Is It Really Burnout?
If you’ve ever gotten home after a long day, or week, or month (or let’s be real, sometimes it’s a year) at work and thought, “I can’t do this anymore,” I feel your pain. Work is so intrinsic to our lives and survival. As adults in the U.S., we often ask each other: “what do you do?” which means “what is your job?” as an introduction to getting to know a person better. We assume that everyone has a certain amount of identity with the work we have chosen. Because of this, there can be a lot of cognitive dissonance when we feel exhausted, defeated, bored, or disconnected from our work.
“I’m burned out” is the number one reason I hear when doing a consultation with my clients. Many of us have seen the term and identify with the metaphor—burning every ounce of fuel and feeling left with nothing but a smoldering pile of ashes, trying to muster enough spark to get up and do the same thing again tomorrow. We feel burned. But what actually qualifies as burnout? What are people experiencing when they are reaching this point of no return? And what can be done to change it?
Burnout Defined
According to Dr. Yousef, a renowned neuroscientist and researcher at UC Berkeley, burnout is not just a feeling. “Burnout is a physiological and neurological condition that can take months to develop and months to undo.” Basically, you experience it in your body, beyond just passing emotions that shift and change depending on circumstances. Your brain is changed enough to the point of necessary intervention. The World Health Organization defines burnout in 3 dimensions:
Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
Increased mental distance from one’s job or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
Reduced professional efficacy (World Health Organization, 2019)
The definition goes beyond day to day experiences of running out of battery. If you’ve started reflecting on the work as a whole, behaving differently due to feelings of negativity about work overall, and seeing your ability to do your work dissipate: you’re seeing burnout.
What Burnout Looks Like
Different professions are going to have variations of this, but in my work as a therapist, I have seen many similarities despite roles and industry being vastly unique. Different personalities and neurodivergence will also contribute to how you personally experience burnout and even still, you will be experiencing core elements true to each category.
Energy Depletion & Exhaustion
This one is the most obvious and people mistake just this characteristic alone as burnout. People come in to therapy saying that they have nothing left, that every day at work they are given an endless stream of tasks, that they have little to no energy for their personal lives, that they feel stuck and unable to even apply to other positions or jobs, and/or that they often feel guilt or shame underneath this exhaustion. My clients are often the ones supporting everyone else in their lives, very skilled at helping others, and used to taking on a lot of work or tasks and doing it well. It naturally follows that it isn’t just about the energy depletion during the workday, but that this “shouldn’t” be happening—something must be wrong with me if I can’t handle the pressure. This internalization can look different for different people, but typically I see either impostor syndrome or cynicism.
Impostor syndrome has been shown as linked to burnout, possibly coming from the same root. Millennials and Gen Z are particularly prone to this, 49% of us reporting that we experience it at work on a regular basis. Research shows that impostor syndrome induces worry about work both while at work as well as outside of work. This contributes to the energy drain: we aren’t just letting it go when we leave our job. We are using our limited burnt ashes of energy to try to figure out what is happening during the day. Impostor syndrome is powerful because it touches on our very human needs to belong and to experience competence. If we believe we are tricking everyone but not actually belonging AND we aren’t performing well enough? It’s a recipe for a drained battery that never replenishes.
Increased Mental Distance & Cynicism
The other manifestation I see is cynicism. People who have been burned out at work have seen: empty promises for support or improvements, multiple changes in management, layoffs upon layoffs, passed over for promotions and/or pay raises, poorly managed conflicts, and disruptions in projects or workload. It feels fruitless to do anything other than take distance. This could look like “quiet quitting”, slowly doing less and less or providing low quality work or simply doing the bare minimum. Another common thing I hear from my clients is a cynicism that extends beyond this job. “What if I get another job and it’s the same? All places are the same, right? Politics, poor management, layoffs, there’s no escape from this.”
Reduced Professional Efficacy
And of course, the performance in work will change. As you burnout, you have less energy and your abilities will deteriorate. Making mistakes, low morale, miscommunications, and overall disengagement will keep happening. To be honest, this is also the characteristic that speaks to management and work leadership: if employees are burning out and not doing their job, then productivity suffers and there needs to be something to be done. It is essential to zoom out and remember that in a country that is run by capitalism, productivity is that moves decision making at a high level. Caring about employees or even high level leaders is one thing, acknowledging profits is another. There is so much pressure on individuals to fix or to do more, when there is so much systemically designed to keep the pressure on individuals rather than making a sustainable structure that honors us all as humans.
How to Heal from Burnout
When I’m working with clients, I target 3 different areas to heal and then prevent burnout:
Emotional Reconnection
Evaluate Authenticity of Identity & Values
Isolation and/or Toxic Connections >> Healthy Community
Through working with people time and time again through burnout, I’ve seen so much hope and reigniting of the spirit of the person seemingly lost underneath the embers. It could be that through connecting with their emotions and values, we are able to make a plan for them to finally leave their job; or we find space to learn assertiveness skills and boundaries and advocate for their needs within the job they already are; or perhaps in connecting with healthy community, they have been offered new opportunities either in their career or to help balance the rest of their personal life. It looks different for everyone, and yet each one echoes with the same theme: burnout is not the end. It’s a wake-up call.
If you’re curious about your own level of burnout, I have exclusive (and free!) access to the Burnout Risk Index, developed by a team of neuroscientists at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Take it today and I will be able to send you a personalized email with your results and some recommendations for you.
