Defining Burnout, it’s Symptoms, Causes, and the Burnout Cycle
What is Burnout?
Burnout is a relatively newly-defined phenomenon. This means that it doesn’t have a ton of consensus around what it is, or isn’t. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, burnout is defined as “physical, emotional or mental exhaustion, accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance and negative attitudes towards oneself and others.”
The initial definition that most sources cite is the World Health Organization, who defined burnout in 2019 as specifically a work-related condition. It’s not a medical condition, you can’t be diagnosed with burnout, and according to WHO, only people at work get burned out. (Insert eyeroll emoji)
Though it can’t be a diagnosis, it does have a ICD-11 code and definition as an “occupational phenomenon.” Instead it is considered to be something that influences health or causes people to contact the doctor, but it’s not really a condition. Something tells me that in the era of late stage capitalism and the fact that burning out resources seems to be a business model… this might get an upgrade in coming years.
What are the Symptoms of Burnout?
However, the WHO does have a good, systematic list of symptoms of burnout.
The symptoms of burnout are:
- Emotional exhaustion
- Checking out – distancing oneself from work
- Reduced work quality (doubting abilities, and not doing as well, making more mistakes)
- Hopelessness
- Sleep and body disturbances
- Possible substance use
If you read this list above and think that that sounds an awful lot like clinical depression, you’d be right. Generally speaking, burnout is only in specific areas of life, while depression impacts everything.
While you may not have energy for hobbies while you’re burned out, you don’t derive pleasure from them when you’re depressed. Depression includes low self-esteem and feelings of guilt or shame that don’t generally come with burnout.
If you’re trying to determine whether you’re burned out or depressed, I urge you to try talking to a mental health professional.
However, I do patently disagree with the WHO’s restriction of burnout to an “occupational phenomenon” that “shouldn’t be used to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
WHY NOT?
Burnout does not happen in a vacuum. A burned out person at work is also a person who is doing too many things at home. A burned out caregiver or parent is likely a burned out person at work. We aren’t automatons.
And since there are a series of personality attributes that make us more susceptible to burning out, why on earth wouldn’t a person burn out in more than one area of their lives? In this, Psychology Today agrees with me. Their definition is “a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. Though it’s most often caused by problems at work, it can also appear in other areas of life, such as parenting, caretaking, or romantic relationships.”
Who is more susceptible to burnout?
Studies show that there are certain personality attributes that make a person more susceptible to burn out. Generally speaking, at your workplace these tend to be the Rockstar employees.
Personality Types that are Prone to Burn Out are:
- Type A – driven, ambitious, goal-oriented personalities
- People-pleasers (particularly those afraid to say “no”)
- Perfectionists
- People who struggle to enforce personal boundaries
I would add to this list that people who are neurodivergent are also prone to burning out, though autistic burnout and ADHD burnout are actually a different form of the problem.
These personality attributes might describe someone prone to burnout, but they also describe your middle managers, your team leads, and the best people at your workplace. The people who can move mountains.
The problem here is that as businesses reduce resources, these people are asked to do even more with less help, and because they are people-pleasers, they do their best to make it happen, even if it’s not healthy or possible.
The fact is that we have to give up some of these elements of our personalities and ways of working in order to truly break out of the burnout cycle.
While there are personality elements that can exacerbate or create situations that lead to burnout, in reality, burnout is a sign of an unhealthy workplace and a need for systemic change within the employer’s processes and standards.
Company Cultures That Cause Burnout
In this article in Harvard Business Review, the author breaks down the myth that the idea of burnout is an individual problem. Many start-ups tend to see burnout as a sign that the individual “couldn’t take the heat” or “couldn’t hack the pressure” when in fact, the company itself was a major contributing factor to the burning out of its employees.
While being under-challenged and under-utilized at work can also lead to burnout, that’s a rare edge case.
