The impact of burnout on human physiology and on operational performance: a prospective study of soldiers enrolled in the combat diver qualification course.

In the course of training and in their work, military personnel are often required to spend considerable time under intense conditions with other people. Due to the performance demands and the intensity of the situations, the interactions between individuals may become charged with negative feelings of frustration, anger, as well as a sense of being without support. When these feelings are experienced for extended periods of time, they can be draining to an individual and can lead to burnout. Maslach and her group [1, 2] argue that our current concept of stress is too broad and subject to misinterpretation, since some stress might be "difficult" but positive in nature, or negative in nature etc. (the idea of eustress and distress). She has developed the concept of burnout to address how well a person is able to relate to his or her environment and has assessed this along an axis of emotional exhaustion, cynicism (or depersonalization a sense of disconnection from conspecifics) and personal accomplishment. Within this framework one might conceive of a situation where a person feels stress, but will react differently to that challenge depending on the balance between their sense of emotional exhaustion, disconnection from others, and personal accomplishment. In this vein of thought, we may have a higher capacity to tolerate very difficult situations as long as we feel we are accomplishing something worthwhile and as long as we are supported by those to whom we feel connected. Burnout is a non-psychiatric syndrome that has been mainly observed in individuals whose professional demands include a both