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Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion due to an excessive amount of stress. Many people might experience burnout after working long or taxing hours at a job, but it can also have other causes, like conflict with a significant other or an especially busy or chaotic week.
Whatever the reason, burnout can negatively impact your health and well-being. Aside from the mental and physical effects of chronic stress, burnout is often a sign that some aspect of life is putting too much strain on you.
What Is Burnout?
While not a clinically diagnosable condition, burnout is a widely used term and is recognized within the psychological and mental health community as a legitimate mental health condition and phenomenon.
Burnout typically refers to an emotional and mental state characterized by low motivation, apathy, and irritability. It’s often associated with experiencing high levels of chronic stress that are seemingly inescapable for an extended period of time.
Burnout and Its Ties to the Workplace
Burnout is frequently associated with work and one’s career because it’s often seen in those who have a high-stress occupation—though it isn’t the only cause. The idealization of overworking and “toughing things out” that’s common in the U.S. has made burnout more and more prevalent. It can take months or longer to develop, and it’s not something that will simply go away on its own.
Burnout’s symptoms can be intense, as bearing extreme amounts of stress isn’t sustainable for anyone long term.
Common Signs of Burnout at Work
The symptoms of burnout from work are similar to any kind of stress-induced burnout. They include:
- Low energy
- Fatigue
- Low motivation
- Anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure)
- Apathy
- Withdrawal
- Isolation behaviors
- Insomnia, hyposomnia (lack of sleep)
- Hypersomnia (issues staying awake, even with enough sleep)
- Difficulty concentrating
- Irritability
- Gastrointestinal issues
- An overall inability to function
Experiencing chronic, intense stress can also alter a person’s view of themselves and impact their self-esteem, which means you may also notice symptoms like self-doubt or low self-esteem.
What Does Mental Burnout Feel Like?
Burnout is highly individualized, and each person’s experience is unique. Still, burnout is often identified when you notice you’re not engaging in your typical routines and schedules or you aren’t finding the same enjoyment or enrichment in them that you used to.
Another sign of burnout can be changes in your mood, perhaps feeling noticeably more pessimistic or hopeless about things.
Causes of Workplace Burnout
Common causes of burnout include:
- High levels of stress at a job
- Demanding occupations (nurses, teachers, emergency care workers, social workers, etc.)
- Low levels of perceived and real support (at work or personally)
- Facing high levels of criticism
- Working long hours
- Living or working in isolation
- Frequent interpersonal conflict
- Extended periods of time with no physical or mental rest (e.g., parenting, caretaking, or other responsibilities)
- Perceived lack of control/lack of autonomy in daily life
Without significant changes in workload, situation, and/or environment, as well as help from a mental health professional, levels of stress and feelings of burnout will likely persist or continue to increase.
Are Burnout and Depression the Same?
Burnout and depression can look very similar and can occur alongside each other, but they are not the same condition. Burnout is not a diagnosable mental condition, whereas depression is a diagnosable disorder that has been studied and observed with its own diagnostic criteria.
Burnout can loosely be described as a “system shutdown” and can mimic the shutdown symptoms that occur with depression. However, depression does not just involve “shutting down” behaviors: It’s characterized by sleeping difficulties, agitation, changes in appetite, and a variety of other symptoms that are present in more severe and chronic ways.
Burnout can, however, lead to or worsen one’s depression. If you are burned out and believe it may be causing symptoms of depression, it’s important to talk to a mental health provider about your symptoms.
Since burnout and depression are two different conditions, they require different treatment. A mental health professional can give you tools to manage your symptoms and assess the needs of your condition and situation to provide individualized treatment.
What Does Burnout from Anxiety Feel Like?
Burnout caused by anxiety will feel different to everyone. For some, the constant worry and excessive fear often associated with anxiety disorders can lead to burnout. The stress caused by negative thought patterns and anxious rumination can be exhausting and lead to low energy, mental fatigue, and other symptoms of burnout.
When anxiety symptoms are intense enough to cause burnout, it’s recommended to seek help from a mental health professional. Like with burnout and depression, anxiety and burnout will require different treatment approaches, with the main focus likely being to ease the intensity of the anxiety symptoms in order to get to the root of the issue.
What Does Burnout from ADHD Feel Like?
