What does burnout feel like and what do you do next?
In this post, I share my experience dealing with burnout and what experts and the scientific literature has to say about this phenomenon that seems to be permeating across all knowledge-workers.
I’m currently taking a sabbatical from work, and a big motivation for that sabbatical was that I started to feel burnt out. As I’ve talked with friends and family over the last few weeks, I’ve realized that this concept of burnout and fatigue from work isn’t foreign to anyone. We all feel exhausted from constantly working in stressful jobs while being inundated with news about a global pandemic, political turmoil, geopolitical instability, and war.
I wanted to use this post to share a few thoughts on how I’ve noticed and experienced burnout. I’m no expert in anything remotely related to burnout, so please treat this as self-reflection and a collection of thoughts rather than expert testimony. I hope it’s useful to read these thoughts and reflect on them to see if they give a little more structure to evaluate your own state of burnout and what you can do to mitigate and reverse it.
I’m going to try to take an ethos, pathos, and logos approach to defining and understanding what burnout is. In other words, I’ll try to define burnout from three different angles:
Ethos: How thoughtful people define burnout
Pathos: What burnout feels like (to me, but potentially to you as well)
Logos: What science says burnout is and how to counter it
How thoughtful people define burnout
First, I wanted to describe how well-known public figures describe burnout. Those people are Sam Altman, Vivek Murthy, and Barack Obama, individuals who work or have worked in prominent, high-stress environments and have vaulted achievements in their respective fields.
Altman and Murthy both talk about an important point related to burnout: burnout isn’t caused by working long hours but rather a sustained misalignment between the day-to-day work and the longer-term goal of the individual. In an interview with his brother, Altman mentions that “burnout is caused by failing and lack of momentum, not working too hard.” This analogy makes sense for those attempting to start a company, a good chunk of Altman’s audience, for whom the goal is close to finding momentum with their business.
Murthy similarly mentions in a perspective piece for the New England Journal of Medicine that “Burnout is not only about long hours. It’s about the fundamental disconnect between health workers and the mission to serve that motivates them.” Health workers’ primary motivations come from serving others, but a constant daily struggle of paperwork and red tape, as well as failing, at times, to save their patients or make an impact in the desired way, can lead to a misalignment of their longer-term goals with their daily work.
In fact, long hours may not even be a required ingredient that leads to burnout. There are many examples of people working very reasonable hours and still getting burnt out. Tech hours generally aren’t seen as excessively long for extended periods. You’ll frequently find people working 9 to 5 or even fewer, with frequent breaks throughout the day for errands, going to the gym, walking around, getting coffee, etc. But burnout is common in tech, even in such working environments.
What can be done about this? Well, shorter-term fixes can be as simple as taking a walk, which Obama did frequently when he was the president. To be fair, he probably still goes on walks now. Something as simple as walking and disconnecting from work, especially in the middle of the day, can help in the short term. However, in the long term, there needs to be a closer alignment with the work you’re doing every day and your long-term goals. And the more hours you put in without that alignment, the more likely it will lead to burnout.
What burnout feels like (to me)
The second dimension we can think about burnout is how it makes someone feel. My personal insight is that burnout isn’t an acute pain you wake up to one day, but a chronic pain that gradually increases over weeks and months. Every day it gets a bit more prominent, making it easy to slowly get used to over time.
Over the last few years, my own ability to recognize burnout was always a posteriori. I realized what I felt for the past few weeks was burnout, rather than realizing the trajectory I was on was tending towards burnout in the future. I’d spend a few months working without reflecting significantly how how I was doing emotionally and mentally. Eventually, I would stumble into a vacation or a long weekend, find some time to reflect and disconnect, and finally realize over the past few weeks that the buzzing demotivation in the back of my mind over the last few weeks was burnout.
This highlighted the importance of creating the time and space to honestly self-reflect on how I’m doing about work. Let me explain more what I mean by this.
To properly recognize and diagnose my state of being burnt out, I needed to properly self-reflect on how I was feeling about work, life, and the balance between the two. Only I could decide I was burnt out. Nobody else could truly convince me for or against it otherwise.
But how do I come to that realization? Well, every person’s strategy for reflection is different. What worked for me was talking with close friends and family, thinking, and writing. And when I say talking with close friends, I don’t mean a 30-minute walk for coffee in the middle of the day. These are heavy conversations and require the mental capacity and space to not be within a working context. This is why my burnout realizations only came after a long weekend or vacation, in which I finally stopped being in work-mode autopilot and truly stepped back. That’s what I mean by creating the time and space. I needed not to be thinking about work and not physically be close to or in the same area where my mind is in work mode. If you normally work from home, this can be as simple as getting out of town or going to the cafe or park for the day with a pen, paper, and no phone.
The last ingredient is honesty. I find it easy to open up and be vulnerable when writing, and it also happens to be the best way I think. So, I force myself to journal and write down my thoughts extensively, even if no one will ever read them but myself. I got into journaling every month a few years ago, and it singlehandedly helped me make sense of my thoughts and be true to how I was feeling.
In short, burnout doesn’t suddenly hit you one day; it creeps up slowly and sneakily. My recommendation for recognizing when you’re burnt out is to deliberately carve out regular time and space to honestly self-reflect on how you’re doing.
What science says burnout is
What can we learn from the actual experts? Burnout has been a topic of increased interest in the scientific community over the past few decades, and there has been a decent amount of research on it.
Let’s start with the WHO, which classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon (not a medical condition):
“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three 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; and
reduced professional efficacy.
Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
In fact, burnout became recognized by German-American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger back in the 70s. He noticed several physicians at his free clinic in NYC as well as himself experiencing a “physical or mental collapsed caused by overwork or stress.” Sounds awfully familiar. He diagnosed himself and his colleagues with “burnout syndrome.” It took some time for scientists to agree that the key distinction between exhaustion and burnout, however, is a feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction. Painting a room or running a marathon can be exhausting, too, but there’s a sense of completion and fulfillment of one’s goal that motivates us to continue.
And while companies have started becoming aware of the problem, their well-intentioned solutions may exacerbate burnout. Josh Cohen, a professor and psychoanalyst at the University of London, mentions in a piece for The Economist that companies have started offering mindfulness and meditation sessions during the workday, which inadvertently becomes another thing that employees can succeed or fail at, all the while taking away from their working time and not properly allowing them to disconnect from work.
Christina Maslach, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, classifies six factors that contribute to burnout:
Excessive hours. When you’re overstretched and overworking consistently.
Lack of autonomy. When your actions don’t give you control over the outcomes.
Lack of reward. When you don’t get recognized for your work.
Hostile workplace environment. When your workplace culture is competitive and intense rather than collaborative.
Politics and bureaucracy. When there are excessive policies that aren’t enforced fairly or reasonably.
Lack of meaning. When you don’t find value in the goal of your work.
A great topic to close out on is the recognition that burnout and depression exhibit very overlapping symptoms. In a longitudinal research study by Renzo Bianchi, burnout may be best understood as a combination of “work-related depressive symptoms.” In addition, consistently experiencing burnout-causing factors without an outlet to resolve the problem or overcome or neutralize the stressors may begin experiencing deeper depressive symptoms.
The takeaway
In summary, burnout is a well-understood work-related disorder, but recently, it has gained more attention due to its exacerbation throughout the pandemic, specifically on healthcare and front-line workers. But there are common ways to mitigate burnout before it happens, identify when you are burnt out, and prevent and reduce it to return to a healthier work-life relationship.
I hope this post was a useful overview of my journey experiencing and dealing with burnout and a bird’s-eye view of some of the research being conducted in this space to help us better understand how the mind and body feel and react to burnout.