Burnout at work
A 2024 survey found that over nine in ten working people in the UK had experienced high or extreme levels of stress in the past year. One in five had needed to take time off work due to burnout or poor mental health. One in three people of working age reported experiencing mental health symptoms such as sleep problems, irritability, and persistent worry. These are not fringe statistics, but describe the working lives of a large proportion of people.
And yet, despite how common it is, burnout remains widely misunderstood. It is confused with stress. It is seen as a personal failing. It is assumed to arrive suddenly, or only to affect people in particular kinds of jobs. None of these things are true – and the gap between what burnout actually is and what people believe it to be has real consequences, both for the people experiencing it and for the organisations they work in.
What is burnout?
The clinical definition of burnout that underpins most of the current research comes from Professor Christina Maslach, a psychologist whose work from the 1970s onwards remains the gold standard in this field. We can understand burnout as “a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job”.
In simpler terms, burnout is what happens to us when we’re exposed to overly demanding work over an extended period. When the demands – the workload, the pressure, the emotions – just don’t let us, and push us beyond merely stressed and into a wholly different category of stress.
What are the signs of burnout at work?
Maslach identified three core components of burnout:
The first is emotional exhaustion. This is not simply feeling tired at the end of a busy week. It is a depletion so complete that by the time the working day ends, there is nothing left. No capacity for relationships at home, no energy for the things that ordinarily restore us. Just the sofa, and the need to shut everything out.
The second is emotional detachment. This is when people begin to withdraw from the work itself – from colleagues, from the people they serve, from the meaning the work once held. In healthcare it might manifest as a more robotic relationship with patients. In teaching, a distance from pupils. It is a kind of self-protective numbing, though it rarely feels protective to the person experiencing it, or to those around them.
The third is loss of joy in work. The reasons someone entered their profession – the satisfaction, the small daily wins, the sense of purpose – begin to disappear. This is perhaps the most quietly devastating component, because it can make recovery feel hard to imagine when you are in the middle of it.
The important caveat is that feeling any of these things on a bad day – or even across a difficult week – does not constitute burnout. What distinguishes burnout from ordinary stress is persistence. If these three experiences are present week after week, for several weeks, that is when they warrant serious attention.
The impact of burnout
Burnout does not simply affect how a person feels about their job. It has measurable consequences for their mental health, their cognitive functioning, and their physical health over time.
Psychological
The most commonly documented psychological consequence is the development of clinical anxiety and depression. Research suggests that people experiencing burnout are considerably more likely to meet clinical thresholds for anxiety disorders and major depression than those who are not. This is not incidental. The prolonged activation of the stress response, combined with the depletion of energy and meaning that defines burnout, creates the conditions in which these conditions tend to emerge.
Cognitive
Cognitive functioning is also significantly affected. Burnout impairs concentration, working memory, and the executive functions that underpin decisionmaking, planning, and problem-solving. This is one of the reasons why people on the burnout plateau find themselves working longer hours to achieve the same results: they are not imagining the decline in their effectiveness, they are experiencing a genuine reduction in cognitive capacity.
Self-concept
There is also a less-discussed but significant impact on identity and selfefficacy. For people whose professional role is closely bound up with their sense of who they are – and this is particularly common in the kinds of high-commitment, vocationoriented professions most associated with burnout – the erosion of their capacity and joy in the work can feel like a loss of self.
Physical
Disrupted sleep is among the earliest and most consistent indicators of burnout. Research has linked burnout to elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, including coronary heart disease. People experiencing burnout are more susceptible to infection and take longer to recover from illness, reflecting the immunosuppressive effects of prolonged cortisol elevation. Musculoskeletal symptoms – particularly tension headaches, neck and shoulder pain, and lower back problems – are commonly reported, as are gastrointestinal disturbances.
How can people recover from burnout?
Despite what you may have heard, following appropriate professional support, the prognosis for employees who have experienced burnout is very positive indeed. lThey often return to work with a wholly different and healthier perspective on demands and their own resources, not to mention the place of work in their lives. Many learn to approach work more sustainably, bringing their values to bear on their daily decisions and actions.
Understanding what burnout actually is – and what it is not – is the starting point for all of this. Not a weakness. Not a sudden event. Not something that only happens to other people in other kinds of jobs. Something that builds gradually, leaves recognisable traces, and responds well to timely, informed action.
How can organisations reduce overwhelm?
It’s important that organisations recognise the system nature of burnout. It’s not about individual ‘weakness’, but rather employees’ response to unrelenting pressure in the system in which they work.
The risk of burnout is therefore reduced when organisations take action in a systemic way, rather than purely focusing on individual employees’ needs.
This could include:
- Intentional job design, to provide employees with roles that are clear, manageable and stimulating without being overwhelming.
- Manager training, so they can lead teams in a healthy and sustainable way, manage division of workload and responsibilities, and role-model effective prioritisation and rest.
- Provision of wellbeing resources, in the form of information, support, coaching and programmes, so that employees understand the warning signs and have access to the professional support that can help them avoid burnout.
How we can help
Our approach to burnout is to work with employees and organisations to prevent it happening in the first place. We can do this by:
Providing organisations with strategic advice on minimising stressors in the workplace, to avoid an over-reliance on employees' resilience in the first place. Many of the root causes of burnout are systemic, not the 'fault' of individual employees.
Coaching individuals in demanding roles who are at risk of burnout, to boost their resilience, provide them with sustainable coping strategies, and build their capacity to make adjustments to their working style.
Running workshops to raise awareness of burnout, its causes and impact, as well as effective coping skills. We can also run manager-specific sessions, to help them spot the signs of burnout and have the important wellbeing-related conversations that can make all the difference.
Book a consultation today
To learn how we can help you minimise the risk of burnout in your organisation, or to provide to support to employees particularly at risk, book a meeting with us today.