Understanding Burnout: “Is it the job, or just me?”
Burnout has become a common topic in recent years, but that doesn’t make it any easier to recognize when it's happening to you. Often, it’s brushed off as just being tired, overbooked, or needing a vacation. But burnout is more than that. It’s a chronic state of physical and emotional depletion that can reshape how you relate to your work, your colleagues, and yourself.
Defining Burnout
According to the World Health Organization (2019), burnout is a workplace-specific phenomenon that arises from chronic stress that has not been successfully managed. It isn’t classified as a mental health condition, but its impact can be significant.
Job burnout is typically understood through three key components, originally conceptualized by Christina Maslach and since expanded upon in recent frameworks:
Exhaustion, both physical and emotional
Cynicism, which may look like emotional distancing, irritability, or disconnection from the work or people around you
Reduced efficacy, meaning a drop in your sense of impact or competence, even in tasks you previously handled with ease
Recent studies (e.g., Kuhn et al., 2021) suggest that burnout is not just about individual workload or stress, but also about the quality of relationships at work, role clarity, and whether your values align with the organization or industry you’re in.
What Increases the Risk?
Burnout is often assumed to result from working too many hours, but it’s more complex than that. Research from Gallup (2020) identified five key drivers of burnout in the workplace:
Unfair treatment at work
Unmanageable workload
Lack of role clarity
Lack of communication or support from managers
Unreasonable time pressure
People in caregiving, education, healthcare, nonprofit, and tech roles are frequently exposed to high emotional labor or unrealistic expectations, both of which raise the risk. Professionals from marginalized backgrounds, including BIPOC and neurodivergent individuals, often experience additional strain navigating systemic inequities or inaccessible environments.
Signs You Might Be Experiencing Burnout
Burnout shows up differently depending on the person and the context. Some common indicators include:
Persistent fatigue that doesn’t resolve with rest
Irritability or emotional numbness during or after work
Difficulty concentrating or staying engaged with routine tasks
Growing detachment from coworkers or your professional identity
Diminished motivation and a sense of futility about your efforts
Physical symptoms like sleep issues, headaches, or GI distress
These aren’t signs of personal failure. They’re signals that something in your current environment or role is unsustainable.
How Burnout Differs From Depression
Burnout and depression can overlap, but they’re not the same. Burnout is typically work-related and may improve with changes in your role, workload, or boundaries. Depression tends to affect multiple domains of life and includes symptoms like low mood, hopelessness, or loss of interest in things beyond work.
If you're unsure what you’re experiencing, consulting with a mental health professional can help clarify next steps.
What Helps
Recovering from burnout is rarely as simple as taking a weekend off. While rest is essential, sustainable recovery often includes deeper changes—especially if the underlying patterns or systems are still in place.
Some possible starting points:
Clarify what’s driving your burnout. Is it workload? Lack of boundaries? Mismatch of values? Poor leadership? This informs your next steps.
Assess what’s changeable. Can you renegotiate deadlines? Reduce non-essential tasks? Shift your hours? Accommodate your sensory needs at work?
Reclaim autonomy where possible. Burnout is closely linked to a perceived lack of control. Even small shifts in how you structure your day or manage communication can help.
Evaluate whether the role is still a good fit. Sometimes the answer isn’t fixing your current role, but changing it altogether.
Get support from someone objective. A career counselor or coach can help you separate what’s circumstantial from what’s structural and guide you toward aligned action.
Moving Forward
Burnout can serve as a useful indicator that something needs to change. It may point to a misalignment between your values and your current work, or highlight ways your capacity has shifted over time. While it may be uncomfortable to face, burnout is a valid reason to re-evaluate your career path, your work culture, or the systems you’re operating within.
If you’re navigating questions about whether your current work is sustainable—or if it’s time for a bigger shift—career counseling can offer structured, nonjudgmental space to figure that out.
References
World Health Organization. (2019). Burn-out an occupational phenomenon. https://www.who.int/
Gallup. (2020). Employee Burnout: Causes and Cures. https://www.gallup.com/
Kuhn, A. L., et al. (2021). Understanding burnout: A meta-analysis of burnout and job-related correlates. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 26(5), 424–439. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000279
