What Actually Causes Burnout and Extreme Exhaustion?
“Leadership at this company is just so angry. Anything sets them off, and everyone else - anyone else - is to blame. I’m used to it though, and I just focus on shielding my team so they don’t know how bad it is. I can’t afford to lose them.”
What causes burnout? If you came here for the short answer: burnout is caused by chronically incomplete stress cycles combined with continued exposure to stress.
The exhaustion and apathy of burnout is a natural response to stress your nervous system thinks will never go away, so its survival mechanisms preserve what energy remains by shutting down your ability to do anything beyond the basics (exhaustion), preventing you from caring (apathy), and making you believe any effort at change or meaning-seeking would be futile (personal inefficacy).
But the simple answer is unsatisfying, confusing, academic-speak at best; and, at worst, perpetuates burnout by pinning the responsibility entirely on you, the person about to explode from an impossibly long list of demands, at least half of which seem to be the “self-care” and “gratitude list making” we’re “supposed to do” in our never ending quest to have and handle it all, while maintaining dewey, wrinkle-free skin and a perfectly pleasant demeanor.
The real causes of burnout don’t come from your incompetence, your “didn’t try hard enough to not try hard enough” failures.
It’s much deeper than that, and these stories can help you see why we have normalized burnout and burnout culture to the point of disappearance, why the causes remain so hidden to us, and why our agency for change - which is real; recovery is possible - feels like a gaslighting joke.
What really causes burnout? Pervasive, powerful social and economic systems that convince us our worth is equal to our economic production or service to perpetuating the systems themselves, without regard for our actual capacity and our biological needs as humans, as mammals really: connection, meaning, rest, autonomy.
The systems manufacture or amplify the stressors in our lives, and they make us believe that we are the problem if we can’t meet their truly impossible and inhumane (in the sense of: not aligned with human well-being) demands.
For example: the expectation that your productivity shouldn’t adapt to your actual capacity is capitalism that sees you as a piece of a production system, not a node in a complex ecology that itself thrives when the nodes themselves flourish.
Maybe your job, and you, expect perfection and meeting everyone else’s needs even on your sick days; your days after you hit the big deadline; your weeks of seasonal depression; your months after your parent died when you think the grief is done, why am I still so foggy?
Let’s start with a side by side of the same person – you — and two different paths:
Version 1, how burnout happens: You’re venting to your industry friends about how your ridiculous, explosive, angry boss now also wants you to mentor junior staff, which adds more work to your already packed plate; isn’t something he’s asked male staff at your level to do; and means you have to fake that this is a great company for yet another group of people. You’re sure if you push back, or you’re honest and they quit, explosive people will explode, you might get fired too.
But you can’t leave. You need this job — two kids in the city, plus health insurance?, is expensive — and besides, the whole industry is like this. Where are you going to go?
It’s the unbalanced systems of capitalism and patriarchy (among others) causing the proximal stressors - feeling stuck in a hostile, unhealthy, and now utterly duplicitous, soul-emptying job.
But the more you vent, the more you take just enough of the edge off your stress to allow keep you showing up, begrudgingly — until the resentment and anxiety eat a hole in your stomach and you find it almost impossible to get out of bed in the morning because the dread and apathy is like a palette of bricks on your chest.
You go to the doctor and they prescribe antacids and anti-depressants.
Soon, you feel better enough to show up. You’re not a ray of sunshine, but you’re present. You’re doing what they need you to do and stay off their radar. Other physical symptoms appear, you get snappy with your spouse, but that’s this modern life of hard working people trying to get it all done, right?
Your job doesn’t know because you never say anything. Directly, anyway. Although if sighing under your breath and no-eyes-smiling-at-offensive-comments-from-Joe counted, you’d be good. Maybe they don’t care, maybe they would care, or could make changes, if you told them, but why bother, you think.
So the job doesn’t change - for you or anyone else who might be experiencing the same private desperation.
_______
Version 2, how burnout ends before it’s severe: You’re venting to your friends about how your ridiculous, explosive, angry boss now also wants you to mentor junior staff. Same story. Same reasons this is gross, unfair and insane.
But something about hearing yourself say these things, the knots in your stomach that have become constant, and hating the feeling of being so, if you’re being honest, depressed, in the morning tells you something is wrong, and you need to make a change.
It’s scary - Joe and the guys at the top have been in this industry for a long time, they know everyone, and they are prone to rage. You can’t imagine not having a salary while also looking for a job, but also can’t imagine trying to fit in a job search into this crammed life.
