What is burnout?

This is the first in a series of videos about burnout. In this series, I’ll give you the definition of burnout, statistics, and the causes of burnout. I’ll let you know the risk factors and the signs of burnout, the 5-stages of burnout, how to prevent burnout, and if you’ve burnt yourself out, I’ll let you know how to recover from burnout.

Today, in video 1, we will look at the definition of burnout and touch upon what causes burnout.

Definition of burnout

Burnout is defined as 1) Overwhelming exhaustion, 2) A lack of enthusiasm and increased negativity and cynicism towards your job, 3) a decreased ability to perform your job, and 4) cognitive impairment.

Often, burnout can result in depressive symptoms, such as sadness or a lack of hope. It can lead to many negative emotions, such as frustration, anger, irritability, anxiety, and agitation. There might also be physical feelings of stress, such as headaches, stomach issues, body pains, insomnia and heart palpitations. Burnout can also increase your potential for abusing alcohol, drugs, or food.

In the following video, we will dive deeper into the causes of burnout and what predicts burnout.

Burnout is more of a problem than ever before. If you or your team are suffering from burnout, I provide workshops and programs for organisations and one-on-one coaching for individuals suffering from stress and burnout. My sessions cover mindset, breathing and productivity tools to manage stress and burnout in healthy ways. You can make an appointment to speak to me here.

Work-related burnout is a significant problem for the economy. Deloitte’s 2015 Workplace Burnout Survey observed that 77% of US professionals had experienced burnout at some point in their lives. 

In 2018, Gallup got similar results. A quarter of workers felt burned out very often or always, and an additional 44% felt burned out occasionally. 

Now, since covid, rates of burnout appear to be rising, especially since many companies have had to cut staff, with the remaining workers often required to “do more with less” and often encouraged to be online and available for longer than they have been in the past. Add to that the increase of hybrid working and many more workers working from home. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 37% of employees report working more now than before COVID. 

So what is burnout?

I’m a stress and burnout coach, and while burnout includes many of the same symptoms as stress, I look for three specific feelings that differentiate burnout from stress:

1) Overwhelming exhaustion

2) A lack of enthusiasm and increased negativity and cynicism towards your job, and;

3) a decreased ability to perform your job.

Gordon Parker has added one more, a cognitive impairment.

Often, burnout can result in depressive symptoms, such as sadness or a lack of hope, it did in my case, but it can also lead to a whole load of negative emotions and even physical symptoms, such as Frustration, anger, Irritability or annoyance, Anxiety, agitation… and Physical feelings of stress, such as headaches, stomach issues, body pains, insomnia and heart palpitations. It can also increase your potential for abusing alcohol, drugs, or food.

And I can fully relate. When I was burning out, I felt physically and emotionally exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. I was cynical, detached from reality, and almost paranoid, thinking that none of my employees or partners cared about me or the business, and I felt like I’d lost about 30 IQ points. I just wasn’t able to think clearly or make decisions like I used to be able to. I was waking up in the middle of the night with heart palpitations, taking prescription meds to get through the night. It was an awful feeling, and it seemed like there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

That last definition is quite specific to work-related burnout. The following two definitions add a bit more generality to the idea of burnout. 

The first definition is from Pines and Aronson, and they emphasise the exhaustion part, “Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in emotionally demanding situations.” 

And the definition from Freudenberger highlights the sense of dejection that is at the core of burnout. “Burnout is a state of fatigue or frustration brought about by devotion to a cause, way of life, or relationship that failed to produce the expected reward.” 

So as you can see, burnout is more than just feeling stressed or overworked. It is a state of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion caused by an excessive workload or prolonged stress. It occurs when we feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet the demands of life. 

It is most often problems at work that cause burnout. However, it can also appear in other areas of life, such as parenting, caregiving, and even relationships, and I’ll address these in a later section.

What causes burnout?

So, what causes burnout? Too much workload, too much stress, of course!! Well, kinda…

If we go back to Freudenberg’s definition of burnout, “Burnout is a state of fatigue or frustration brought about by devotion to a cause that failed to produce the expected reward.” 

So the ‘reward’ part of that definition is what’s important here, and reward doesn’t just mean financial reward because we can get many different types of reward from our efforts. Our efforts could be benefitting our family or our community, we could be getting recognition for what we’re doing, or we could be doing something that is highly aligned with our values. Even if we’re not getting money for what we do, we might still be getting well rewarded.

I actually saw burnout in action a couple of months ago. Me and a few friends run a community wellness event each Saturday morning. We do boot camp, yoga and meditation down on Maroubra Beach, completely free for the community. We’ve been doing it for years, happy to donate our time because we love it. 

We stepped up our game, rebranded, and changed our name to the Good Deed Crew, and instead of simply doing it for free, we insisted that everyone that came down to our sessions would have to do a good deed in the community as payment, buy a stranger a coffee, do some shopping for a neighbour, pick up trash from the beach, that kind of stuff, it’s really cool, and as an example of one of the things we did, we teamed up with a local charity, and we got everyone who came to the session to bring down and donate food and toiletries for the local women and girls shelter. 

We were putting a shit load of energy into it. We were on the phone to each other every day, coming up with new ideas on how we can get our community doing more for itself, how we can grow the community. We were gonna have good deed crews on every beach in Australia, and we were loving every minute of it. The community was into it. There were great vibes all round and loads of smiling faces wherever we went.

And then, the council said that we weren’t allowed to be doing what we were doing without a permit, and we had to stop, which absolutely knocked the wind out of us, and I could see the life force literally draining from the others. Lucky for me, I’m very protective over my workload, I make sure I don’t take on too much and have the tools to manage my mindset and my stress and see these challenges as an opportunity for me to practice my techniques, but all of a sudden, the workload and the reward were out of balance [hands up]. If we’re getting a big reward [hand high], whether it be an extrinsic reward like money, or an intrinsic reward, like community or recognition or appreciation, then our workload can be up here [hand high], and we’re not going to feel burned out, we’re going to feel energised. But if the reward comes down, and we feel unappreciated, we feel undervalued, then all of a sudden, that workload is going to feel significant, and we’re going to feel burned out. It’s almost like reward is the fuel for the workload.

Most people associate burnout with an excessive workload, and too much stress, so the most obvious place to look at making a change is with workload, reduce the workload and reduce the risk of burnout. However, while workload is an important place to look, to get a complete understanding, we need to investigate 6 areas, workload being only one of those six areas, and we’ll do that in the next section.