The Relationship between Burnout and Sleep: Four Longitudinal Case Studies

In this longitudinal case study, the relationship between burnout and sleep is examined in four individuals with (pre)burnout. Sleep parameters of 4 people with burnout and 3 healthy participants were recorded by using activity trackers for seven months. Results of this study were that sleep quality and sleep duration went down over time for two of the four burnout cases. For healthy participants, no changes in sleep parameters were found, except for one person, where time awake and nocturnal awakenings increased over time. Furthermore, a decelerating trend was found in awakenings for one of the burnout cases during the burnout phase and no-burnout phase. However, effect sizes were small, and only for a part of the participants these effects are found. Because of the slow progressive nature of burnout, we did not expect a large deterioration of these sleep parameters. These results provide a feasibility test, starting point and possible hypotheses for a large follow up study to see whether sleep quality and sleep duration decline over an extensive period for people with burnout at population level.