Is Burnout Just What Work Is Now?

During the pandemic, I experienced my first real episode of burnout. I was falling asleep every day after work, with fatigue so heavy I’d wake up four hours later on the couch not realizing I’d fallen asleep in the first place. Despite being an expert on the topic, and telling patients they had it, I had trouble turning the lens on myself.

Part of that is just how insidious burnout is. Unlike depression, it’s caused by the systems we work in. It’s considered a workplace-associated condition, including by the International Classification of Diseases, and it isn’t currently in the psychiatric diagnostic manual (a conversation for another time). That’s partly why you feel better on a weekend or vacation, because you’re removed from the stressor. But, if you were depressed, as I tell my patients, you’d still be depressed, just on a beach.

However, burnout is more than just being tired or stressed from work, even if that’s how we’ve come to use the word colloquially. Definitions of burnout typically include three dimensions. The first is emotional exhaustion or feeling spent at the end of the day, which for me, looks like physical exhaustion. When I give talks, I ask people to raise their hands if they’re currently not emotionally exhausted. One or two usually enthusiastically do, and it turns out they’re just back from vacation, or are a step from retirement. The rest of us see it as a byproduct of a field that demands too much.

The second dimension is cynicism or depersonalization, and manifests as feeling angry, numb or less connected to the people and work around you. We do this to protect ourselves from the hard stuff we see or hear. I know I do, as an empath psychiatrist, but it’s like being in that mode with everyone, all the time.

The third is a reduced sense of personal accomplishment, or feeling like you’re doing less or someone tells you that you are. This is the symptom that shows up most in my office because we tend to shrug things off until they interfere with work or productivity. We learn this early: My college student patients will tell me they’re “fine” because their grades are good, even when they haven’t left their room in days, are best friends with AI and haven’t slept. To them, an A is proof of their wellbeing. That logic follows us into the workplace where, if we’re doing our job, and no one has said otherwise, we must be fine. The problem is burnout tends to only interfere with work once it’s already severe. Catch it earlier, and we can do something about it before it hits our performance reviews.

Burnout is also hard to identify—as it was for me—because so many people around us are burned out too. In healthcare, that number is around 50 percent, so being burned out just feels like the norm. My favorite study on this topic asked surgeons to complete a wellbeing measure, then asked them how they thought they did compared to national norms. Nearly 71 percent of those who scored in the bottom 30 percent thought their wellness was at or above average.

What does that mean? Well, someone in the bottom 30 percent can look over, see that their coworker isn’t sleeping either, and conclude that must be average. They can then glance at the next cubicle, see a coworker crying twice a week instead of once, and conclude they themselves must be killing it.

But just because our workplaces normalize not eating, not sleeping and high rates of burnout doesn’t make any of that good. It does, however, make it hard to know if what we’re feeling is something we shouldn’t just accept. We begin to wonder, “Isn’t this just what work is?”

Even further, if we do decide something is wrong and want to do something about it, it somehow then becomes our fault. We feel like we can’t complain because everyone else is burned out too and isn’t saying anything. We don’t want to stand out (who does in academia?) or admit we need help, because we don’t want to be “that person.” Instead, we beat ourselves up for feeling badly in the first place.

To understand our workplace culture more, I spoke with Kristen Black, Guerry associate professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. I asked whether hard work has become such a badge of honor in higher ed that we now see burnout itself as “good.”

“‘Good’ and ‘normal’ are two related but different ways to characterize burnout,” she replied. “Is it to some extent normalized? I think so. We often thrive on having too much to do and not enough time to do it. Some in higher ed may even be tempted to be proud of their ability to overwork. I think at our core, we know it is not healthy or good to work in a state of burnout, but because of how normal it is, we can inadvertently glamorize it.”

She added this is even easier in fields where we’re passionate about our work. A sense of “calling” can cut both ways. So, instead of treating burnout as enviable and inevitable, what do we actually do about it?

A few things Black and I suggest:

1. Ask yourself how you’re doing regularly and track it: No one is going to notice the subtle changes in you, except you. Falling asleep every day after work is already too far down the burnout path. Notice instead when you start getting angrier at emails because you can’t take on one more task, like I do, or when you don’t want to cook, not because you don’t want to, but because you have zero capacity left for it. If you can clock yourself at a three out of 10 instead of a 10 out of 10, or in the yellow or orange zone, instead of red in this chart, what you’ll need to do to cope is very different than if you wait until you’re spent. We’re talking going for a run versus a psychiatrist and FMLA.
2. Support each other in balancing it all: Burnout prevention means matching your resources to your demands. Black explained that in the workplace, we can do a better job checking in with each other and ourselves on that balance. She added, “We can be challenged at work and engaged, while not depleted. We can also encourage one another and personally build better habits that keep our resource supply full.” Resources to Black can be everything from supportive relationships to using job autonomy to make your schedule fit how you best work, to personal resources like sleep or breaks. These are all consistent with studies that tie autonomy, flexibility and social support to lower burnout.
3. Look for meaning and protect it: Another definition of burnout is a mismatch between what you expect from your work and what you actually experience doing it. Say you become a doctor to help people and instead spend most of your day on notes and insurance calls. That gap, which is really a lack of meaning, is often where burnout comes from. Purposefully protecting meaningful work is key. Don’t stack all your energy-draining activities back-to-back, but balance them with something refueling in between. Don’t say “yes,” or “no,” to a task until you evaluate whether it might be a source of meaning. It can be tempting when you are burned out to say “no” to everything, but often that just leaves you with the mandatory tasks from your boss. More things are not always bad, if they are the right things.
4. Reward healthy workplace cultures, not just overwork: Too many workplaces reward doing more and sacrificing personal time as the model for getting ahead. I know I dive into work to avoid big feelings, get praised for it, and do it again until I can’t. I know I’m not alone in that. As Black put it: “Think about the last awards ceremony you went to related to work. Was anyone praised for their well-balanced life? Or were lists of accomplishments and projects rattled off that make you wonder if the person ever sleeps? While there are certainly exceptions of some really positive and healthy work environments, I think many higher ed employees experience this same type of social environment, where getting ahead almost requires toeing the line of burning out.” Rewards and praise can be shifted, though. Like a sticker chart for taking care of you, instead of taking yourself out.
5. Say it all out loud: The way to change culture is to be vulnerable as a person, and transparent as an organization. This is the hill I die on. Modeling from one leader is contagious to their team, which is contagious to an organization. It is possible to not just spread burnout and overwork, but to spread wellness and hope, too.

Of course, individual or team changes won’t fix everything. Black emphasized, “Burnout is not just an individual problem. You cannot mindfully meditate yourself out of the demands of an 80-hour work week. Organizational leaders that control and contextualize the everyday workload have a responsibility to help workers not burn out through the structure and design of work.”

We need better work environments from the top, from people in roles like mine, but that takes time. For now, we can control the culture we endorse. If higher ed admits that burnout is not an aspirational goal, we’ll stop powering through and start building cultures of prevention and recovery. Together, we can make taking care of ourselves the norm.