There’s this feeling I get when I know something is…off. When I don’t want to talk to anyone or do anything other than sleep and watch Bravo. It’s like all I have the capacity for is going to work and coming home, but I’m emotionally exhausted by and disconnected from my job too. That experience has a name: burnout. And even as a person who is an actual expert on the topic, I needed someone else—my therapist—to name it for me.
Burnout can be tough to identify because, culturally, we have a very loose definition of the term. “Colloquially, ‘burnout’ has become almost synonymous with any experience of work-related stress,” Colin West, MD, PhD, medical director of employee well-being at Mayo Clinic, tells SELF. “It’s a bit like the common ‘I’m so depressed’ statements people make in daily life, which are often expressing something much more general than true clinical depression.” The problem with referring to burnout so casually is that it may minimize our experiences and allow us to view them as simply a normal product of our work environment. We may even see our burnout symptoms as a badge of honor: “I’m working hard, I should be tired from work.”
Job burnout isn’t a medical diagnosis, or even a psychiatric one, but it’s so much more than stress or distress from work. As defined by the 11th Revision of the International Classifications of Diseases (ICD-11), burnout is an occupational phenomenon that has three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased cynicism or a distant or indifferent attitude toward work, and declining work performance.
“I think of burnout as becoming exhausted by your job and losing the ability to care about your work and the people you work with,” Bradley Evanoff, MD, MPH, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, tells SELF. “Once you're burned out, it’s hard to gather the energy or the enthusiasm to do a good job.” It’s also a struggle to keep working: According to data from accounting firm Deloitte’s annual Global Gen Z and Millenial Survey, burnout is one of the top three reasons young people are quitting their jobs.
The good news is that it’s possible to identify and address burnout before it leaves you utterly drained or drives you to quit your job on a whim. “I view burnout as a candle that is slowly exhausting its flame, and if we don’t recognize the signs and risk factors, we may find ourselves depleted with nothing left but the bottom of our wick,” Jessica Gaddy, LICSW, founder of teletherapy company Nia Noire Therapy + Wellness, tells SELF.
As a psychiatrist who sees employees in a university and hospital system, I couldn’t agree more. Most of my patients seem unaware of the subtle, less textbook, signs of burnout and only notice something is wrong when something is really wrong. That’s why I asked other mental health experts for some less-obvious signs of burnout to look out for in yourself and your colleagues:
1. You’re frequently irritable—and not just at work.
Often, symptoms of burnout are subtle and vague, like feeling edgy or irritable, Rebecca Brendel MD, JD, president of the American Psychiatric Association, tells SELF. “If you’re finding yourself with a negative outlook on life—not just about work—or regularly feeling detached or having a short fuse, these are other clues that there may be some burnout occurring,” she explains.
You should also keep an eye on who’s setting you off, Kali Cyrus, MD, MPH, assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medicine, tells SELF. If your energy-vampire coworker often gets under your skin, for example, that’s not necessarily a sign of burnout; you might just not like them. That’s why Dr. Cyrus recommends “paying attention to increased or consistent irritability toward people that normally don’t elicit that response,” like your best friend or partner.
It’s also important to note that irritability, along with some of the other common symptoms of burnout (including lack of motivation and exhaustion), can also indicate that you’re depressed. If you’re showing signs of depression, ask your primary care doctor, if you have one, to screen you for the disorder.
2. You feel overwhelmed by even small requests.
When you’re burned out, you have less capacity to deal with…anything. As a result, every request, even the smallest one, may feel overwhelming or even impossible. This reaction is common in parents too. “A lesser-known symptom of burnout is easily flying off the handle when your child or family member makes a small request of you,” Pooja Lakshmin, MD, author of Real Self Care and founder and CEO of mental health digital education platform Gemma, tells SELF. “Your kid demanding a PB&J, not a PB and banana, could be enough to drive you up a wall.” Or maybe your partner’s request to switch up your go-to Friday night show sends you huffing out of the room.
