Many burn-outs in the Netherlands: the biggest crisis ever

Life in a performance society is starting to take its toll: the increasing cases of people with burn-out in the Netherlands cost society up to 20 billion euros per year. In addition, the condition leads to permanent brain damage in many people. That must be different, says Erik Matser, Helmond's clinical neuropsychologist. "If we continue like this, we do not need an atomic bomb to completely eradicate us. We need a different lifestyle to avoid a disaster."

Matser relies on data previously provided by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). "In the Netherlands, about one in five people does not work due to stress and exhaustion," says Matser. "These people are literally too tired to work because they lack energy, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who work, but they also suffer from complaints such as depression and anxiety." Many people slowly recover from various diseases and the underlying cause is stress, and psychological imbalance.These people are often out of a rut as often as they are exhausted. "Usually they are relatively young people," he says.

Youth without life force

According to Matser, there is, in any case, an upward trend in youth-related problems. "I have people around the age of twenty in my practice who have no life force, no energy, no creativity, and their vision of the future is black." According to him, this has to do with the society in which many people are inundated with information. Eighty percent of their students indicate they can not make a day without a cell phone and email. "The brain stays continuously under high voltage and can not handle it in many young people."

Pressing the throttle

According to Matser, everything has to do with the influence of persistent stress on the brain, making it work worse and change the brain tissue. "The brain works best with a good balance between the stress hormones (the accelerator) and the growth hormone (the brake function / accumulation / recovery). Our society promotes the accelerator kick and ignores the brakes, causing many young people become unbalanced and seriously ill for a long time. "Harvard Medical School recently demonstrated that living in a stressful environment literally breaks down nerve cells due to the persistently high level of alertness.

Greatest crisis of all time

According to Matser, the Western world is on the verge of perhaps the greatest crisis ever caused by stress. Man as a species no longer functions in today's society, which is already having disastrous consequences. "The only reason we can afford this misery is that the economy is in good shape, but people who develop stress-related brain dysfunction often never return in the right way."