How Burnout Contributes To Surge In Year-End Medical Emergencies
By the time the year draws closer to its end, the energy intensifies as work deadlines pile up, and families prepare for the holidays, often feeling overwhelmed. However, this toll can have devastating consequences on your physical health to the point where you might land in the emergency room. Read on to learn more about how burnout contributes to a surge in year-end medical emergencies.
Why Burnout Peaks Toward the End of the Year
Burnout isn’t something that happens suddenly because it gradually builds until your body cannot cope with the accumulation of stressors anymore. You might think that you can handle the pressure and navigate without taking time out to rest. However, this can lead you to the peak of burnout, which can become a medical emergency when you least expect it.
These are common factors that can contribute to life-threatening burnout:
- Work pressures.
- Financial strain.
- Family responsibilities.
- School exams and academic deadlines.
- Rising living costs.
- Emotional fatigue.
- Unpredictable national stressors, such as safety concerns.
The Physical Toll of Burnout on the Body
You might think that burnout is feeling tired or overwhelmed. However, it impacts your physical health, affecting the nervous system, cardiovascular system, immune response, and hormone balance. By the end of the year, you might notice that your body’s resilience is low, making you more vulnerable to experiencing health crises.
Here are the most common year-end medical emergencies linked directly to burnout:
- Cardiovascular Events
Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline stay elevated for far too long as you navigate the year. By the time you reach the festive season, your body is likely to feel depleted. This increases the risk of:
- Heart palpitations.
- Chest tightness.
- Hypertension spikes.
- Heart attacks are more likely to occur in people with undiagnosed conditions.
- Panic Attacks and Severe Anxiety Episodes
Burnout can compromise your emotional regulation. Something as simple as a delayed task or rush-hour traffic can trigger different reactions. Sometimes, these episodes can mimic heart attacks, leading to emergency calls when you are on the verge of collapsing or show these signs of distress in public:
- Hyperventilation.
- Dizziness.
- Sudden terror.
- Inability to breathe.
- Fainting.
- Immune System Breakdown
After months of navigating pressure and other stressors, your immune system can become weakened. This leads to increased infections, prolonged and repetitive flu symptoms, high fevers and complications that can require emergency intervention. Moreover, research suggests that hospitals consistently record spikes in gastrointestinal emergencies during the festive season.
- Fatigue-Related Accidents
Chronic exhaustion affects focus, reaction time and coordination, which are leading contributors to emergencies. Most of these incidents can result in the need for the FREE-to-use iER App to connect you with the nearest emergency responders. The common fatigue-related accidents include:
- Workplace injuries.
- Falls.
- Kitchen accidents.
- Road collisions caused by microsleep or fatigue.
Why Emergencies Increase as the Pressure Builds
Burnout doesn’t operate in isolation and takes time to build. Various year-end behaviours interact with it, amplifying the risk of medical emergencies. For instance, the rush to finish everything as you feel the pressure at work to meet deadlines can push you beyond your physical limits. This can also lead to missing out on quality sleep, which increases the risk of unhealthy coping habits such as energy drinks, excessive caffeine and alcohol consumption.
These are some habits that can rapidly increase the risk of collapsing, high blood pressure and impaired judgment, which can become life-threatening medical emergencies. In other cases, personal issues such as finances and social or family obligations can also lead to emotional overload, which can intensify around this time of year. This is when burnout can take its toll on you and become an emergency requiring immediate access to medical responders through the FREE-to-use iER App.
Year-end should be a time of reflection and winding down; however, it can become a period of harmful physical and emotional overload. When you are subjected to the effects of burnout, your emotional, mental and physical health can be severely affected and contribute to being admitted to the hospital. If you experience warning signs, such as a panic attack or fatigue-related accidents, you should have the FREE-to-use iER App handy to alert the emergency contact centre, which can connect you to over 18,000 medical and non-medical emergency responders nationwide.