Career Exhaustion vs. Career Burnout
A word I’ve been hearing thrown around lately is “burnout” - on podcasts, during client sessions, and even among my friend group. And it makes sense - for the past two years, we’ve been enduring a “psychological storm” - to borrow writer Anne Helen Peterson’s term. It’s no wonder so many of us are experiencing increased chronic stress - in our lives and in our careers.
When we say “I’m so burnt out” and what we really mean is that we’re feeling exhausted or sick of something (like say, a job search) - we dilute the concept of burnout.
To make sure we understand how career burnout and career exhaustion are different, I asked my brilliant friend and Burnout Recovery Strategist, Christine O’Neill, to define each of them and help us identify the signs that our career exhaustion has, in fact, turned into career burnout. Below is what Christine had to share.
What is the Difference Between Career Exhaustion and Career Burnout?
The term “burnout” gets thrown around a lot. A lot of people feel chronic stress and that leads to them feel exhausted. But feeling exhausted is not the same as experiencing burnout.
Career exhaustion is a step toward career burnout. Think of stress and burnout as a continuum. On the far left, you have individual stressors. If you get these stressors one at a time, you can work through them under a manageable amount of stress. This is where you’d have normal career stress. You’ve had a stressful week at work and you recover over the weekend. You feel like “Okay, I’m ready to go back.” No Sunday scaries. You’re feeling pretty good about getting back to your job and you still feel a sense of satisfaction from the work you do. That’s normal.
On the far right, you have burnout. If you get serial stressors (stressors that compound and don’t allow us to complete the biological stress cycle), that will result in chronic stress. That’s where you have a few stressful weeks at work and think to yourself “Wow, I really need a vacation.” You may even experience anxiety and depression during this time. If you have the privileged opportunity to take a vacation, by the end of it, you start to feel like yourself again. You see a way forward. You may still feel tired and you may not like the work ahead of you, but you have more energy to handle what comes your way.
However, when this chronic stress is left unmanaged, it will lead to exhaustion and anxiety is almost always part of that. Because anxiety thrives off the unknown. And untreated exhaustion will lead to burnout over time.
“Being alive with a nervous system in 2022 is like having a chronic disease.”
Burnout is considered end stage exhaustion. It is where you are so far gone that you’re extremely tired - but you’re also extremely wired. Your body doesn’t know how to slow down because it’s in survival mode. Your nervous system is so dysregulated that it is not able to complete a normal stress response cycle and you end up over-reacting or under-reacting (e.g. flight, fight, or freeze).
Recovering from actual burnout can take many months. We literally need to treat it like a chronic illness, because in fact, that is what our body is experiencing.
What Are The Signs of Career Burnout?
In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) defined burnout as an occupational phenomenon defined by three characteristics:
One is emotional exhaustion - being completely drained, feeling unable to get out of bed in the morning.
The second is cynicism, or depersonalization. Feeling very negative about everything.
And the third is reduced personal and professional efficacy. Things like missing deadlines, basically not getting things done.
But it's not like burnout didn't exist before 2019. An American psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger was the one who first coined the term back in 1970’s. In addition, Dr. Christina Maslach has also been researching and publishing about it since the ‘70s. Initially it was discussed in relation to caring and helping professionals, like doctors and nurses.
To be clear, WHO does not classify burnout as a medical diagnosis, but I do think we will get to this point.
“Anytime we are giving more of ourselves - physically, emotionally and psychologically - than we’re getting back, it can lead to burnout. ”
For example, being a social justice activist can lead to burnout, because over time, there can be a growing sense of “no matter how much I do, it's not going to make a difference.” Parents experience burnout. If we start to feel a sense of hopelessness–with any kind of paid work, caregiving or volunteering responsibilities– and we don’t see a way out of it, that can be a sign of burnout.
How Does Depression Relate to Burnout?
Anxiety and depression are really common in folks experiencing exhaustion and burnout. There’s also a lot of overlap between burnout and depression. Having that dark cloud that’s over you all of the time.
Depression is often caused by a neurochemical imbalance.
With burnout-related depression, if you remove the stressor (like volunteering or changing your job to get into a better work situation), the depressive symptoms associated with burnout tend to get better.
Whereas with depression not related to burnout, removing the stressor (changing jobs or stopping the volunteering) won't necessarily make it better. You’ll still feel depressed.
It can be difficult to figure this out until you've actually gone through the process with a licensed professional. I'm really passionate about reducing stigma around mental health issues and talking about them. You don't know whether you're depressed because of work necessarily, or depressed because of burnout. Professional help is important.
How Are Stress and Anxiety Related?
