Do you smell smoke?: What we’re getting wrong about burnout

Studies on burnout go back to the 1970s. Researchers in the field have looked even further back, to when man and machine first embarked on the race to do more with the same number of hours.

Amid the pandemic, in survey after survey, Indians in white-collar jobs are clocking in as burned out. Microsoft’s 2020 Work Trend Index report found that nearly a third of Indian workers polled reported increased levels of burnout, citing a lack of separation between work and life and dual strains from work duties and personal obligations. In the 2021 Future of Work report by research firm Censuswide, one in every three professionals polled said they felt burned out as a result of increased workloads (35%) and rising stress levels (34%).

What does it mean to be burned out? How do we get back on track? And where did it all begin?

Quite simply, burnout is caused by chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. That’s according to the expanded definition issued by the World Health Organization in 2019.

The term “burnout” was first brought into academic usage by a doctor, psychoanalyst Herbert Freudenberger. He was startled to see that the physical and behavioural symptoms of excessive drug use in some of his patients matched symptoms exhibited by himself and his overworked peers.

Freudenberger was working at a free clinic in New York City at the time. He borrowed the term “burnout”, in fact, from slang used to describe the psychological effects of the long-term use of narcotics. Physical symptoms of the condition as he came to define it in his studies included fatigue, frequent headaches and lowered immunity; behavioural signs included a tendency to anger and to tears, and increased drug use. In a paper titled Staff Burn-Out published in the Journal of Social Issues in 1974, Freudenberger reported that he had suffered two spells of burnout himself.

Initially, the concept was studied and discussed in the context of healthcare workers but it was soon expanded, first to “helping jobs” such as teachers, police officers and social workers, then to other professions too.

The first attempts to tackle burnout can be traced to the 1980s, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) created by Christina Maslach, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. MBI allowed people to measure their personal susceptibility to the new syndrome.

The why of burnout, psychologists are quick to point out, is not personal but organisational. “Burnout is primarily a relationship crisis between people and workplaces,” says Michael Leiter, an emeritus professor of psychology at Acadia University in Canada and Deakin University in Australia, who has researched burnout with Maslach for decades.

Can one dial it down?

Part of the problem today lies in how the purpose of work has changed, psychologists say. “It’s a relatively new concept that we expect to get fulfilment from our work,” says Torsten Voigt, a sociologist and burnout researcher at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. “For a long time, working and particularly all forms of labour meant you went to work and you got paid and you returned to your life.”

In this scenario, work was a means to an end, the end typically being family and leisure time. In today’s hypercapitalist economies that depend on infinite growth, work has mutated into an end in itself, particularly in times of economic uncertainty such as the present. Goals — personal achievements, family, leisure — begin to seem like threats to an already precarious system.

Meanwhile, societies have reshaped themselves too. Families have become smaller and more fragmented; communities more diffused; work has become inextricably enmeshed in non-work hours.

Technology has been demanding steadily more of employees. “Agile” organisations ask workers to step up with new skills, innovations and improvements. Wilmar Schaufeli, a professor of work and organisational psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, says one reason the world is seeing a rising incidence of burnout is these changing expectations.

Can you turn it off? Anna Katharina Schaffner, a burnout and exhaustion coach and professor of cultural history at the University of Kent, suggests one should certainly try. “I think we massively overinvest in work. It has become intricately tied up with identity, meaning, purpose and status. We expect work to give us meaning, to give us dignity, to make us whole and to somehow save us from an existential void,” she says. “This makes work a place of potentially huge suffering as it cannot meet these expectations.”

Do we have it worse?

While the concept of burnout isn’t new, every age has had its signature afflictions. “I’m very cautious about saying that something is new or is unique to our generation, but when it comes to burnout I do believe there is a generational shift that probably started in the late 1990s or early 2000s where there was a change in how we live and the way we organise our lives that made the concept of burnout more prevalent in our society,” says Voigt.

Technology has played a key role, but it has been playing a key role in burnout for at least a century.

In 1971, three years before Freudenberger first used the term “burnout”, US air traffic controllers were reporting a form of exhaustion that manifested as a decline in quantity and quality of work production, says Rajvinder Samra, a UK-based psychologist with a focus on mental and psychological performance in work. “Their burnout had to do with new technology: radar systems,” she says. “The controllers went on strike. They faced long working hours, changing shift patterns, under-staffing, inadequate breaks, and they had to deal with demanding visual attention tasks with the new radar displays. Recent technological advances were part of why their work was so stressful.”

Go further back, 100 years, says Schaufeli, and there was the concept of neurasthenia or “weak nerves”, attributed to the fast pace of life at the time. “The electric light bulb was catching on. Artificial light meant that people could work much longer hours. They were also travelling by steam train and not by horse, and there were the newspaper and telegraph and telephone, all new technologies. It was argued that people had weak nerves due to technology and the hectic pace of life.”

Are we then to return to a way of life before all this? Of course not. But burnout is a signal that the workday has ceased to be healthy. What would a healthy workday look like?

“An optimal workday today is one in which employees choose their productive hours, managers eliminate arbitrary rules such as coming in to work every day, and work-life balance is promoted on a daily and cross-channel basis,” says Anjali Raghuvanshi, chief people officer at the HR consultancy Randstad India. “An optimal day emphasises the employee’s autonomy and control over their tasks. Fairness takes precedence. Feedback is sustained and works both ways. Vitally, the workplace should be collaborative rather than transactional.”

In the absence of the conditions required for an optimal workday, newer generations will feel an intensifying sense of dissonance with organisations that don’t upgrade their people-management systems. Amid today’s pandemic and climate crisis, coupled with economic and political instability, this dissonance can be expected to cause spikes in reported burnout, like the ones being reported today. The spikes contribute to reshuffles such as the one that began with the wave of quittings nicknamed the Great Resignation in 2021.

“In the pandemic, we really began to ask whether there wasn’t more to life,” says Voigt. “I think that makes burnout an entry point to think about the future of work.”

Now for the mind games

What is the neurobiology of burnout? How does one distinguish between burnout and stress? “Burnout is a stress disorder,” says Amy Arnsten, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Yale.

Arnsten’s research explores how stress impacts the prefrontal cortex, a recently evolved part of our brain that is important for working memory, abstract thought, high-order decision-making, top-down control of emotion, attention and action, planning and organisation, insight about oneself and others, optimism and perspective, the ability to persist through difficulty and wait for a larger reward. “Brain-imaging studies of people with occupational burnout show that they have thinner prefrontal cortical grey matter, and need to activate more of the prefrontal cortex than is usual in order to perform a task well,” she says.

Understanding how one’s brain reacts to burnout can be helpful, as it shows people that many of their reactions are part of a “natural phenomenon”, Arnsten adds. “It shows them that this is just how the brain changes with chronic stress.”

A key thing to remember is that it isn’t your job alone to find a fix. “Relationship problems require relationship solutions,” says Leiter. “It is hard to become so resilient that you can tolerate anything. And some things at work should not be tolerated.”

What are those things, and how can you recognise them and start to heal? See the story alongside for more.