Abstract
Burnout is a serious problem which includes three components of difficulty stemming from work stress: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (or cynicism), and a reduced sense of professional accomplishment. Burnout can lead to negative health outcomes, distress in clinicians, and increased risk for harm to recipients of psychotherapy services. Ideas about how to prevent and treat burnout include increasing self-awareness and self-care, but these variables have not been examined in a quantitative study directly relating them to each other. This study examined a sample of 197 psychotherapists looking at correlations between burnout, self-awareness, self-care, and wellness, which found significant correlations among all the variables. Further analysis suggested that wellness and self-care behaviors were more directly related to reduced burnout than self-awareness. Insight was not shown to have a direct relationship with increasing self-care behaviors, but rather appeared to have an indirect relationship in increasing wellness and reducing burnout. Overall results indicate the strongest relationship was between increased wellness and reduced burnout, suggesting that increasing a practitioner's overall wellness is likely to be the best way to prevent or reduce burnout.