03 January 2024
Burnout is said to be the defining feeling of the post-pandemic world – but why are we all so exhausted? Some of us struggle with perfectionism, while others are simply overwhelmed by the demands of modern life. But whatever you’re feeling, you are not alone – and this liberating, enlightening guide to exhaustion in all its forms will help you find the energy to beat burnout and weariness.
From confronting our inner critics to how our desire to be productive stops us from being free, Anna Katherina Schaffner, cultural historian and burnout coach, brings together science, medicine, literature and philosophy to explore the causes and history of exhaustion and burnout, revealing new ways to combat stress and negativity. Exhausted is an inspiring A–Z guide to getting control of your own exhaustion, and rediscovering happiness along the way.
Read an extract from Exhausted below.
B is for Burnout
The key symptoms of burnout are exhaustion in the form of a deep kind of fatigue that isn’t curable by resting. This state tends to be accompanied by a very negative assessment of the value of our work, and resentment of the people with whom we work and the organisations in which we are embedded. When we are burnt out, we may also experience brain fog and an inability to concentrate. We may suffer from insomnia or restlessness, we may drink too much, be prone to procrastinating and engage in endless displacement activities. We often become increasingly unable to do the work we are expected to do, and may feel a great sense of shame about our inability to perform as we used to. In cases of very serious burnout, we may even suffer a full-scale nervous breakdown and suddenly become completely unable to function at work and perhaps also in other areas of our lives.
Today, everyone is talking about burnout. This is partly because the popular consensus on what burnout is has become ever looser. It is a welcoming metaphor, allowing people to project all kinds of agendas onto the term. Recently, burnout statistics have gone through the roof. What is going on? Why has burnout become so ubiquitous? Are we really more exhausted and depleted than ever before, or do we just talk about it more?
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There is no doubt that the twenty-first-century world of work entails unique psycho-social and economic stressors. Many of them are perfidious. The demands of neo-liberal competition and the growth imperative, which is based on maximising profit and optimising resource extraction at all costs, come at a price. As do email and social media, which make some things easier and many others much harder – and our constant availability means it is much more difficult to escape the things that cause us distress. While our attention spans have shrunk, our loneliness levels have increased. Because we are constantly connected and reachable, the boundaries between work and leisure have become more porous than ever, with work constantly bleeding into our mental, digital and physical spaces. Moreover, most of the tech we use at work and at home is designed to make us addicted to it, and new technology in particular has had a significant negative impact on our mental health. Finally, economic uncertainty and the threat of climate change, as well as pandemics and war, have made many of us feel very anxious. We are constantly exposed to upsetting news, and yet have very few practical means of taking action on the key issues of our day. Although our ancestors, too, struggled with exhaustion, there can be no doubt that we live in particularly fast-changing, complex and worrying times.
And yet, strange as it might seem, burnout is a diagnosis that also has positive connotations – like the ‘fashionable diseases’ of the past, melancholia and neurasthenia, a nineteenth-century forerunner of burnout that was based on the notion of nervous weakness. Melancholia was firmly aligned with creativity, scholarship and genius, while neurasthenia was associated with brain work, sensitivity and an artistic constitution. Burnout is, in part at least, a similarly heroic diagnosis, worn by some as a badge of honour. Being burnt out signifies that we have given everything, and more, to work. The burnt out literally take work deadly seriously. They are in constant demand, highly important and extremely conscientious. They care. They take on responsibility – more than they can carry. They always help out. They are not shirkers. They are not losers. In fact, research suggests that a very large percentage of the burnt out are former winners and high-flyers.
This does not mean that I wish to diminish the suffering we feel when we burn out. Nor is being in that state in any way a cakewalk. It is not. For many of my clients, burnout is an existential threat, forcing them completely to re-evaluate their lives, and often to abandon the careers for which they spent years preparing. What makes burnout so dangerous is that it traps us in a no-man’s land where we can neither work nor allow ourselves to rest. Many of us feel tremendous shame and guilt about burning out – very much the opposite of feeling heroic. My point is simply that burnout is a diagnosis that comes with some cultural validation and even status. It bears, for example, less stigma than depression and other mental health conditions. And this is the case because our culture validates work, and working hard, and, to a certain extent at least, looks kindly on those who are wounded in the battlefield of work. Being burnt out also means to be a victim of the values of our age. And there is some solace and community to be found in that.
But what can we actually do when we are burnt out? How can we heal? I continue to be struck by the paradox that looms so large at the heart of the debates: the happiness industry pushes individual coping strategies, while research shows that in the vast majority of cases, it is our working environments that are making us sick. The burnout researchers Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter identify six main factors causing burnout in organisations: excessive workload, insufficient autonomy, inadequate rewards, breakdown of community, mismatch of values and unfairness.9 When we experience any of these at work, we are much more likely to burn out. A growing number of healthcare professionals argue that burnout should be reconceived as ‘moral injury’, that it is a result of unbridgeable value clashes, ethical dilemmas and continuous violations of our dignity at work.
The World Health Organization clearly defines burnout as an occupational health condition, not a mental health issue. But even the WHO’s definition of burnout is troubled by what I call the ‘burnout paradox’: ‘Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.’ This sounds accusatory, putting the onus on the sufferer, blaming, in essence, the burnt out for their bad stress management skills. What might ‘successful management’ of chronic stress even look like? There is an undeniable tension between conceptions of the role of external structures and personal agency. What can we really do, then, to counteract occupational burnout, other than leaving our jobs or radically reforming our workplaces – both of which are not realistic options in most cases? It is, first and foremost, the organisations that cause their staff to burn out that need coaching and training, not their burnt out employees.
When in the grips of burnout, then, we need to be very discerning about what is and what isn’t our personal responsibility. Part of what makes burnout so intractable and difficult to treat is precisely that it is mostly a result of structural forces. But that insight alone can be healing: by recognising the social factors of burnout that aren’t our fault, rather than seeing it as an inherent failure of our own (or as a badge of honour), we can begin to take back some power for ourselves.