Basically, if your irritation level doesn’t match the situation, and your disproportional outbursts happen more and more frequently, that can indicate burnout, according to Dr. Lakshmin. You may also find that you start turning down more requests, even ones you would normally find enjoyable. (For me, it’s often saying no to going to dinner or a movie with friends—because I just can’t do one more thing.)
3. Your normal self-care routines start to fade.
Occasionally feeling overwhelmed by daily tasks is totally normal in our fast-paced world, but wearing sweatpants way more often than usual or having a much messier desk or kitchen might also be a sign that you can’t find the energy to keep up your routines or take care of your household—another possible sign of work burnout. This change in daily habits might also look like “ordering more takeout rather than cooking, taking the dog on shorter walks, watching more TV late into the night instead of getting in bed at your regular bedtime, or more drinking or drug use at the end of the workday,” says Dr. Cyrus.
4. You start to procrastinate on the job.
When it comes to work tasks, if you notice yourself avoiding more and more items on your to-do list or avoiding important projects, it might be a sign that you’re starting to get overwhelmed to the point of burning out. In fact, in a 2019 study of more than 3,000 college faculty members, researchers found that burnout was associated with an increase in procrastination. In my experience, this could start with something as small as not responding to emails and later lead to such a pileup of projects that you don’t even know where to begin. At that point, you might even decide not to start anything at all, as an act of defiance against all that you have to do.
5. You keep forgetting things or generally feel scatterbrained.
I’ve had many patients who are showing other signs of burnout tell me they’re concerned that they’re developing permanent memory loss because of experiences at work like opening up a document and forgetting why they opened it, or writing an email and never hitting send. And it makes sense: As it turns out, burnout can affect your memory and executive functioning. This is actually due to neurobiological changes in response to chronic stress, including a decreased volume in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that regulates executive functions, including working memory.
6. You daydream about doing any other job.
Burnout can make other types of work, even ones you would have had no interest in before, seem appealing. Maybe you once thought doing math all day would bore you to tears, for example, but becoming an accountant and clocking out at 5 p.m. sharp every day is starting to seem like a dream job. Or maybe you can’t stop thinking about working at an ice cream stand on Lanai, or running a farm even though you have zero agricultural experience.
“Burnout can lead you to fantasize about quitting and having a job that simply…provides food and water and doesn’t make you work on the weekends or after your kids go to bed,” Eve Bloomgarden, MD, a board-certified endocrinologist at NorthShore University HealthSystems, tells SELF. Daydreaming about drastic career changes doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the wrong industry, but it might be a sign that, yep, your current job is burning you out, and you’re looking for relief.
Identifying the signs of burnout early is critical since they can lead to bigger problems down the road.
“Especially when symptoms are subtle, they can add up and snowball often undetected,” Dr. Brendel explains. “That’s why it’s so important that we build time into our routines to check in with ourselves and others, and stay attuned to our wellbeing.”
Consistent self-check-ins—whether through journaling, meditating, working with a therapist, or simply pausing weekly and asking yourself how you’re doing and answering honestly—can help you notice subtle changes in your mental health that you might miss otherwise, allowing you to intervene earlier. That intervention might look like taking a long weekend off, if you’re able to, or saying no to social invitations so you can get some much-needed downtime. “Noticing how you’re feeling can help you preemptively insert fail-safes into your schedule, which might provide a buoy while you’re under pressure from work, rather than waiting until things go off the rails,” Dr. Cyrus says.
Of course, subtle (and not-so-subtle) signs of work burnout may very well mean you need to make a bigger change. But self-check-ins can help there too: If you’re doing what you can to implement self-care strategies and you still find yourself regularly exhausted and/or overwhelmed by work, it might be time to consider finding a job—or even an industry—that’s a better fit. Or, if that’s just not possible at the moment, perhaps you can see if there’s another source of stress you can remove from your life (maybe a regular commitment you dread or a “friend” that weighs you down) to prevent your metaphorical mental candle from burning out.
Related:
