Burnout is a form of emotional exhaustion, often (but not always) related to work. When emotional demands are too high for an individual, burnout may result.
Burnout is not always understood or taken seriously, but if left unmanaged, it may lead to significant health issues. It is best to take action as soon as you notice a problem.
In this blog, Ann Todd explains what burnout is, how it differs from normal workplace stress, who is more likely to suffer from burnout, and how to prevent or recover from it.
Table of Contents:
- Understanding the Difference between Burnout and Stress
- Why People Burnout
- Typical Causes of Burnout
- Who Is Most Vulnerable to Burnout?
- What Are the Symptoms of Burnout?
- What to Do About Burnout
- How to Recover from Burnout
- What Happens if Burnout Is Left Unmanaged?
Understanding the Difference between Burnout and Stress
Workplace stress and burnout are related, but they are not the same.
Stress is a normal part of life, and for many people, a reasonable amount of stress is motivating – the predictable stress of learning new skills, the excitement of a project that requires focus, hard work and which is successful. Stress may be characterised by pressure, urgency and temporary over-engagement. It is when the stress becomes overwhelming, or chronic, combined with a lack of emotional support, that it may veer towards burnout.
Burnout, by contrast, is characterised by depletion. Reduced energy, reduced motivation, and often a sense of emotional detachment and sometimes physical withdrawal.
Why do People ‘Burnout’?
Burnout develops when there is a lack of balance between the emotional expenditure made at work or in personal life, and the regeneration of those emotional resources. Demands from work AND home may combine to an overwhelming level. It is a form of emotional deficit and a gradual process.
Typical Causes of Burnout
Burnout rarely stems from a single source. It typically builds from a combination of sustained workplace pressure and the demands of life outside work, particularly where there is insufficient emotional support, too little time or space to recover.
Typical Workplace Causes
- High, sustained, emotionally demanding workload
- Lack of control over work or decision-making
- Insufficient recognition or reward
- Conflicting demands or unclear expectations
- Unrealistic targets
- An emotionally unsafe or bullying work culture.
Other Causes of Burnout
Burnout is not limited to the workplace. It may also develop from pressures beyond work, including social and environmental factors that many people don’t question. These may include internalised expectations about living standards, about your expected career path, about the ‘shoulds’ of life you may have internalised perhaps from your upbringing and perhaps social media. Being fully ’performative’ feeling pressured to deliver perfection across every aspect of our lives, may simply prove exhausting.
Changes in our family and personal lives inevitably impact our relationship with work:
- Travelling for business most days every week becomes less attractive when it interferes with family life or finding a partner.
- A partner, relative or child falling seriously ill is emotionally demanding and also changes our focus.
- A parent needing more care as they age may make working, changing shift patterns, or even full-time work, untenable.
- Developing significant illness ourselves, such as addiction, heart disease, and chronic diseases, forces us to think about why, where and how we work.
Who Is Most Vulnerable to Burnout?
Burnout is particularly common in roles where building an empathic connection to individuals is a core part of the job and includes advisory roles, team leadership and sales.
It is also more likely in sectors where ’clients’ may have multiple hard-to-resolve issues, or improvement is impossible or really difficult to achieve.
Vulnerable Roles
High emotional demands are made of people in business:
- When they lead a team.
- When they are entrepreneurs or leading a business startup.
- Customer-facing roles.
- High-pressure sales roles
- When they are negotiators.
- When they work as part of a high-pressure team or a new team.
- They are establishing a new product or company
- When they deliver emotional support services,
- When they are called on to close departments or teams
- When they are repeatedly called upon to dismiss, demote or disappoint staff (pay or promotion expectations).
Vulnerable & High-Risk Sectors
There are high levels of burnout in sectors such as medicine, mental health services, social work, and the prison service.
Education is also a risk area, where staff are dealing with developing young people of all backgrounds and abilities, and their parents. Staff may also be conflicted between the delivery of prescribed curriculum, organisational targets and their own caring values.
Charities and social enterprises present a different set of pressures to ‘with profit’ companies (and vice versa) as a charity founder or CEO is often driven by the mission, with colleagues similarly enthusiastic about clients and outcomes. The emotional load that staff carry may be expected or considered normal. Even large, apparently more professional charities may take the emotional goodwill of employees for granted.
Vulnerable & High Risk Individuals
Whatever the job role or sector, some individual characteristics and life stages make people more at risk.
Individuals more at risk include:
- Those who are recently promoted
- New hires into high-stress positions.
- Entrepreneurs, particularly solo entrepreneurs.
- Those who are socially isolated.
- Those who lack a supportive work network.
- Those whose home life suddenly changes, perhaps through bereavement, partnership breakdown, having children, or becoming carers.
- Those who suffer a change in their health status – be it pregnancy, menopause, heart disease, or significant depression.
- Those who have difficulty setting and maintaining emotional boundaries, perhaps tending to take the client’s distress ‘home’, or accepting an ever-increasing workload, or managing subordinates who delegate upwards.
- Those who tend to work harder (longer hours) rather than smarter (reflect and change approach), when confronted with difficulty.
- Those who are more extroverted and need validation from those they work with.
- Those who work in an emotionally unsupportive culture.
- Those who have pre-existing health conditions, including mental health conditions such as anxiety and OCD.
What Are the Symptoms of Burnout?
Burnout symptoms present differently in different people; below, we begin with the emotional, where it typically makes itself known.
Emotional Symptoms of Burnout
- Being unable to stop thinking about work or switch off.
- Loss of empathy for, and patience with, a client, staff and colleagues.
- Feeling always needed at work. Believing that the team, production or delivery will stop without you.
- Strong feelings of anxiety before going into work or when you think about work.
- Feelings of hopelessness about the client and the utility of your work.
