Is Your Personality Making You Exhausted?

After a busy and stressful day, most people just want to take some time and relax. Maybe you’ve been on the run for the last 12 hours, and now all you can think about is sitting down on the couch and regrouping. Although being exhausted at the end of the day happens to everyone now and then, what happens when your "joie de vivre" has lost all its "joie"?

Exhaustion is a component of the state of burnout in which your energy levels feel depleted and your mind disengages from what your body is doing. Considered a threat to mental health, the World Health Organization has even included burnout as an occupational phenomenon worthy of including in its International Classification of Diseases, the ICD-11. Its recent online publication, Mental Health at Work, lists no less than 13 risk factors that include a variety of conditions related to burnout, including lack of control over work pace, long and inflexible hours, and discrimination and exclusion.

At an extreme, everyone might experience burnout if the conditions are bad enough, and all 13 risk factors are present in someone’s life. However, when the environment isn’t quite that toxic, what could explain why some people tune out emotionally and others remain engaged?

Neuroticism and the Risk of Exhaustion

There is good reason to expect that individual differences in susceptibility to exhaustion can be understood in terms of personality. The Five Factor Model, a leading personality trait approach, includes the dimensions of neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and extraversion. Those high on the quality of neuroticism, who are prone to worry and negative moods, might seem to be the leading contenders for burnout. According to the Sapienza University of Rome’s Lorenzo Filosa and colleagues (2024), “neuroticism is likely the personality trait more positively and strongly associated with perceived stress,” due to the tendency of the highly neurotic to experience “intense negative affect in reaction to adverse environmental circumstances.”

The question the Italian researchers pose is why this should be the case. What goes on inside their minds when the highly neurotic face unfair conditions at work, long hours, and strain? Perhaps, Filosa et al. argue, it’s something in their physiological responsivity that links a burnout-inducing environment and feelings of exhaustion.

One promising candidate is a measure of the cardiovascular system’s ability to modulate its reactivity during times of stress. Heart rate variability (HRV) is, as the term implies, a measure of whether the interval between heartbeats in an individual changes over time and circumstances.

Although it might sound like a good thing to have a low HRV, people with this tendency not to adapt to situational demands actually do worse when placed under stress. Their lower “vagal control of the heart” means they are subject to the wear and tear of exposure to chronic stress. Prior research shows, further, that those with low HRV are more likely to experience burnout under tough working conditions. Neuroticism’s negative effect on burnout resistance could, the authors propose, be accounted for by the role of low HRV.

Testing Personality’s Role in the Physiological Response to Burnout

To test their hypotheses, the Sapienza U. researchers recruited a sample of 271 working adults (average age 41) who all shared jobs in which they were required to interact with the public (e.g., teachers, social workers, physicians), theorized to be related to exposure to high levels of interpersonal stress and job overload.

Over the course of one day at work, participants filled out an experience sampling measure to rate their job demands, which, in turn, were related to HRV measures obtained through continuous heart rate monitoring. The research team also included measures of neuroticism (e.g., “I often get nervous”) and exhaustion (“I feel emotionally drained from my work”), as well as other control measures related to health and lifestyle habits.

Consistent with prior studies, the Filosa et al. results showed greater emotional exhaustion among participants who showed the least HRV. However, this relationship held only for people who were high in neuroticism. As the authors concluded, “high-neuroticism workers with low HRV’s… are the most impaired in terms of resources and the most prone to experience increased exhaustion symptoms.”

Neuroticism Essential Reads

Bumps, Bruises, and Loops: The Path to Neurotic Suffering

The Neurotic Loops at the Core of Many Mental Disorders

Is It Time to Turn Up Your HRV?

Although the Italian findings might seem to convey the idea that the highly neurotic are fated to feel drained after days filled with heavy workloads, there is some good news. As the research team points out, personality is increasingly being understood as malleable rather than fixed. The way to get there, furthermore, might be through the route of self-efficacy, specifically self-efficacy with respect to emotions.

It's possible, then, that the highly neurotic can be rescued from exhaustion by helping them to get a better handle on their feelings when situations seem to overwhelm them. To boost this process, though, an additional step can come about through an HRV intervention. Meditation and slow breathing/relaxation are relatively simple ways to help people manage their ability to regulate their heart rates, as is amply shown in previous research.

Turning these ideas into practical suggestions, you might consider noticing how your own demands change over the course of the day and then thinking about how you’re reacting. Are you able to rise and fall to various challenges or do you remain permanently “risen”? How depleted do you feel at the end of a high-demand (or any) day? Even if your personality veers you off to the neurotic side of things, taking a few minutes to breathe when you’re stressed could potentially shift the equation toward greater adaptability.

To sum up, people who are highly neurotic may find life to be exhausting, especially when it becomes stressful. Finding a pathway through the heart’s adaptability might provide the route toward less burnout and more fulfillment.

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