Stress and anxiety are very closely related. But they're different. Because unlike anxiety, not all stress is bad. We actually need a certain amount of stress to function. Stress is what gets us out of bed in the morning. Stress is what gets us studying for an examination. Stress is what gets us prepared for an important presentation. Stress is even what gets us to put dinner on the table.
We are biologically designed to deal really well with stress. When we deal with an individual stressor, our body recognizes that it needs to activate. And that's done via our sympathetic nervous system, which is an unconscious process that happens when we sense stress.
When your alarm goes off in the morning, that stressor causes your body to release stress chemicals - cortisol and epinephrine (commonly called adrenaline), norepinephrine - that actually tell our cells and the functional parts of our body - our muscles, our brain, our organs - to motivate. To get out of bed and start to do our thing. And as we're going through those motions, those stress chemicals then start to level out if that's the only stressor that we're dealing with.
However, most of us are dealing with multiple stressors simultaneously. And that's not even thinking about the larger existential stressors that we're all dealing with! We unconsciously internalize the threats of stressors like the global pandemic, the challenging economy, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as personal threats.
If you’re overworking, have multiple home responsibilities, and you’re concerned about how you're going to pay your bills, you’ll never have the opportunity to reduce these stress chemicals in your body. So you end up with sustained high levels of stress chemicals telling your brain that there's always danger.
Now let’s talk about the close connection between the brain and the body. We are all hardwired for survival. From an evolutionary perspective, we are wired to react before we even know what the threat is. The reactive part of our nervous system jumps into action before the thinking part of our brain knows what the threat actually is. And we go into that fight, flight, or freeze reaction, which is the sympathetic nervous system reaction. You get an email from your boss and you automatically get a cold feeling in your gut and think “oh god, what is it? Am I going to get fired?” before you even open it.
If we don’t manage stress well, that stress reaction becomes the default for our bodies. And we make our way toward burnout.
What Advice Do You Have For Someone with Career Burnout?
One of the defining aspects of true career burnout is you don't see a way out. You don’t see any way things could be different. Honestly, it feels like it's going to be this way forever. It’s because the part of your brain that is really good at problem solving and imagining new scenarios is so negatively impacted by chronic exhaustion and burnout. It goes offline. When you’re that burnt out, you cannot possibly come up with a creative way out of what you’re feeling without help.
When I start working with someone who is that dysregulated, they're typically highly reactive. They are lashing out and they're not able to modulate their emotions. They think the worst about everything all the time, because remember - cynicism is one of the components of burnout. So they feel like the victim and are often looking externally for someone to blame for what's going on–it’s a self-protection mechanism. That's very natural when someone gets to this really depleted psychological and emotional place.
One of the first things we do is figure out what's most important to them, because they've often lost sight of that. I tend to work mostly with people in midlife / mid-career, in their late 30s to mid 50s. The last time they may have thought about what was really important to them was in high school or college, when they chose their career path (and stayed in the same career realm for most of their adult life), and they haven't had a chance to reevaluate whether that fits who they are today. So that's an important place to start before making any big decisions.
But even that is difficult when folks are working 12-14 hours a day, which most of my clients are. So the very first thing we do is we take a look at their calendar, and we start to prune it.
That time isn't then replaced with things like learning a new language, or getting a new degree, which so many of them want to do, because that's what high achievers do! They want to get to all the things they've been putting off. But I truly encourage people to do less.
And if they are going to add something back, it's adding something creative that they used to do that brought them joy. I have one client who picks up the banjo, I have someone else who draws, another client who writes, and someone else who makes digital music. All of these things are a type of meditation. It slows everything down. And so once folks are doing these things that are slowing them down, and getting them back into finding joy in their lives, it's amazing the possibilities that become accessible.
What I want to make clear is this is not a one or two-week process. It is at least a month-long process to get to this point, where a client will say, “Well, it's really clear, I can't keep doing this!” Whatever is problematic in their jobs has become much clearer to them. And it's much easier to solve those career troubles.
Once they have gotten more rest and downtime in their lives and are bringing some fun and creativity back into their lives, they are able to see:
“Oh, yeah, this is what I really like about this work. I don't like this aspect of it, but I like this other aspect of it. And maybe I can just focus more on that in my current job and not have to find a new job.”
Or…
“You know what, I'll never be able to get to the place I want to get in my career in my current position. So I need to start to think about other possibilities.”
But when we are running and running and running, we can't get there. Instead, we jump to a new job and end up right back in the same situation. All because we haven't figured out how to stop repeating career burnout habits.
What Are Career Burnout Prevention Habits We Can Build?