- Feeling paranoid that bosses and colleagues are conspiring against you.
- Having no time for friends or family away from work.
- Lack of motivation (enthusiasm) that continues even after you’ve taken a break.
Physical Symptoms of Burnout
- Being tired all the time
- Visible stress illness such as eczema, psoriasis, headaches, nausea, insomnia (etc.).
- Low-level depression (feeling sad, feeling ‘flat’).
- Invisible stress influenced illnesses such as heart disease, longer or deeper lasting depression.
Behavioural & Cognitive Signs of Burnout
- Avoiding work, avoiding colleagues.
- Being uninterested in, difficulty learning or retaining new ideas.
- Forgetfulness – forgetting key tasks, meetings or even social events.
- Moving very quickly into defensive responses – such as flaring up, avoidance, and zoning out.
- Lack of productivity – despite putting in long hours.
- Using compensating behaviour or self-prescribed solutions such as over- or under-eating, using drugs and/or drink, upping the amount you smoke/vape.
What to Do About Burnout
Burnout is, at its core, a form of emotional deficit. Recovering from it, and protecting yourself against it, comes down to restoring balance between what you are giving out and what you are getting back.
Handling burnout is not about pushing through or simply resting for a weekend.
With the right support, strategies and psychological safety, recovery is possible. It also builds resilience and the skills to prevent it from reoccurring.
How to Prevent Burnout
To prevent burnout, it is important to reflect regularly on what is not working in your role before symptoms develop.
- Before starting any new job, check what support the organisation provides.
- Avoid organisations that deliver emotional work if they do not provide appropriate support.
- Use the Occupational Health (OH) and therapy services provided by your organisation when they are available and confidential.
- Build your own support network when one doesn’t exist internally.
- Work with an independent professional mentor/coach to provide a safe, reflective space. This can help to significantly reduce your emotional workload.
- Be aware that highly driven or competitive individuals may not recognise or be interested in your emotional loading, and like supervisors who pass senior management pressure directly to their reports, they often prove challenging to work for.
It is always OK to change direction in your career. It is always OK to walk away from a role that you find overwhelmingly stressful and may be harming your health.
How to Recover from Burnout
Recovery from work burnout requires both rest and reflection on both your career direction and professional life. Sometimes life forces us to do this, such as becoming a parent, having a health issue, or being dismissed or made redundant from a job. Sometimes we realise that the job or the organisation just doesn’t fit us, and that endlessly trying to hit impossible targets or meet a performance improvement plan is pointless.
It’s important to:
- Reassess what matters to you at this particular time in your life.
- Review the balance between work and home to make sure it is right.
- Identify what you can let go of or minimise.
How Long Does It Take to Recover from Burnout?
Recovery from burnout is different for everyone. It depends upon:
- How vulnerable you are to start with. More complex mental health issues complicate recovery.
- How much emotional support you have in your home life. Having a confidential friend to talk to is important.
- How much emotional support you have at work. Confidential Occupational Health and therapy services are often helpful.
- How long the symptoms have been left unaddressed. Longer to address generally means longer to recover.
- How much change is required to re-establish balance. Entrenched habits take a while to change, and change is harder when we are exhausted.
However long recovery takes, the good news is that it strengthens individuals. They emerge knowing their priorities, usually with better boundary management, often more empathic and with significant life experience that frequently feeds their next steps, sometimes onto new paths that they find more rewarding.
What Happens if Burnout Is Left Unmanaged?
If burnout is not addressed, it may lead to:
- Exhaustion, including ‘nervous exhaustion’ or significant depression.
- Physical illnesses such as heart disease, alongside more minor ailments such as colds and flu as the body and immune system are impacted by constant negative stress. Also, eczema, psoriasis, and insomnia are associated issues resulting from constant worry.
- Breakdown of close family relationships because it is hard to be with someone who is consumed by distress, and who has no energy for the give and take of relationships. The impact on your children and teens may be severe if you have no emotional availability to be involved with them or have become very reactive. Partners may not recognise the person you have become, and some may not feel they want to stay.
- Loss of income and career progression as an organisation pushes you out for underperforming, or being ‘difficult to work with’ as you lose enthusiasm or become more emotionally reactive (or ‘flat’). You may lose sector networking opportunities as you lack interest in and energy for them.
- Social isolation as friends fall away as you are too busy or emotionally drained for them, and when you do meet, you lack energy.
Final Thoughts
What we are able to contribute to work changes as we go through life, depending on our health and circumstances. It is wise to seek an overall balance between the emotional demands of how we make our living and our other obligations in order to avoid burnout.
Try to regularly reflect on your priorities at every life stage. Whilst such life choices might feel difficult, becoming ill doesn’t help you, your loved ones, or even colleagues, as you then become unreliable or demotivated. Hiring a coach to support you through this process is sensible.
Organisations are competitive spaces. Not everyone progresses to higher-status or higher-paid positions. Management and leadership roles are of themselves demanding in terms of skill sets, time and emotional competence. Not every manager is emotionally supportive, and some companies run on stress and adrenaline. These may be fun in our 20s and 30s, but much less appropriate as our lives change. Technology and markets change ever more quickly, new bosses demand new ways of working, we need to constantly upskill: sometimes what we thought our career would be is not realisable. It’s good to think about a Plan B.
Life itself is often challenging, not an airbrushed performative social media post. Sometimes our home life places significant demands upon us, and we have little choice but to respond to them. These demands may make us unsuitable employees, but with thought, we often find more rewarding paths to follow into new areas that renew us.
Changing your mind about the role, the organisation or how you want to spend your life is always OK. Book an introductory call with Ann to discuss your issues and get started
Think you might be burning out? It may be worth a conversation
If you are relating to this article, book an introductory call with Ann to talk things through. You don’t have to sort this out on your own.