Those who experience burnout due to dysregulation and other ADHD symptoms often report experiencing feelings surrounding self-criticism, low self-esteem, difficulty focusing, and difficulty concentrating.
Often, burnout due to ADHD can make people feel like their ADHD is magnified or amplified. The mental exhaustion caused by consistent attempts to regain focus and concentration in order to complete tasks and stay organized, particularly at work, can make it more difficult to manage other ADHD symptoms and maintain regular daily function.
Since they are tied to focus, emotional regulation, and motivation, ADHD symptoms can aggravate symptoms of burnout, and vice versa. Help from a mental health professional can allow someone with ADHD to differentiate the symptoms of each condition, lessen their intensity, and find preventative strategies to keep burnout at bay in the future.
How Long Does It Take to Recover from Burnout?
Burnout doesn’t happen overnight, and it will likely take time to recover—up to six months or more, depending on the severity. Burnout recovery should be focused on relieving current symptoms, like resting to combat fatigue, and preventing future relapse.
From a clinical standpoint, professional mental health counseling is one of the most effective and researched approaches for dealing with burnout, reducing its symptoms, and preventing it from reoccurring in the future.
Through your healing journey, you’ll focus on the identification of your personal values and a return to a schedule (behavior activation) that incorporates these values, activities, and routines regularly. It’s important to make sure you are incorporating rest and balance into your schedule, giving your mind time to regain its energy throughout the course of the day. This includes boundaries like not taking work home with you or speaking to your boss or manager about your workload if it becomes unmanageable.
Preventing Burnout in the Workplace
Engaging in regular counseling sessions is an effective way to prevent burnout. With your counselor, you can learn more about your brain and body’s specific needs and create a plan to meet those needs regularly.
In your personal time, though, there are many other ways you can work to supplement your work in therapy and help relieve feelings of burnout. These can include:
- Take a timeout. To recover from burnout, it’s important to take time to decompress. You can try deep breathing, meditation, taking walks, spending time with friends—anything to help you re-center and re-energize.
- Get 8 hours of sleep a night. Another immediate step you can take to recover from burnout is to catch up on any lack of sleep. When stressed and overwhelmed, sleep is a need that is often neglected. Try to keep a consistent sleep schedule and practice good sleep hygiene and see if your symptoms improve.
- Define what a healthy, balanced schedule looks like in your life. Balance is an important part of living a healthy and fulfilling life. Brainstorm on your own or work with your mental health provider to establish what a more balanced life looks like to you—how much time is spent working, resting, doing self-care activities, taking care of others, etc. The more you can identify your actual goal, the easier it will be to create a path toward achieving it.
- Spend some time in nature. Whether it’s taking a walk outside, sitting at the beach, eating lunch in a park, or even just taking a beat to feel the sun on your face, nature can help refocus the mind and regain perspective.
- Make mental health breaks nonnegotiable. This might mean taking small breaks throughout your day, such as a cup of coffee alone, or taking days off or a vacation. It’s important to remember that one aspect of our lives, work or otherwise, should not dominate our time. Life is made of parts, and each of these parts is important to our mental health and well-being. Breaks are a normal and healthy part of any task or activity.
- Evaluate your relationships. If you’re experiencing burnout often, you could benefit from evaluating your relationships. Notice the energy you feel around those you interact with. Do you feel relaxed or uplifted? Do you feel anxious or exhausted? If certain people zap your energy or leave you feeling overwhelmed, factor this into your choices about being around them.
- Consider a job or position change. To recover from and prevent future burnout, you might want to consider a change in work. Even if you love the work you do, burnout is not a sustainable state of being, and if you believe that elements of your work are causing it, adjustments need to be made to prioritize your well-being. For example, if you find yourself agreeing to help out on projects that are outside of your scope or take on too much work at once and overworking yourself to finish it, it may be time to impose some work boundaries, both on yourself and your coworkers regarding what you can be involved in. However, if your limitations on your workload aren’t being respected or the expectations for what your role should involve are more than you can meet without overworking yourself, it may be time to move on.
As stated above, burnout prevention strategies are focused on creating and maintaining a life that involves balance and autonomy. This balance will incorporate your daily values, support system, and other hobbies or avenues of enjoyment with regularity and predictability. As you find new strategies to help with burnout, make sure they work to fill you with energy, peace, and fulfillment.
