I have written quite a few posts for Psychology Today about stress and burnout (See my posts). I am frequently asked what is the single most important action I can take to address burnout and its underlying stressors. Although stress reactivity is tremendously complicated, involving intricate neurotransmitter, hormone, and immune system interactions, coupled with psychological underpinnings such as developmental issues, schemas, perception, prior operant conditioning, habituated patterns, neural pathways, and memory storage and retrieval, the answer to the question is quite simple: Actively take control of your stress that causes burnout!

Burnout is caused by longitudinal, unmitigated, chronic stress (Comer, 2020). Mitigating it requires a unique plan: You must manage it. Stress and burnout do not vanquish on their own. In fact, chronic stress is well reported to lead to many pathologies, both physiologically and psychologically (Comer, 2020).

To create a successful plan, you must first think about the underlying causal factors leading to chronic stress-induced burnout from three temporal aspects: proactive, concurrent, and retroactive (see Figure 1).

Proactive........

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