It’s been this way for so long. You can handle it. But your chest is tense. There are no good options.
You go for a run, a hard run. In the middle of a sprint, tears come up and your breath catches. “WTF? WHY AM I CRYING.” You let yourself ugly cry for a beat - probably thirty seconds in all. And then a big sigh. Your body feels loose, you start walking, and break into a restorative jog for the run home.
Nothing is different, nothing is solved. But you ask yourself: is this how you want to feel in three years? Will more time make it better? Will more accomplishments or acquiescing keep me safe?
Not only NO, but it’s probably going to feel worse in three years if this morning depression spreads to the rest of the day, and will be even harder to change then.
You know yourself well, and you trust your intuition. This isn’t who you want to be, you don’t have to prove your toughness to anyone, and you are employable elsewhere. You deserve a job that matches your strengths and a culture the allows you to flourish. it might not be perfect, but it’ll be better than this.
You figure out what’s most driving your morning depression and knotty stomach, and work up enough courage to talk to your boss about it.
The story can go anywhere from here: maybe you figure out a role that’s a better fit; maybe they make some changes to their culture because you were brave and clear enough to question stuff; maybe they do none of that and insinuate that you’re lazy, entitled, and weak, but you know none of that is true and you take your dignity and secure sense of self onto the job market and respectfully resign.
“No thanks”.
The first version of the story is how burnout happens, how it continues, and how it becomes culturally normal, spreading through workplaces, families, friend groups, professional organizations, school communities, etc.
It’s not your fault. The story represents how culture and systems make us think we have no power to deeply care for ourselves, to push back in small but mighty ways.
In the second version, this is how burnout fades before it moves in. And it doesn’t just fade for you - it fades for your colleagues, for your spouse, for your children both now as part of your stress-orbit, and when they enter the workforce.
In the second version, you’re still experiencing the same stressors, the same unfair systems. Your body is still letting you know it’s not safe out there.
But now, you’re able to do things we’ll talk about in the next section and the next blog post on recovery: complete the full stress cycle, including the changes part.
Maybe the entire system didn’t change, but it got one more piece of data, and other people in your shoes (there are ALWAYS other people) saw effective personal resistance and integrity modeled for them.
If the first version is your reality, that’s okay. There are REALLY good reasons why that path feels like the safest, most rational choice. Maybe the only choice.
Let me explain why.
What actually causes burnout?
“Burnout is the chronic state of being out of sync with one or more aspects of your life”, according to Paula Davis, a stress and resilience expert.
Out of alignment. Out of integrity - integrity, as Martha Beck says, not in the moral sense, but the physics sense, as in “whole”. Like a plane needs high internal integrity to take off and fly.
Stressors, Stress - and Enabling Social and Economic Systems 101
The root causes of burnout pull three factors together: Stressors, Stress (or the stress response), and Systems. Briefly:
Stressors: what causes stress. Stressors can be external - toxic bosses - or internal - fear of failure
Most people think burnout is caused by the stressors
Stress response: an adaptive cascade of cardiac, respiratory, cognitive, endocrine, musculoskeletal, reproductive, immune, and digestive changes driven by a flood of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol released by the brain.
The stress response produces the signs, symptoms, and accelerate you through the stages of burnout
The stress response is essential. But it gets a bad rap because it’s bad news when it goes from acute - there’s an immediate threat to address - to chronic - “life itself is the immediate threat.”
Social and economic systems are the almost hidden forces around which our entire economy and broad culture are organized. They can create and magnify the stressors; and their pervasiveness and grip can amplify the stress response as we experience a brutal internal tug of war between risky change and safe inertia.
Think of stress and stressors as velcro: a bunch of hooks (the scratchy side) that connect with loops (the softer side), when they come in contact
The hooks are the stressors, the loops are your stress response. If the particular potential threat (the hooks) finds a match in your body, your genetics, your history, your current state of being, your own way of perceiving and responding to the world (the particular design of the loops) - the velcro sticks.
If the hooks don’t match the loops, the velcro doesn't work. The same stressor doesn’t stick. But social and economic systems make the hooks hookier and the loops grippier. Stressors seem unavoidable; stress response feels like a tsunami.
