{"id":44919,"date":"2019-03-13T15:24:23","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T22:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/?p=44919"},"modified":"2019-05-10T07:43:48","modified_gmt":"2019-05-10T14:43:48","slug":"tired-of-your-sport-it-could-be-burnout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/hike\/tired-of-your-sport-it-could-be-burnout","title":{"rendered":"Tired of Your Sport? It Could be Burnout"},"content":{"rendered":"

A gentle wind rustled evergreen boughs around me, a stream galloped past my now-damp trail runners and my pup threw herself, ecstatic, against downed branches in our way. The world was right, but I wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I saw it all, but I didn\u2019t feel it. Instead, I had a heavy, deadened feeling in my chest and limbs. It was as if all the light and love had been drained from my body, leaving behind an empty shell. I set a timer for half an hour, promising myself I could turn around and tromp back to the trailhead when it sounded. I only made it 22 excruciating minutes.<\/p>\n

A month after this \u201chike\u201d I came across a Buzzfeed article, \u201cHow Millennials Became the Burnout Generation<\/a>.\u201d In it, reporter Anne Helen Peterson describes the psychological reasons behind why her to-do list felt so impossible. It gave me pause. Could that be what I was experiencing? After all, since the completion of 58 miles in a 24-hour hike-a-thon five months prior, I had barely been able to get myself on the trail. I kept trying, and I kept experiencing that same feeling of emptiness. Burnout<\/em> might be the word to describe what I was feeling.<\/p>\n

What is Burnout?<\/h4>\n

The term burnout was coined in the 1970s by Herbert Freudenberger<\/a> to describe exhaustion-like symptoms he was observing in some medical professionals like doctors and nurses.\u00a0Today, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases<\/a>\u00a0describes burnout as a \u201cstate of vital exhaustion\u201d that may not go away on its own.<\/p>\n

Burnout began appearing in sports science literature in the 1980s<\/a>. Despite the parallels scientists were observing between professionals and sports figures, it took until 1997 for researchers to come up with a framework for athlete burnout syndrome<\/a>, which looked just like the burnout experienced by medical professionals, but included some sports-specific symptoms like a feeling among athletes that they weren\u2019t achieving what they\u2019d hoped.<\/p>\n

In 2001, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, Allison Margaret Eades, developed a questionnaire called the Eades Athletes Burnout Inventory. The inventory requires athletes to respond to prompts like \u201cI feel overwhelmed by the demands of my sport participation\u201d and \u201cI\u02bcm not performing up to my ability in my sport,\u201d rating them on a 7-point scale.<\/p>\n

Then, in 2007, a study that circulated that same inventory among 980 adolescents in Sweden<\/a>, found that between 1 and 9 of those athletes had elevated burnout scores. That might not seem like a lot, but if you take into account that the majority of athletes surveyed reported experiencing low to moderate levels of burnout, it begins to sound like a larger problem.<\/p>\n

Symptoms<\/strong><\/h4>\n

I wanted to learn more about how burnout could be responsible for the exhaustion that crept in every time I started thinking about hiking, so I turned to J.D. DeFreese, Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who writes about athlete psychological health.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the realm of sport, [burnout is] considered an issue that manifests in your thoughts and emotions,\u201d DeFreese said. \u201cOf the three facets or symptoms, one is emotional and physical exhaustion, two is feeling that you aren\u2019t accomplishing much, and the last is devaluation\u2014not feeling [the sport is] as important to you as it was at one point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Megan Kimmel, a sponsored mountain ultra trail runner, has felt that emotional and physical exhaustion. She started racing when she was working multiple jobs, buying a house and trying to find sponsors. \u201cI was burning the candle at both ends,\u201d she said. Fatigue and devaluation of the recreational side of the sport set in.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had zero desire to continue racing\u2014but I had commitments to [continue to race],\u201d Kimmel said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t happy doing it. The main part of that was I missed was recreating just for fun. All the sudden it was an obligation.\u201d<\/p>\n

To recognize burnout in yourself, Scott Sailor, president of the National Athletic Trainers\u2019 Association<\/a>, points to a few unique sensations: \u201cSomeone might feel fatigue or lack of engagement or even feel that they\u2019re ill. Those all can be signs of burnout.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re experiencing a combination of the symptoms below for longer than a week, according to the National Athletic Trainers\u2019 Association<\/a>, you should consider consulting your doctor for help:<\/p>\n