The present research project proposes to analyze the ways in which teachers react and adapt to stressful situations within the work context. The main objective, therefore, is to investigate the psychological and physiological implications of occupational stress, with a focus on the repercussions on the psychophysical well-being of individuals. Within this framework, the investigation will focus on the set of symptoms, signs, and disorders that may emerge as a result of prolonged exposure to strenuous working conditions, which can be traced back to the burnout syndrome in the world of education. Through a multidisciplinary analysis, an attempt will be made to understand not only the causes and manifestations of the phenomenon, but also its consequences at the individual and organizational levels.

The concept of burnout has its roots in the 1970s amid growing interest in the effects of job stress in the helping professions. Freudenberger (1974) was the first scholar to systematically introduce and analyze this phenomenon in academia. The U.S. psychoanalyst, in an article published in the Journal o f Social Issues, uses the term burnout to describe a condition of physical and emotional exhaustion observed among workers in a voluntary psychiatric facility in New York City. According to his definition, burnout represents a state of frustration resulting from dedication to a cause that has not produced the expected rewards, particularly affecting those who work with high emotional involvement in high-pressure settings. Research on burnout is registering a significant boost thanks to the experimental contributions of Christina Maslach. This author summarizes the phenomenon as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion "which can occur in individuals who, by profession, 'deal with people"" (Maslach, 1992, p . 20). It is, therefore, a syndrome in which each stage contributes to the occurrence of he others. In particular, Maslach identifies three dimensions:

• emotional exhaustion, understood as a dysfunctional adaptive response in the face of excessive demands due to contact with people;

• depersonalization, characterized by attitudes of rejection toward people who come to the caregiver;

• the reduction in personal abilities, referring to reduced motivation to succeed and a decrease in one's self-esteem and ability to cope with the strenuous conditions of work.

In the elementary school context, work-related stress is an increasingly relevant phenomenon, particularly for educational figures involved in intense and ongoing interpersonal relationships, as is the case with support teachers. In fact, the school environment, with its continuous stresses, regulatory pressures, complex relational dynamics and emotional demands, is configured as a setting with a high risk of psychosocial stress, which can lead to the development of burnout, especially among those staff members most exposed to situations of discomfort, fragility or disability. So, the school is not a service for the market, but a place where the education of the subjects it welcomes must develop through content, activities, appropriate and effective tools. From this point of view, the programmatic contents of a school curriculum are indifferent to only one condition, namely that they are tools for getting used to using one's head: those who know how to think, also know how to plan, choose and do. The famous triad of knowing how to think, knowing how to do, and knowing how to be is not a program for school, but the result of a genuine education, which puts at the center, reflective thinking, which is both the catalyst of the educational process and the connecting point of imagination, memory, curiosity, and the ability to identify and solve problems that various contexts pose (Bellatalla, 2023).