain triggers a series of changes in the body known as the “fight-flight” response. These include changes that may sound familiar to you – increased heart rate and breathing rate, muscle tension, and maybe even experiencing ‘butterflies’ in the stomach. These are normal physical changes that occur to help us deal with a challenging situation.
When stress is ongoing, or you experience one stressful event after another with little time to recover, you may start to experience symptoms like moodiness, sleep disturbance, stomach upset, anxiety, anger and irritability, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, and feeling constantly overwhelmed, ‘burned out’, or low in confidence. This is when stress leads you to burnout: a state of complete mental, physical and emotional exhaustion.