Velcro: just a bunch of hooks and loops. Burnout: Just a bunch of stressors (hooks) activating your stress response (loops), and staying hooked (incomplete stress cycles)
Stress
Stress is a physiological and neurobiological — body and brain — experience. The stress cycle starts in the body when your sense organs perceive a change (change of any kind = threat). The proverbial lion on the savannah, for instance. Your brain issues a waterfall of chemicals and signals that lead to nearly instant effects that are meant to help us a.) assess the threat and b.) fight it, or flee
And I do mean waterfall. In less than a second, a huge rush of adrenaline, and then cortisol…
Raises your heart rate to pump more blood:
Constricts your veins (read: increases blood pressure) so blood can speed to your legs and arms (and away from your torso; buh bye digestion);
Widens your pupils while also narrowing the field of vision to maximize visual input from what is right in front of you, only
Amplifies your amygdala and limbic system for the fastest processing responses to immediate threat and danger
Down regulates your prefrontal cortex because rational high order thinking, curiosity, and executive functioning are a total waste of time when faced with a ferocious lion
If your brain and body determine you can neither fight nor flee the threat, more F-letter stress responses follow: freeze and flop (in mammalian terms: play dead) or fawn (neutralize the threat by calming it down with your own chipper, charming, accommodating self).
If all goes well, you survive. You successfully fight, flee, trick the threat into thinking you’re uninteresting and/or dead, or neutralize it with your calm demeanor. Then your body will do what it has evolved for millennia to do, and what almost all other mammals will do: Shake. Sigh. Laugh. Cry. Hug someone. Dance. But mostly shake.
Think of how a dog will shake after chasing a rabbit or spotting a squirrel or growling at another dog. We’re supposed to do that too. It’s how our bodies know that everything is safe again - because our bodies wouldn’t be able to do those things if we were still fighting the threat. .
If we don’t metabolize the stress chemicals, if we don’t complete the stress cycle - our body still thinks it’s being chased, that the threat is still active. And we get stuck in a perpetual stress response.
Which leads to hypertension, digestive issues, chronic pain, hair loss, brain fog, and drains our adrenals (that were producing all that adrenaline and cortisol) so that we have absolutely no energy to do anything — including fight back or fix the problem.
In other words, it leads to the burnout cycle.
What affects the stress response? What makes the stress response worse?
Because we all have different exposures and experiences to these systems and their pulls - before birth, from birth, in our current lives - our stress responses are highly personal. They might even vary day to day for the same person.
Ever shattered a mug on the tile floor and laughed it off? But last week you dropped the mug right after your kid rejected your last ditch effort at getting some semblance of nutrition in their body for the day (real question: how is it possible to not like buttered toast?) - and you burst into tears?
Same stressor, different stress.
Any of these factors can amplify the reactivity and intensity of your stress response:
What came before today (check this post for more on burnout multipliers):
Trauma, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse including emotional neglect and chronic childhood misattunement
Experience of shame for “otherness”, including people of color who experience racism; neurodivergence in a world that prioritizes neurotypicality; sexual and gender minorities in a cis het world
Consistent childhood roles: Are you an “emotional support oldest daughter” who single handedly kept the family semi-functional? Golden child who held all the family’s ambitions? Maybe the family scapegoat?
Other life experiences that overwhelmed your nervous system and may still be driving a hypervigilant, hair-trigger stress response
Genetics and epigenetics: the trauma and unhealed harms of any of the above in our parents, grandparents, great grandparent - generations - that science now shows live in our bodies and nervous systems.
Your current situation:
Your self awareness of your history, habits, blind spots, and stress responses
Your ability to self-regulate (neither suppress nor get lost in) intense emotional states
The culture of your workplace right now (high urgency, 24 hour or less turnarounds, no room for error, open and dysfunctional conflict, blame for mistakes – all of this will light up your sympathetic nervous system like a Christmas tree when a stressor hits)
The intensity of cultural beliefs in your air, right now. Family, community, cultural milieu, your social media feed (do not underestimate this one!)
Your physiological state: sleep, workouts (too much, too little), substance use, vagal tone (HRV), nutrition, and microbiome
Brain: mental health, neural highways
Medications that may activate the stress response
The Stress Cycle
There’s another way to un-Velcro: complete the stress cycle, meaning to healthily metabolize the stress chemicals coursing through your body, regulate your nervous system - and then make some changes (even internal frame shifts).
The stress cycle concept was popularized by Emily and Amelia Nagoski in Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.
“Dealing with stress is a separate process from dealing with the things that cause your stress. To deal with your stress you have to complete the cycle.”
