Exercise feels good.

Or, if you’re in truly horrible shape, it probably won’t feel good at first.

But once you’re even slightly better than that, the feeling after a nice workout can be intoxicating.

Pleasant, energizing, even mood-lifting.

That makes a simple question hard to ignore: if exercise reliably makes us feel good and energized, could it be used as an antidote to conditions that make us feel the opposite?

Burnout might be one of those conditions.

I'm Nicolas, and I help entrepreneurs and business leaders master their mental energy.

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🏋️‍♀️🏃‍➡️ Exercise regularly

Not just for your health and longevity, but as a practical tool to reduce burnout and sustain high performance at work.

Today's study is a small intervention study by Gerber et al. 2013.

The authors wanted to test if exercise affected burnout.
Specifically, if a 12 week aerobic training intervention could positively affect symptoms of burnout.

The study included 12 men with burnout.

Participants were measured before and after the 12 week intervention.

To measure the effects of exercise on symptoms of burnout, a set of questionnaires were used:

·       MBI (Maslach Burnout Inventory): Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, personal accomplishment

·       BDI (Beck Depression Inventory): Depressive symptoms

·       PSS (Perceived Stress Scale): Perceived stress

·       BFS (Befindlichkeitsskala): Mood (8 subdimensions)

The intervention was a 12 week period with 2-3 times weekly training at an intensity of 60-75% of max heart rate with a minimum of 17.5 kcal/kg weekly energy expenditure.

After the intervention, the authors could report a significant drop in measures of:

·       Emotional exhaustion

·       Depersonalization

·       Depressive symptoms

·       Perceived stress

And, additionally mood states also improved significantly from before to after the intervention.

The authors mention a few possible mechanisms for why this study found such strong effects.

First, participants might have perceived exercise as a possible remedy against burnout, as other literature exists that shows how exercise can improve mood and depression.

And as we have seen many times in these newsletters, our perception and mindset has a huge effect on the strength of the routines and efforts we do.

Secondly, exercise is known to improve sleep quality, which alone could have helped with burnout symptoms.

There is also a possibility that the close contact to the trainers could have affected some scores positively.

It is also possible that reoccurring positive emotions related to exercise may have helped break negative thinking cycles.

And of course also physiological mechanisms might have explained the positive results.

For example, we know how exercise leads to a influx of positive brain chemicals, and based on our December focus, ww know how exercise improves neuronal mitochondrial health which has so many important roles, some of them closely affecting mood and energy levels which are two key factors of burnout.
👉Read more here

However, I must also mention some clear limitations of this study despite the huge effects observed.

Most important of these is the small number of participants.

With only 12 participants in the study, it's hard to conclude anything about the effect of exercise on burnout with absolute certainty.

And also, the study did not use a control group.

Most well-designed studies like this one would always include a control group who does not undergo the intervention in order to say that the change in measures observed between the first and the second test day is actually caused by the intervention, and not by any random effect.

It's obvious that for everybody following this newsletter, knowing that any habit can actually positively decrease symptoms of burnout is super useful.

I'm writing this newsletter for entrepreneurs, business leaders and other ambitious individuals who feel that their ambitions can sometimes lead them into symptoms of burnout.

Because I have been there.

So, the whole point is to identify routines and habits that can be beneficial for avoiding and managing burnout in the light of huge workloads. And exercise is definitely one of them.

Articles used for this newsletter:

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