Understanding Burnout (Part 1)

An Epidemic of Burnout is Only a Few Steps Away

This is part 1 of a three-part posting on burnout: its nature, its causes, how modern management is exacerbating the problem, and how best to avoid it altogether.

Recently, I found a lengthy, but extremely thorough, article on burnout in the New York magazine. The author, Jennifer Senior, explains burnout as more a feeling of hopelessness than a classic sense of being stressed or overtired. I suspect that is right. Burnout is something like writer’s block: a feeling that whatever you do—however hard you work and however much you appear to achieve on the outside—none of it means anything, or has any real worth. It’s a sense of withdrawal and distancing from things you once found absorbing; to the extent that, after a while, you can scarcely bring yourself to do anything more than “go through the motions,” and sometimes not even that.

Psychotherapist Herbert Freudenberger, who first coined the term, noticed that when people became too discouraged, they would often push harder and harder at their jobs, only to feel as if they were achieving less and less. Not only do people suffering from burnout become mentally exhausted, they develop severe cases of cynicism and contempt for whatever they were doing that led to the burnout. I have felt the same things myself, in the past: a feeling that whatever I did wouldn’t make the slightest difference; and that the rest of the world was largely composed of idiots too self-obsessed and shallow to care about my work anyway.

Many sufferers from burnout are perfectionists, for whom anything less than winning in some truly spectacular way is tantamount to failure. I suspect they may be specially prone to the condition, not just because they tend to deal with any setback by throwing all they have into harder and harder work, but because they cannot accept the reality that much of the world is apathetic towards them anyway.



Hyper-extended expectations are the starting point of most cases of burnout. When impossible expectations collide with reality, something has to give. At first, people try to overcome reality by excessive work and effort. When that fails, they still cannot bring themselves to admit that their original expectations were little better than childish fantasy. Instead, they blame the organization, the people they must deal with, the f****ing bosses, idiot customers, or just about anyone else for their condition. It’s a short step from there to deciding none of it matters and experiencing the sense of hopeless emptiness and weariness that characterizes true burnout.

I wonder how common burnout really is? Just as many people claim to be suffering from the 'flu (quite a serious disease), when what they have is a heavy cold, I suspect that many cases of burnout are closer to simple mental exhaustion. Burnout isn’t necessarily caused by long hours or overwork. They are more the symptoms of people’s efforts to counter the anxiety and bad feelings that burnout induces. If a week’s holiday, or easing up for a few days, is enough to restore your equilibrium, you weren’t suffering from burnout. You were just overtired.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this post with part 2 and a listing of the factors in modern management that most contribute to burnout and the pain it causes.

Technorati tags: burnout stress workplace exhaustion slow leadership