It’s really tough to come up with a list of “things to stop doing in order to stop burnout” because there’s a complex set of internal and external factors that come into play. For instance, extractive capitalism is an external economic force that prioritizes production over the needs of the employee. Most of us in the United States are working in this system. Couple that with the fact that for most people in the U.S., health insurance is attached to employment. Many of us can’t just leave a toxic job without something else to go if we (or our family) relies on those benefits. It feels like a Catch-22.
However, many of the internal factors that drive exhaustion and burnout are patterns of behavior that relate to our need to feel safe. We come by them honestly! But understanding where those come from is a whole different topic.
Here are six career burnout prevention habits you can start building awareness around today.
1. Prioritize progress over perfection to avoid burnout.
Trying to be perfect all the time is a surefire way to burn yourself out. While many of us don’t aim to be perfectionists, perfectionism is a control issue that has underlying reasons. Therapy can be very helpful to figure these reasons out. It’s very common to believe that if you don’t make any mistakes, you can’t be criticized or judged negatively. But you’re HUMAN and humans make mistakes. Striving for perfection is exhausting, and almost always present in my burnout clients.
2. Don’t overwork to prevent burnout.
Overwork, especially in salaried positions, has become normalized, especially in the United States. We’ve internalized the culture of “Full time=50+ hours a week.” But we’re not machines. Work/life balance is impossible if we accept overworking as the norm. (Of course this isn’t true for low wage hourly folks who have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, so an acknowledgment of that is important…work/life balance is a classist notion unachievable for many).
3. Try not to overfunction so much to prevent burnout.
Overfunctioning means working outside of your direct responsibilities. While, yes it’s nice to temporarily help out on occasion. And, yes it can feel good to feel needed. It is not okay to continually pick up the slack for underperforming colleagues, or companies that don’t provide adequate resources for the work that needs to be done. In fact, by overfunctioning you’re HIDING the problem and making it invisible to those who should fix it. Don’t do that.
4. Create better boundaries to prevent burnout.
Having poor boundaries (or none at all) is putting yourself in the fast lane for resentment and burnout. Overworking and overfunctiniong are usually a result of not being practiced at saying no. If you’re not sure where you need to establish better boundaries, look for feelings of resentment. I wrote this article about resentment and boundaries as a guide to creating better boundaries.
5. Stop equating pay with your value to prevent burnout.
Thinking that more money will solve the problem is one of the most common errors I see people make (and have definitely made myself). We are socialized by a capitalistic society to equate pay with our value. So when we feel fried and undervalued at work, it’s natural to think that we deserve more money. And that may likely be true! But guess what happens when you get a raise/promotion/higher paying job but nothing else changes? You feel good for 5 minutes and then you’re right back feeling awful. Even if you’re objectively underpaid for your role, that is unlikely to be the only negative workplace factor driving your dissatisfaction. So don’t make it the hill you die on. You’re still going to be unhappy after the raise.
6. Work on yourself to prevent burnout.
Another common mistake I see people make is changing jobs without changing themselves. The promise of a new job allows us to create a narrative about “how it’s going to be different this time.” But if we bring our perfectionism, bad boundaries, and overwork/overfunction tendencies with us, guess what? Once the newness wears off, you’ll be feeling fried again.
What is your Career Burnout Story, Christine?
As the saying goes - “It takes one, to know one” and before becoming a Burnout Prevention Strategist, I personally struggled with severe burnout. I kept repeating my burnout habits, because I hadn't dealt with my people pleasing and perfectionism. As a dedicated healthcare professional, I also had the belief I could change the world and make things better for everybody. This kept me grinding myself into the ground in under-supported positions, where I didn't have the resources I needed to do the work the way that I needed to do it.
In late 2021, I was diagnosed ADHD that had previously gone untreated. It has become increasingly clear to me this played a huge part in my burnout. It got to the point that I had physical and psychological collapse. I started having panic attacks and ended up tipping into a deep depression, which I'd never had before. I had hemorrhagic colitis, meaning, my body and my brain were falling apart because of my unmanaged stress.
I had to take a medical leave of absence from work. It was during that forced time off that I started to get better. And, unfortunately, sometimes being forced to take time off is what needs to happen.
We can't fully heal while working full time and dealing with all the other stressors in our lives. That would be like riding a bike with half inflated tires. You might get “there” eventually, but your bike and body will be really messed up! We don’t want that to happen to you which is why knowing the signs of burnout is so critical.
About Christine O’Neill:
Christine O’Neill, MMSc is a burnout recovery expert and executive leadership coach helping high achieving professionals with burnout recovery and growth. Learn more at thenestvt.co and @thenest_vt.
