I published my first post with “burnout” in the title, “Burnout is real”,  in 2022. We were just coming out of the most intense phase of the COVID pandemic disruptions. The term was familiar to people, but the idea that it might be a real diagnosable medical condition was less well known. It might still be.

In March 2024, I interviewed a client of mine who had taken sick leave for burnout about her experience with clinically significant burnout. I learned a lot from that conversation. It gave me a different perspective on the situations other clients were facing, and a new perspective on some of the topics I’ve been writing about for years.

Burnout is characterised by severe fatigue. Physical fatigue may even result in collapsing at work. That physical fatigue will be accompanied by cognitive fatigue, symptoms of which include inability to concentrate, memory problems, and so on. Fatigue also contributes to emotional dysregulation.

Another major sign of burnout is starting to hate what you used to love. This may also present as a kind of malaise in which things seem meaningless.

Burnout is caused by exceeding your capacity for an extended period of time. Your physical capacity. Your cognitive capacity. Your emotional capacity. Your body will use adrenaline and cortisol to help you do this, but at some point, even your adrenal glands will give up. I hope you don’t get there.

If you get to that extreme stage, it is going to take time to recover. It is crucial to address fatigue earlier.

Structural conditions lead to burnout

It doesn’t surprise me that I wrote that first piece in the wake of the intense phase of COVID pandemic mitigations. There was a lot of extra work involved in making rapid transitions to different modes of working, managing children’s education more closely during the day, and doing the work of maintaining a household in the context of limits on the ability to shop, use outside help, and so on. There was also a lot of extra emotional labour. It was harder to get support for any of that. And it was relentless.

However, as I wrote in “You’re coping until you aren’t”, there are a lot of other structural changes contributing to an increase in burnout.

• Underfunding of higher education leading to institutional changes like:
  • Increased casualization of academic labour
  • Increased workloads for all staff (including academics), regardless of job security
  • Increased administrative and service work due to regulatory requirements
  • Increased student numbers
• A child-care crisis, both in terms of cost & availability
• Inflation affecting core needs like housing and food
• A care crisis for the elderly and disabled, putting more labour back on family members[end]

The political situation, climate change and its consequences, and all the other things that make the world feel increasingly dystopian, contribute to the cognitive and emotional load. If you are doing anything to address those things, that adds more physical work, too. I’ve written more about this aspect of things in The Dystopia, Uncertainty, and Disruption Spotlight.

It would obviously be better to address the underlying problems and prevent burnout collectively.

However, structural change takes a long time and a lot of effort. You need strategies you can use now. I agree with Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, that you can’t fight the structural stuff if you are burnt out.

Recovering from burnout

If you are at the stage of being properly, clinically, burnt out, recovery will be long and difficult. The longer you deny how bad it is and try to keep going, the worse it will get. I’m sorry. I know the ability to get the support you need to recover varies widely.

You will need to take sick leave. Probably months, not weeks.

You will need to rest: physically, cognitively, and emotionally. You may need medication and/or therapy to address anxiety and depression. Despite needing rest you may need medication to help you sleep, or to manage whatever is going on with your cortisol levels and related. When you have started to recover, you may need physiotherapy to rebuild stamina. Listen to (or read) the interview about my client’s experience for a sense of how this might look.

When I say rest, I mean radical rest. You will also need new habits to counteract the habits that have led you to burn out. There may be an intense phase in which you can do practically nothing. It will take a long time to build back up to what feels like a normal or reasonable capacity. During that time, you may need to think about the energy needs of activities you’ve never really thought about before. I wrote 2 posts on the theme “So Tired You Could Cry”, one of which talks about what “low power mode” might look like. The other gives you permission to cry, because the effort involved in not doing so is going to make things worse.

I wrote a post many years ago about The Importance of Quitting that might also be helpful. At least temporarily you are going to have to quit a lot of stuff. Sick leave is a form of quitting. Some of that will be temporary, but your experience of burnout may also lead you to reflect on whether you want to quit some things long term. Maybe your job. Maybe just particular roles within your job.

Preventing burnout

If you aren’t already burnt out, I hope you now have a better sense of what that might look like and why it would be better not to let things get that bad. The rest of this Spotlight will look at prevention.

Many of the posts linked here were not written with burnout in mind. I was thinking more about work-life balance when I wrote them. But, looking back at the things I’ve written in the past several years through the lens of burnout, I can see that there is a lot of useful information here.

There are two main framing ideas I will use to organize this material.

1. The first is about preventing overwork in the first place, which is related to the importance of meaningful work.
2. The second is about preventative self-care.

As with recovery, you may find it useful to seek professional support from medical professionals, mental health professionals, physiotherapists and fitness trainers, or others. You don’t have to wait for things to get to a crisis point to do this.

