Increasing a workers control over his or her job is another intervention has been shown to help counteract exhaustion and cynicism in the workplace.Additional prevention methods include: starting the day with a relaxing ritual; yoga; adopting healthy eating, exercising, and sleeping habits; setting boundaries; taking breaks from technology; nourishing ones creative side, and learning how to manage stress.Barry A. Farber suggests strategies like setting more achievable goals, focusing on the value of the work, and finding better ways of doing the job, can all be helpful ways of helping the stressed. People who dont mind the stress but want more reward can benefit from reassessing their work–life balance and implementing stress reduction techniques like meditation and exercise. Others with low stress, but are underwhelmed and bored with work, can benefit from seeking greater challenge.In one trial, workers taking a high-dose Vitamin B complex "reported significantly lower personal strain and a reduction in confusion and depressed/dejected mood after 12 weeks. "In another trial, doctors undertaking a program involving "mindfulness, reflection, shared experience, and small-group learning" for 9 months had a much lessened propensity to burn out. Another trial with medical interns found a ten-week mindfulness program reduced the incidence of burnout. Secondary and tertiary prevention (aka treatment and management)
Hätinen et al. list a number of common treatments, including treatment of any outstanding medical conditions, stress management, time management, depression treatment, psychotherapies, ergonomic improvement and other physiological and occupational therapy, physical exercise and relaxation.
A newer generation of studies indicates that burnout, particularly its exhaustion dimension, problematically overlaps with depression; these studies have relied on more sophisticated statistical techniques, for example, exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) bifactor analysis, than earlier studies of the topic. The advantage of ESEM bifactor analysis, which combines the best features of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, is that it provides a granular look at item-construct relationships, without falling into traps earlier burnout researchers fell into.Liu and van Liew wrote that "the term burnout is used so frequently that it has lost much of its original meaning. As originally used, burnout meant a mild degree of stress-induced unhappiness. The solutions ranged from a vacation to a sabbatical. Ultimately, it was used to describe everything from fatigue to a major depression and now seems to have become an alternative word for depression, but with a less serious significance" (p. 434). The authors equate burnout with adjustment disorder with depressed mood. Kakiashvili et al., however, argued that although burnout and depression have overlapping symptoms, endocrine evidence suggests that the disorders biological bases are different. They argued that antidepressants should not be used by people with burnout because the medications can make the underlying hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis dysfunction worse. Despite its name, depression with atypical features, which is seen in the above table, is not a rare form of depression. The cortisol profile in atypical depression, in contrast to that of melancholic depression, is similar to the cortisol profile found in burnout.