The science of burnout and how to train your brain to beat it

AI neuroscientist Sarah Baldeo joined CTV Your Morning Edmonton to discuss why she believes burnout has become an epidemic amongst adults.

Burnout is a state of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion caused by prolonged and excessive stress. AI neuroscientist Sarah Baldeo joined Kent Morrison on CTV Your Morning Edmonton to discuss why she believes burnout has become an epidemic amongst adults and how she explores it in her new book 100 Ways to Future-proof your Brain in the Age of AI.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: What exactly is burnout when you talk about it in a neuroscience way?

Sarah Baldeo: When we talk about burnout from a neuroscience lens versus the psychology lens, both fields are equally important when we think about mental stress and cognitive overload. But in neuroscience, we think about neurotransmitters, chemical messengers and the physiological structures of the brain.

We think about what’s actually happening with the physical structures of the brain. There’s two main areas that we focus on when we talk about burnout in neuroscience: one is your memory centre, which is called your “hippocampus” and the other is your thinking centre, which is your “prefrontal cortex.”

Burnout happens when we see this stress and reward mechanism, which is essentially cortisol and dopamine, becomes really deregulated. Burnout is your brain literally unable to emotionally regulate and physically regulate those hormones across the proper structures of your brain and that controls that cognitive overload that people start to experience.

Kent: It seems like more and more young adults are going through this. Why do you think that’s happening?

Sarah: We saw the minister of health from Health Canada come out in March of this year and say that there’s a huge amount of warnings where this is increasing over time. I think when we look at 2025 and what’s happening today, there’s a huge amount of change. There’s things like AI hallucinations and social media bullying and predictions of what’s going to happen in the future. When we think about these hierarchy of needs, of what people are paying attention to, there’s this famous psychologist called Abraham Maslow. At the bottom is “physiological.” This is what people are struggling with. People don’t have time to think about love and belonging and feeling good about themselves. They’re trying to meet the basic needs and they’re really struggling. Not with “survival” exactly, but adults just haven’t been trained to thrive in the world that exists today. We have technology and innovation moving at a pace that the human brain just wasn’t built to keep up with.

Kent: You make a bold claim in your book that “burnout is a choice” and “we have the potential to override and get through this.” How do we do that?

Sarah: What I normally say to people is, think of your brain as your old brain and new brain. Your old brain is right at the centre that controls emotion and instincts and your new brain controls thinking and logic and rational thought.

That Limbic System, that survival flight-or-fight mode is still very important, but your brain, when you come across these threats and these chaotic moments, it’s still reacting as if it was 1000 years ago. The way to navigate this is we really need a neurological upgrade. You can train your brain to sort of hijack that fight-or-flight response.

That instinct to panic is totally normal when you’re overwhelmed, but I tell people this neurological retraining when you’re in the midst of chaos, when you’re in the midst of panic, that is the best time to retrain your brain. Your brain is most active, we see the highest spike in neurological activity and that’s when it’s the most flexible and open to retraining. It doesn’t feel like a choice, but we do have the ability to hijack that fight-or-flight response, that survival mode, even during stressful moments.