1. Preventing burnout: Saying No & Meaningfulness

If the main cause of burnout is overwork, and one of the main symptoms is loss of meaning, it follows that doing less and making sure what you are doing includes the things that are meaningful to you is important for prevention.

I’ve written so much about both of these topics that they have Spotlights of their own:

• Saying No
• Meaningfulness Matters

To get started, there are a few posts that serve as good, emergency saying no techniques.

Sometimes things accumulate gradually and when you notice you have too much, you can’t just drop things immediately. Declaring a moratorium on new things at this point at least stops things from getting worse. It’s not all or nothing. You can also adjust *how* you do the things you are committed to. I talk about this in “Two questions to help you avoid burnout“.

You might be able to extend the timelines for some of your commitments. It’s okay to ask for an extension, especially for commitments you’ve made for yourself.

Part of the trick is changing your mindset, though. You are probably ambitious, and that’s okay, but you need to consider pacing yourself. Boundaries, Balance, and the Whole You and You Can Take Your Time provide some ideas for thinking about this process.

It is okay to ask for help. This may be uncomfortable. Academia rewards independence, sometimes too much. Using the supports you need: Part 2 reframes asking for help as supporting your independence.

2. Preventing Burnout: Self-care

Recognizing that you have limited capacity, physical, cognitive, and emotional, and trying not to exceed it is crucial to preventing burnout. If there are periods where you need to do so, or if you work best in intense bursts, you must balance those with periods for rest and recovery.

So many people tell me that they don’t know how to rest or are not very good at rest. Rest (and self-care more generally), doesn’t have to be another thing you either excel or fail at. You need to figure out what works for you.

Think of it as managing energy. You might not have a good sense of how much energy different things you do even takes. It’s also common not to think about the energy needs of some of your regular activities

Start by noticing. It may take a while to figure all this out, and you can make small changes as you go. There are details about what to notice in the linked post.

I’ve also written several things about rest over the years. How to take the weekend off and How to take a vacation and Taking a real break between semesters focus on periods where resting is your main activity. Resting when you can’t stop working focuses on those times you need to rest but can’t focus solely on rest.

You may need a plan for what kinds of activities constitute rest for you. You want to avoid that situation where you feel like you aren’t really doing anything anyway so you might as well pick up that article or thesis you need to read, or whatever. Don’t worry if you aren’t very good at it, you can get better with practice.

There is also a post on eating well, in which people have shared some of their strategies in the comments. Use the 2 questions to prevent burnout alongside this so you don’t turn eating well into another thing that’s pushing you to do too much!

I also recommend Emily & Amelia Nagoski’s book, Burnout, for lots of evidence-based self-care tips, including actions you can take to process the cortisol your body produces to prevent it building up too much and causing serious health problems.

I wish you didn’t need to do this, too

It would be great if we didn’t live in the kind of dystopia where risk of burnout is high and we have to take these individual steps to manage your risk. As the interview I did with my client illustrated, even when we do these things, we might still burn out. That indicates just how much pressure many of you are under, and underlines how important the preventative measures are.

There is a lot of criticism of self-care advice and university “wellness” programs as a response to burnout and overwork. I agree that institutions should be doing more than giving you this kind of advice. They have the power to do structural things to reduce your risk of burnout, and to use their position to at least try to influence governments and others.

You can be angry that your university isn’t doing more *and* do what you can individually to manage your risk.

The other thing that came across clearly in the interview, is the importance of collective action. This doesn’t need to be big. Look for ways to make small changes to the context in which all of you are working in solidarity with a few colleagues.

• Use whatever power and influence you have to make sure wellbeing is considered when institutional decisions are made. Getting that in the minutes of the meeting is the first step towards decisions that actually try to address it.
• Talking about the personal decisions you are making helps create a culture in which it is easier for other people to make those decisions.
• Creating safe spaces in which more vulnerable colleagues can share their struggles and be supported in making unpopular decisions helps, even if being open more generally is still unsafe.
• Add concern for overwork and well-being to existing union discussions. This is especially important to ensure that proposed action to address the working conditions of the most precarious employees aren’t increasing the likelihood of burnout for the most secure.[end]
• The structural conditions contributing to burnout are not limited to your institution. Collective action extends to wider political engagement. Education policy and funding constrains your institution’s scope for action. Policies affecting childcare, eldercare, and healthcare also contribute.

Structural change is painfully slow. Do what you can within the limits of your capacity. Look after yourself to increase that capacity.

Related Posts:

Spotlight On: Dystopia, Uncertainty & Disruption

Spotlight On: Saying No

Spotlight On: Meaningfulness Matters

Go back to the top of the Spotlight On: Burnout.