Indian Journal of Clinical Anaesthesia 2021;8(2):150–151
Content available at: https://www.ipinnovative.com/open-access-journals
Indian Journal of Clinical Anaesthesia
Journal homepage: www.ijca.in
Editorial
COVID-19 burnout, Stress and resilience....
Lalit Gupta
1,
*
1
Dept. of Anaesthesiology and Critical Care, Maulana Azad Medical College and Associated Hospitals, New Delhi, India
ARTICLE INFO
Article history:
Received 28-05-2021
Accepted 29-05-2021
Available online 01-06-2021
© This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The exponential Growth of COVID 19 in few months
have brought the mighty countries on their knees in a very
short time span. The consequences are many fold, it has
not only affected the health system but also the people in
quarantine at their homes or in Covid care centres apart from
Hospitals.
With a high rate of mortality and morbidity, COVID-19
has induced many psychological problems of depression,
fear, anxiety and unending stress and most seriously
burnout.
1
Burnout is a well-described state of physical
and emotional exhaustion, usually seen in professionals
but COVID has extrapolated to people in home quarantine
as well. Uncertainty related to the COVID-19 and the
duration of staying at home has caused significant changes
in our daily life routines. Even a recent research has
also shown that people quarantined are more prone to
psychological breakdown due to stress and fear of illness
and sometimes job insecurity leading to frustrations and
irrational behaviour.
2
Stressful life situations and fear of COVID 19 have
significant adverse effects on the mental health and
psychological functioning of a person. Possibly the
burnout crisis will heighten people’s sense of interpersonal
relationships with the society as being COVID positive
is seen a social stigma at many places. Alternatively, the
distress and anxiety during the pandemic, along with the
loss of colleagues and loved ones, may lead many normal
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: lalit.doc@gmail.com (L. Gupta).
persons to become disillusioned or to despair.
The paradigm of burnout as a psychological syndrome
is a three dimensional response to interpersonal stressors.
It includes emotional exhaustion, cynicism and decreased
personal accomplishment.
3
The emotional exhaustion refers
to wearing out, loss of energy, debilitation, depletion, and
fatigue. The Cynicism refers to negative attitudes toward
society with irritability, withdrawal, and loss of idealism.
The reduced personal accomplishment is responsible for
poor morale, and an inability to cope with stressors.
This three-dimensional model of burnout highlights the
importance of individual stress experience and one’s
conception of both self and others.
3
To cope with such psychological problems be in health
sector or non-health sector, it is important to delineate the
key factors responsible for this. At this stage, understanding
the importance of character strengths like Resilience also
called as bounce back adaptability can buffer the adverse
effect of stress on burnout. Psychological resilience is the
one’s ability to cope mentally or emotionally with a crisis
or to return to pre-crisis status quickly by adapting to
surrounding changes for protecting self from the potential
negative effects of stressors. In addition, resilience refers
to the “ability to bounce back” quickly from stressful
situations, and flexible adaptation to a new situation.
4
It is
an inside personal strength that can contribute to the positive
functioning in emotions, thoughts, and behaviours.
Emotions are contagious. Given the levels of anxiety and
negativity, many feel right now, there is something liberating
https://doi.org/10.18231/j.ijca.2021.031
2394-4781/© 2021 Innovative Publication, All rights reserved. 150