The Problem of Professional Burnout of Higher Education Teachers and the Methods of its Prevention

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of professional burnout of higher education teachers, because they work under a constant stress due to their interaction with others. Taking into account the modern pace of life of an average person, a complicated stress background associated with the global pandemic, new requirements for working conditions and life, the problem of the emotional health of an individual becomes increasingly essential. The purpose of our study is to determine and generalize the theoretical and practical backgrounds of the use of health-saving methods in order to prevent professional burnout of teachers of higher educational institutions. The author has studied modern interpretations of the definition of «professional burnout», and is convinced that an integral component of all of them is psychophysical exhaustion of a person. Emotional burnout is defined as a mechanism of psychological defense in response to psycho traumatic influence, that is, burnout is characterized as a special regulatory system that stabilizes the personality and helps to eliminate or minimize feelings of anxiety caused by awareness of the conflict. It is determined that, firstly, professional burnout depends on both objective and subjective factors, and goes through a number of stages (phases), every of which is characterized by certain demonstrations; secondly, with ageing and increasing of teaching experience, higher education teachers become more emotionally exhausted and depersonalized; thirdly, professional burnout is subject to prevention and correction with the help of various health care methods and means that act on the physiological, emotional-volitional and axiological levels, and so forth.