Attributes of Company Culture that Burn Out Employees:
- Unmanageable workload and unreasonable deadlines – most people associate overwork and overload with burnout
- Competition – a cutthroat atmosphere rather than going for a “win-win”
- Unfairness – a sense of feeling unappreciated, or seeing that some people are treated differently than others
- Lack of meaningful work – This is perhaps the most personal of these elements, however by ensuring that wins and successes are tied meaningfully back to company goals, management can help with this as well.
- Lack of clarity, lack of documentation, and confusing responsibilities – it can be overwhelming to try to make up a job without clarity.
- Lack of onboarding or training
- Lack of communication or support from management
- Culture of no boundaries – 24/7 availability is expected
I have created a training for managers who want to help prevent employee burnout. This focuses on a number of these elements of workplace burnout.
What are the Stages of Burnout?
The defined stages of burnout vary depending upon the model, and I find that most of these models only cover the “fire” stage of burnout, and not a path to recovery.
The original 12 stages defined by North and Fruedenberger are descriptive of the micro steps in what I describe as “fire” of burnout:
- Compulsive Ambition: “I must prove myself”
- Working Harder: “I must do more”
- Neglecting Needs: “I don’t have time for that”
- Avoiding Conflict: “Nothing is wrong”
- Revising Values: “This is more important”
- Denying Problems: “The problem is others”
- Withdrawal: “I need time alone”
- Concerning Others: “I’m fine, stop worrying”
- Depersonalisaiton: “I just need to make it through today”
- Sense of Emptiness: “I don’t feel much anymore”
- Depression: “Nothing really matters”
- Final Stage of Burnout: “I can’t go on”
This list does get into the “Flood” stage in the later steps, but it doesn’t carry you through into recovery or prevention.
Another model is by Miller and Smith, which simplifies it to 6 stages, but these are also flawed.
- Honeymoon phase is the first few months of most people’s employment
- Awakening phase “onset of stress”
- Brownout phase “chronic stress”
- Full-scale burnout
- Habitual burnout phase
- The Phoenix phenomenon
The “phoenix” phase is particularly concerning, because the description is as follows: “If individuals suffering from burnout syndromes have access to rest, stress management, or medical therapy to help them find a solution to the problem, including modifying their way of thinking positively and balancing work and life, they will be able to return to work and life with renewed energy.”
The problem with the Miller and Smith model is threefold:
- It blames the employee not the whole situation
- It says that “rest, stress management, and therapy” will help them get out of burnout
- It does not acknowledge the rest of the burnout cycle.
The stages of the Wildfire burnout cycle offered in Burnout Recovery are more holistic than either of these models. They are:
- Fire – “Fire” stage is when boundaries are violated, when the symptoms of stress and burnout appear. This is an angry stage of feeling overloaded.
- Flood – “Flooding” is when we have to grieve the person we were prior to burnout, and let go of that way of being. It’s a sad, more depressed stage, so many people skip it.
- Regrowth – the process of “Regrowth” is when you start to feel like yourself again. It’s slow. It takes a long time. But it’s still hopeful and full of curiosity.
- Prevention – Finally, we have to prevent ourselves from cycling back into burnout again in the future. This takes communication, planning, and self-assessment.
What do you mean by “Burnout Cycling?”
Burnout cycling is the phenomenon that once a person has burned out, they are more likely to get burned out again – and often it will take less stress and a shorter amount of time for that to occur.
Things that lead to burnout cycling include:
- No major change in the management or approach to this person’s employment or responsibilities (e.g. no additional resources, no reassignment of responsibilities, etc)
- The person “ends” their burnout by taking the smallest steps of self-care (such as a vacation or therapy) without looking at the deeper root causes. (This often is the case when a person leaves one job due to burnout, only to get burned out again at another workplace).
- Failure to change the root causes of the burnout on both the part of the individual and the business will inevitably cause the person to burn out again.
As the text of Burnout Recovery makes clear, we do not need to continue burnout cycling forever. This is a way of being, and a series of circumstances that we can stop. It’s a cycle we can escape.
Leave a Reply