Employees are still burnt out from the pandemic: And self-care alone won't solve it.

• Author: Penrod, Emma

CHANDA VANIMAN moved to Southern Utah to get away from it all, unfortunately her burnout followed her here.

Vaniman, a yoga instructor and exercise physiologist who now works for Intermountain Healthcare, believed that moving to a state with five national parks, dozens of state parks, as well as trails and bike paths galore would mean plenty of restorative time outdoors spent hiking and biking. And in many ways, she says, it was that.

Yet Vaniman says the push to spend her evenings and weekends outside made her feel even more overwhelmed. As she tried to juggle a full-time job, school, and time with friends and family as well as her new hobbies, Vaniman says she increasingly felt as though she "was not performing well at anything."

The World Health Organization (WHO) officially added burnout to its International Classification of Diseases in 2019, marking if a global health concern just in time for the burnout epidemic experienced by many workers over the past year. Despite consistently high scores in traditional measures of wellness and quality of life, Utah has not been immune to burnout and instead shows signs of an unprecedented decline in employee wellbeing alongside neighboring states.

Utah does maintain several advantages over other states, such as ease of access to recreation and strong community institutions, which experts agree should serve as a safeguard against employee burnout. But understanding what happened during the pandemic, they say, requires a better understanding of what burnout is and what causes it--and why recreation alone can't cure it.

HIGHER ENGAGEMENT, HIGHER RISK

Despite adding a definition of burnout to its 11th edition of the International Classification of Disease, the WHO is quick to clarify that burnout isn't technically a medical or mental health condition. Think of it as more of an occupational hazard.

Employees with burnout can be identified by the condition's three main symptoms: chronic feelings of exhaustion and failure, decreased interest in or even cynicism toward one's work, and reduced job performance. These symptoms can cause a person to become more vulnerable to developing other physical and mental health conditions, according to Michael Leiter, a professor of psychology at Acadia University in Canada who has studied burnout extensively. But while the two can bleed into one another, he says burnout is a distinct phenomenon separate from mental health conditions such as depression.

Leiter says that burnout is different from depression in that it's specific to work-related issues. While both burnout and depression might cause low mood or reduced productivity, people experiencing burnout continue to function well in non-work settings. They still enjoy recreation or time with family. Depression, Leiter says, "is...