On Exhaustion and Burnout. Part One.
Anybody tired?
I’ve gotten a few requests to share some thoughts about the problems of exhaustion and burnout. Well, I have some thoughts!
As it happens, I apparently have a lot of thoughts on these subjects. So many, in fact, that I’ve decided to split this up into a little series.1
Part 1 here is concerned with laying out some definitions and context. Part 2 dives into workplace exhaustion. And Part 3 (drumroll…) details the phenomenon of burnout. I’ll examine some causes, symptoms, and signs, as well as some ways to treat, or at least alleviate, the underlying problems.
So first, let’s figure out what we’re talking about.
Everybody’s doing it.
“Exhaustion” and “burnout” are common terms in the context of workplace maladies, but their definitions (or at least their usages) seem to lack precision. I may not be able to help much with that, and might not want to.
Sometimes the pursuit of precision can obfuscate common sense in an unhelpful way.
What I’m more interested in anyway is the contrast between them, rather than strict definitions, because effectively recognizing and treating them requires understanding their relationship and their difference.
So I’ll risk stating the obvious.2 We know they describe feelings of tiredness, disengagement, even cynicism and resentment. We know they run rampant in workplaces like those Ars Pandemonium covers. And we know they are closely related.
Any divergence could feel like a difference without distinction. If you’re tired, you’re tired. But as we’ll see, addressing the problems might require very different approaches.
“A 2021 survey from the Society for Human Resource Management found that 41 percent of Americans feel burned out. Only 36 percent of employees feel engaged at work.”
-Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job
The relationship between exhaustion and burnout is not simple. For example, sustained exhaustion is certainly a key contributor to burnout. Similarly, incipient burnout will certainly cause us to be less resilient to exhaustion.
But exhaustion doesn’t necessarily lead to burnout. Nor is it necessarily the only cause when burnout happens.
If exhaustion is recognized and treated in a timely manner, it might not contribute to burnout at all. And for that matter, you can get burned out without ever having been exhausted in the first place.
Story time: I once had a coworker who had trained in architecture and then gotten a job at a big firm. They found themselves working on what should have been exciting projects…but designing handrails for stairwells, or specifying fixtures for office bathrooms. That sort of thing.
The work wasn’t difficult, but it was exacting. It took some creativity, but it sure didn’t take much. And the only satisfaction it really offered was clocking out at the end of the day — it was hard to take much pride in the design of door handles of an office tower they would never set foot in.
They stuck with the job for a few years but eventually, with scores of people ahead of them in seniority, a cutthroat office-politics environment, and no obvious prospect for the situation to improve, they wore down. They found themselves without any motivation to continue. Burnout had crept in without drama, exhaustion never really playing a part.
Eventually, they got into the game industry, which is how I knew them. Out of the frying pan, I suppose, but that’s a tale for another time.
Anyway, hearing that story, it’s easy to think, oh boo-hoo, that poor person had to go sit in a clean, comfortable office environment with free coffee and get paid pretty well to do really easy work. How did they ever manage?
And I kind of get that. I do!
But here’s the thing: if they had gotten a job in the accounting department at that firm, say, instead of the design department, things might have been different. Same office environment, probably similar hours and pay.
But they wouldn’t have been expecting creative fulfillment, and maybe more importantly, they wouldn’t have been expected to feel fulfilled by the work.
In Work Won’t Love You Back, author Sarah Jaffe references the World Health Organization's definition of burnout (or as the egghead bureaucrats spell it, “burn-out”):
“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:
- feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
- increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
- reduced professional efficacy.
Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
Jaffe then goes on to note, importantly, that this definition presumes the worker in question had “a mental connection to” and “positive feelings about” their work to begin with. Which means, by its nature, “burnout” is not an all-inclusive concept:
“Burnout, in other words, is a problem of the age of the labor of love.” Workers engaged in this “labor of love” are “expected to give their lives over to the work because they believe in the cause; but it becomes harder and harder to believe in the cause when the cause is the thing mistreating you.”
I don’t agree with everything this book has to say; but it is pretty smart. This framework for burnout makes some sense to me, at least in regards to what I have personally experienced and observed. And since Ars Pandemonium is primarily concerned with the “creative professions” — where we deeply care, or are expected to deeply care, about our work — this feels well aligned.
Any job can be exhausting: hard work is hard. But only work in which you are emotionally invested can lead to burnout. Honestly, that’s probably not the full, nuanced truth, but I think it will work to frame this discussion.
Exhaustion is an acute sense of fatigue; burnout a chronic sense of weary despair.
I have long suggested that if exhaustion is like a broken limb, burnout is like an amputation. In one case, you can be “back to normal” after some healing. With the other, something is gone — and everything is different from now on.
Maybe the key differentiator comes down to this: it’s easy to imagine being exhausted (and frustrated and exasperated, even) while remaining internally motivated. But it’s impossible to imagine all but the slimmest shred of motivation (and that based solely on external circumstances) in a burnout situation.
Or maybe this: exhaustion is the desire to stop doing something for a while. Burnout is the deep ache to never do the thing again.
Next, on a very special Ars Pandemonium…
So! Exhaustion and burnout: related, but not the same. Possibly causal, but not necessarily. Exhaustion is an acute sense of fatigue; burnout a chronic state of weary despair. Exhaustion is a universal peril of hard work; burnout, a unique danger of “loving your job.”3
Every person is different, and it can be hard to predict how one or another person will react in a given circumstance. But there are several kinds of situations I’ve seen over the years that should throw immediate red flags as fertile breeding grounds for exhaustion and burnout.
As managers, we can look out for these, even if we lack visibility into specific individuals. In the next two parts, I’ll look at a few that really stand out to me:
Exhaustion
Overcommitment: The stakes are all wrong.
Misalignment: I was hired to do X. Why is all my time spent doing Y?
Crunch: The pain is temporary, but the product is forever? Bullshit.
Burnout
Imbalance: Too much repetition. Not enough repetition.
Extracurriculars: The tank needs to be refilled.
Dread: Looking forward to nothing.
Trouble at home: Sometimes “life” is the toxic part of work/life balance.
And remember: managers are people too. We need to recognize these situations for ourselves, as well as for our teams.
A “minimum” word count will never be my problem. I am one wordy guy. So thanks for bearing with me while I break this up into…let’s say episodes. Stay tuned, a couple of very special episodes on the way.
What I’m listening to.
I can’t listen to music while writing, but while editing and preparing for publication I often have some jams going. Thought I’d share! Really digging the recent(ish) Kim Deal stuff:
Look, there are definitely limits to how long an essay can be and get any engagement on Substack. Taken as a single post this would be…well beyond those limits. So a series it shall be.
I don’t think I am, given the broad range of definitions I see proffered — here’s a Healthline article that basically conflates the two. Here’s an HBR article that seems to suggest exhaustion is a symptom of burnout (which, to me, is basically backwards). It takes two seconds of searching to find dozens more. But even if I were stating the obvious, mutual knowledge matters.
Obviously here I’m primarily interested in the “creative professions.” Work Won’t Love You Back would have it that this is also applicable to care giving, academia, non-profits, and basically any mission-driven work, which, sure. Makes sense to me.