Do burnout and sleep quality interact when being treated for burnout? : Results from a student led, psychoeducative stress intervention

Sammanfattning: Stress, burnout, and sleep problems are linked with negative health outcomes and are increasingly common globally and among the Swedish population. To strengthen mental health response at the primary health care level, the students of the Programme for Master of Science in Psychology give psycho-educative, CBT-based stress- and sleep treatments at health care centres in Umeå as part of their training. To understand what affects the treatment outcome, this study aimed to investigate whether burnout and sleep quality interact after a stress intervention. One hundred sixteen residents of Umeå, who went through treatment in the form of a stress school, participated in the study. The stress school treatment was delivered in four weekly sessions that lasted 90 minutes each including a break. The Shirom Melamed Burnout Questionnaire (SMBQ), the Karolinska Sleep Questionnaire (KSQ) and the Swedish version of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) were used before and after the intervention to assess its effects. The findings of the study showed no interaction effect between burnout and sleep quality at the beginning of the treatment and burnout as a treatment outcome. At the same time, it revealed main effects for both burnout and sleep quality, showing that high level of burnout and poor quality of sleep at the beginning predict higher levels of burnout after the treatment in the stress school. These findings suggest that addressing stress and sleep problems at the beginning may be important in improving burnout treatment outcomes in stress treatments.