Burnout as Psychological Inflexibility in Healthcare Professionals: Review and New Intervention Proposals from a Contextual-Functional Approach

Abstract

Burnout is a phenomenon that has been object of study during the last decades, reaching a consensus regarding the three dimensions which comprise it: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and sense of ineffectiveness. Burnout has a high prevalence in those professions that involve continuous contact with human suffering, for example, healthcare professionals. According to the need to define burnout as a mutual relationship between environmental and personal factors, and the implication of this phenomena in three levels of response (cognitive, physical, and behavioral), we propose a definition of burnout as experiential avoidance or psychological inflexibility, behavior aimed to avoid private events presented in some work circumstances, and its approach from a functional-contextual perspective such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). In this paper, a non-systematized bibliographic review is carried out, presenting different correlation and experimental investigations that justify the definition of burnout as psychological inflexibility. The paper ends with two brief proposals of intervention that try to solve the limitations of previous research, such as the lack of follow-up sessions.