Important: The stress cycle isn’t something you do so you can survive your status quo. It’s what you do so you can do the hard, creativity-demanding work of change from a full cup and regulated state.
It’s also not “wellness culture”, performative or obligatory self-care (“If one more person tells me to make a gratitude list, I’m going to punch them in the face.” – Emily and Amelia Nagoski in Burnout)
We cover this more fully in the post on Real Burnout Recovery, but here’s the gist:
Notice you’re stressed
Pick a cycle completer (or multiple!):
Ideally, move, in some way: Top choices: Run, walk, shake, dance, heavy work like weight lifting or yard work. Bonus for outdoors.
Laugh or cry
Connect with other humans (physical touch, hugs, or just a quick but genuine positive moment)
Notice your regulation, mark it as something your body can access - it’ll help you notice the stress next time, which is often a big challenge for people.
What difference does the stress cycle make? Think back to the stories above. They shared:
The same stressors (toxic boss, work overload, feeling taken advantage of and undervalued, unfairness)
The same systems (capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny maybe; we don’t know your other identities so racism, ableism, and other oppressive biases could be at play) and
Similar initial stress responses (stomach upset, morning dread)
But only in the second version, the one where changes came, did you complete the stress cycle - the running, the crying, the sighing. Those insights are possible, technically, without completing the cycle. But completing the cycle means you are renewing your energy to be able to fully live those changes, and roll with whatever punches the systems throw you on your way out.
Change is hard at baseline - you need your full capacity, which relies on a system cleared of stress residue, to actually stick the change.
Systems
Back to the Velcro analogy: the stressors are the hooks, the stress is the loop.
A major enabling factor on both sides - loopier loops, hookier hooks - are pervasive, powerful, and unchecked social and economic systems around which our cultures and economies are organized. These systems are designed to produce power and productivity.
They will never, naturally, produce “holistic well being and healthy, connected humans”.
What we often see (and blame) are the stressors — the stress-response activating factors that hook onto our loops.
What we miss is why those stressors exist, why they continue to exist, and why they hook onto our loops, and why our loops hold tight so fiercely.
Why doesn’t the unpleasantness of stress mean we just unhook from the loops and move on to greener pastures?
Why, to ask the big question, do these systems continue if they contribute to such broad-scale burnout?
Most people think burnout comes from the immediate and obvious stressors - the ceaseless demands and sleepless nights of parenting; the impossible expectations of a high turnover career; the conveyor belt of horrific injustices in our modern world; and sometimes just plain “big losses and life events”.
The endless, and I do mean endless, emails from the PTA.
Listen, stressors don’t make life easy.
But they’re often just the most visible symptoms of the systems that, when unchecked, allow the symptoms to wreak havoc on our lives. The stressors are the hooks, the systemic forces and how sensitive we are to them are the loops.
Two important facts about systems:
All systems are perfectly designed to produce the results they’re getting: If you’re burned out, if you’re exhausted, and so are a lot of other people around you, that’s by design.
Those results naturally get bigger (amplifying feedback loops) without opposing forces
What systems am I talking about? They include, but are not limited to…
Capitalism
Paternalism
Patriarchy
Racism
“Meritocracy” (if the quotes, or meritocracy being listed here at all, get you mad, that’s great, stick with me)
Reflexively centering the status quo: neurotypicals, cis gendered folks, heterosexuality, monogamy, white people and the global north
These systems contribute forcefully to burnout, and answer the “Why do these systems continue if they produce maladaptive results?”, because they are all:
Pervasive to the point of disappearance (like water to fish, we barely notice them)
Powerfully supported by the people who benefit from them
Entrenched. Our entire lives are organized around them
Self-perpetuating, training us to believe the stress we feel, the injustices we see aren’t real; or that they are our fault for not working harder, for not being talented enough to be chosen, seen, privileged.
Let’s talk about #4, the self-perpetuating part. Like a virus that enters a cell and changes the cell’s DNA so that it replicates more of the virus, these systems use cultural systems and our own internalized beliefs to keep themselves alive.
