Burnout: What is it and why do I have it?

What is burnout?

It’s hard to describe, but you probably know what it feels like.

If you Google “burnout,” it’ll be hard to find a clear, consistent answer.  Burnout is not yet a diagnosable medical condition or psychological disorder, so there’s a lack of clarity around what should be a common definition:  

• A post on WebMD proposes that it’s a type of exhaustion resulting from being overwhelmed.  

• A Mayo Clinic article describes it as a form of stress.  

• An article on Psychology Today claims that burnout is mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion resulting from stress.   

Poring over academic research literature dating back fifty years further muddies everything. 

But what does emerge is one consistent theme: burnout stems from emotional depletion.

An Example:

Imagine you wake up and your first instinct is to grab your phone from your nightstand to check for messages that came in overnight.  There are five. Two are marked urgent, and one is an empty client email except for the subject line that reads “Call me.”  Trickle of fear.  So begins your day. 

You feel a gut drop and wonder if you missed something.  Determining that no, it’s just a pushy client, you feel annoyed and maybe a bit of despair at their long term engagement with your practice.  

Later on you flip through your calendar comparing your meetings with the list of drop-dead deadlines that are either close of business today or later in the week.  A wave of anxiety laps at you, maybe some dread in there too. 

Halfway through a day of progress, interruptions, and setbacks, you finally have a couple hours for focused productivity.  A huge stack of work that you’ve done a thousand times before for another drop-in-the-bucket case that will only be noticed if something goes awry stares up at you.  Despair, frustration, anxiety. 

Hours pass and a boon graces your office.  You can justifiably leave at 5 and the world’s your oyster.  But all you want to do is collapse on the couch and passively let screens watch you.  

Multiply this by days, weeks, months, or years and you accumulate an emotional debt. Once that debt reaches a point where it can’t be paid, we arrive at burnout.

How did I burn out?

There is research support for the idea that instead of stress alone, burnout is “the end result of a process of emotional attrition” (Malach-Pines, 2004, p. 66).  As with any issue of attrition, two considerations are (1) your rate of recovery and (2) your rate of depletion.  If your depletion rate exceeds your recovery rate, burnout becomes a matter of time. 

Understanding Rate of Recovery

Recovery rate is highly personal.  An overarching, consistent factor is what gives the individual a sense of meaning and significance, and to what extent are they able to pursue those things in their lives.  Indeed, “the root cause of burnout lies in people’s need to believe that their lives are meaningful . . . [w]hen they feel that they have failed [in this way,] that their work is meaningless, that they make no difference in the world—they start feeling helpless and hopeless and eventually burn out.” (Malach-Pines, 2004, p. 67).

It’s not enough to make more money or to take time off. If none of it matters, you will still struggle to recover properly.

In contrast, feeling a sense of significance or something akin to it enables you to sustainably persevere (Caputo, 2020, p. 140).  To the extent you are able to incorporate this feeling into your life at work or at home, you are better able to restore your capacity to feel, and therefore your capacity to engage.

Understanding Rate of Depletion

Consider the idea that every emotion takes energy to experience.  Feeling sadness, anger, fear, and even happiness and all variants in between is taxing.  Also consider the idea that the duration of each emotion is indefinite except for happiness, which is inherently (and unfortunately) temporary.  As with the example above, if you have been going full bore all day, you leave little left for anything else. 

When your capacity to feel is depleted, your motivation and ability to engage become depleted as well.

Some of the other definitions cited above talk about stress, but stress itself is not necessarily a bad thing.  Stress is motivating.  Feeling stressed about a thing makes it important to you, so you prioritize it. If you never felt stress about anything, it’d be hard to believe that unpleasant and difficult things are important, or to experience satisfaction upon achieving an accomplishment.  

But how you manage that stress will absolutely impact your depletion rate and therefore your risk of burnout.  If you wake up thinking about a stressor that makes you scared, spend time with your family thinking about the stressor that makes you scared, and plow through work thinking about the stressor that makes you scared, at the end of the day you chew up a huge amount of energy in the aggregate experiencing an emotion that may not do anything for you. 

So consider whether the extent to which you think, behave, and feel exaggerates your daily emotional costs.  Do your reactions serve you well and help you overcome your problems?  Does the frequency with which your stressors occur to you advance you towards a resolution? 

Finally, a definition.

Burnout is a persistent condition of low engagement resulting from a prolonged period of emotional depletion.

If you are burning through more resources than you are able to generate, the price will be paid at some point.  Sheer strength of will, stubbornness, discipline, and commitment can carry individuals through times of desperate scarcity and extend the deadline, but eventually the bill comes due.  You owe yourself a long, prosperous, engaging life and career, and focusing on what gives you meaning and managing your costs will absolutely be worth the effort. 

If you need help with this, I encourage you to reach out.

References

Caputo, A., Fregonese, C., & Langher, V. (2020). The effectiveness of psychodynamic career counselling: A randomised control trial on the PICS programme. Psychodynamic Practice, 26(2), 136–165.

Malach-Pines, A. (2004). Adult attachment styles and their relationship to burnout: A preliminary, cross-cultural investigation. Work & Stress, 18(1), 66–80.