What to do about burnout at work

Jonathan Malesic knows burnout firsthand. He was working his dream job, teaching at a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania. He was publishing papers, working toward tenure — doing all the things on the professor checklist. He was happy; until one day, he wasn’t.

“I was constantly exhausted. I dreaded going to work,” Malesic told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. A combination of unenthusiastic students, a budget crisis, and seeing colleagues let go had him on edge and feeling “sort of useless.” He didn’t recognize himself.

Eventually, he realized something had to give. He left academia, but remained curious about what derailed his career. It turns out, the answer was burnout. He discovered the work of psychology professor Christina Maslach, who literally wrote the book on burnout. 

“There are three dimensions to burnout,” Malesic explained. “The first is exhaustion, and the exhaustion is something that has to be chronic. You can’t be burned out for a week or a month. It’s a kind of exhaustion that does not improve with rest. The second dimension is called cynicism or sometimes depersonalization: You treat people as not full persons. And that can manifest itself in anger, gossip, and frustration. And the third dimension is a sense of ineffectiveness, a feeling that your work is not accomplishing anything.”

Malesic took the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the standard test that measures burnout, and he found he was in the 98th percentile for exhaustion. “In American society, we value work so highly,” he said. “We put so much of our identity and self-worth into work.” Eventually, he wrote a book called The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives.

Danielle Roberts had a similar experience. After a pandemic layoff, she started to seek out balance. She found it, and now, as a career coach, she helps other people find it too. Or as she likes to say: as an anti-career coach. 

“I think we are at a point where dream jobs don’t exist,” she told Explain It to Me. “We have to start questioning the systems and the structures that are causing burnout in the first place, rather than making it a personal problem or a professional weakness.”

So how do you do that? And what are the different ways burnout has manifested itself through the decades? Roberts breaks it down for the latest episode of Explain It to Me.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Has burnout always been a thing? Or is it just a young person’s game? 

I grew up in a blue-collar family and was one of five kids. My dad did tile and marble for a living for 40 years. He just retired and what he got for a lifetime of hard work was a broken body and a pin to say “thank you for your service.” 

For older generations, their burnout often looked more physical. Gen X, their burnout often looks more mental. And then millennials and Gen Z, our burnout often looks more emotional and existential because we were taught that our work equals our worth and to pour so much of ourselves into it. 

It’s not that one generation is more burnt-out than the other; it’s just that it manifests differently based on the world in which we grew up.

What do you notice about how Gen Z is approaching burnout differently?

We can learn so much from Gen Z and what they are teaching us about modeling the boundaries that would’ve prevented all of us from burning out in the first place. 

We often hear that they’re lazy and entitled and that nobody wants to work anymore, but think about what they witnessed growing up. They saw their parents or their friends’ parents be loyal to companies that laid them off. They saw millennials put themselves through college and get a tremendous amount of student debt just to be laid off or have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. I think they are looking at everything that other generations have done and saying, “No, thank you.”

Are there ways to avoid burnout at work in the first place?

It all starts in the interview process and being mindful of what to look out for in the language that your team uses. If people are describing their company like a family, run. That is a red flag. I don’t know about anybody else’s family, but mine is full of dysfunction and you’re expected to give a lot, and not always get a ton in return. 

Then when you are in the onboarding process, start talking about what you need from your manager early on. There’s something called a working styles worksheet, and it includes questions like, “When I’m stressed, what I need most from my coworkers is blank. The best way I receive feedback is blank. My meeting participation style is blank.” That will give you a lot of agency and autonomy in how you show up in your work and how you allow other people to treat you. We teach other people how to treat us.

These days, it’s hard to get a job in the first place, on top of the cost of housing and health care and so many things. That makes leaving a job or even having boundaries at the job you have now really, really hard. 

If you can’t afford to quit your job, are there steps you can take to prevent burnout?

The world is a dumpster fire right now and the job market is trash. That said, you do still have agency within your days. 

There’s something called an energy management audit where for a week, you track your time from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed and you figure out what your energy patterns are, then see what you can do to either redesign your time or change up your environment to sustain your energy levels. 

In a workplace that could look like taking a meeting with your camera off or going on a walk. Or if you know you have a particularly draining meeting at 12 pm every single day, you take a five-minute block and get up and just shake out your nervous system, do some jumping jacks, put on your favorite song. You can just close your eyes and give yourself that rest for 30 seconds. You can set a reminder on your phone to do a breathing exercise just to get back into your body a little bit more.

Is there anything you’d recommend not doing? Maybe something that feels good now, but ultimately in the long run is going to make it harder. 

Pushing when you have no more capacity or resources to push. And also thinking that you need to do it all by yourself. We live in a highly individualistic society. We take on so much emotional labor on top of the day-to-day. 

If you are feeling stuck on a problem at work or you’re feeling super stressed, the solution is not to push through and put in more hours. That is going to be not only a disservice to the work itself, it’s going to be a disservice to you. Look at your workload realistically and say, “What can fall off?” We can’t self-help our way out of systems of oppression or burnout. 

I think sometimes we really just need to let some of the plates fall and break, because if we continue to take on everything and our employers are like, “Oh, Danielle’s got it. She can keep doing all of this and it’s fine,” then they’re just going to continue to expect that out of me. But if I say, “I’m letting these two things fall and break and it’s the company’s responsibility to fix them,” then maybe I’ll actually finally get some help.