Take internalize capitalism, for instance. There’s nothing wrong with “work ethic”, commitment, perseverance, and some sacrifice for what truly matters to you. But when you start tying your worth to production, and experience any of the following, you’ve internalized capitalistic beliefs at the expense of your own well-being (cue burnout and cue “burnout is my fault”):
To borrow from Spunout, a youth-based behavioral support service, “Internalised capitalism is the idea that your self-worth is directly linked to your productivity or how well you can perform in a capitalist society. You might be experiencing internalised capitalism if you:
Often feel guilty for resting
Prioritise work over your wellbeing
Always feel like you should be doing more
Believe you are lazy for resting, even if you are experiencing pain, trauma or adversity
Worrying that you should be further along in your life/ career than you are”
Who can’t relate to that? Of course burnout culture is normalized as “productivity culture”, “hustle culture”, “adult life in the modern world culture”
Those pressures, stressors, expectations we covered above - they are all sources of burnout, but they’re not the root sources.
They’re just the visible symptoms of a myth that lies at the root of burnout: that we each equally have the individual agency to simply opt out of the systems around which our entire economy and culture are organized, to just not be bothered by the inhumanity of systems that aim to, for example, reduce the lungs of the earth to “possible producible hectares of paper pulp”.
It’s just not true. The systems are the air we breathe, their effects are real, and so is their grip - which holds on tightest to the people most central to keeping the myth going and least able to interrupt it.
We can’t, by our individual selves, control whether these systems exist today.
What we do have control over, however, is:
(a) how we respond to the stress of these systems
(b) whether we hear the messages of that stress
(c) whether we believe we have any agency
(d) how we use that agency to act on the messages of that stress
The next blog post covers what we can control, where our recovery power lies.
For now, just know the heart of your burnout are these systems, which amplify both your stress response, and the stressors themselves. They make it harder to complete the stress cycle, see change, and make it happen - which is why burnout is so common and hard to recover from. We normalize it, we deny it, we shame ourselves out of recovery and back into the cycle.
It’s so damn hard to recover and stay out by design. But it is both possible, and our responsibility, to see where we do have agency, and act where we can.
The Problem is Bigger than You, But You Have a Role in the Solutions
Burnout is caused by repeatedly incomplete stress cycles, but a lot of people hear that as blame. “Another thing I didn’t do and now I have so much catching up AND I’m exhausted and apathetic, I feel hopeless”.
It’s not your fault. It’s hard. It’s likely no one really taught you, and even if they did, all these systems we live in do their best to self-perpetuate by Niagara Falls-ing on your Garden Hose of pushback.
Completing the stress cycle is complex. It’s not as simple as going for a run or punching a pillow as a checkbox - and especially not to just get back to life, to survive. It’s the willingness to complete the stress cycle fully, to tell your body you’re safe again, and from this place, notice what needs to change.
Most of us are learning this later in life - if at all. Welcome.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Causes of Burnout
Why is burnout so common?
That’s also why burnout is so common - because actually completing the stress cycle and activating change is rarely something that we’re taught, is modeled for us, or is welcomed by the systems we’re seeking to change.
It’s much easier to normalize the stress, rationalize the pain as “the price of admission” to an ambitious life,
From just the office-based work arena: Being the only one to actually shut off on vacation; the only one to use all your PTO, the only one to leave at 4:30, every day, with no apologies; the only one to block off 8-10am for no meetings and really hold to it because you know 8-10am is either the best, or your worst, time of day, and either way you shouldn’t be in meetings – the pushback, especially in high burnout cultures, is enormous.
Of course you’re all exhausted and busy and stressed. Of course at the end of a “good day” you still grab a large glass of wine because you need something for yourself. Of course you’re looking back at those exact good days as proof that you are surviving, it’s fine, it’s just hard right now.
Of course it’s not getting better, it’s only getting worse - for you, your colleagues, your families who are receiving your stress.
Because pushing back against these systems and sticking the landing - staying with it - is an act of revolutionary bravery.
And who has the consistent 7-9 hours of sleep a night for that??
But if this is what we need to be able to show up ready to shape the day and receive what it throws back and find joy in the process, then this is what we need.
2. What causes burnout at work?
In our previous post on burnout symptoms, we covered how the World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes burnout as a diagnosable condition - when it results from workplace stress.
We know that burnout can come from anywhere demands exceed capacity, and our ability to opt out of those demands is compromised or limited (in reality or perception).
But we spend at least a quarter of our weekly hours at work, usually our best waking hours. For stay at home parents, they are almost never not working while awake (or ever??). So of course it’s going to be a major driver of burnout.
Christina Maslach, a foremost researcher on burnout at work, grouped the drivers of workplace burnout into six buckets:
Lack of control (especially when combined with #4, work overload)
Values misalignment
Insufficient reward
Work Overload (the most common and visible driver for most folks)
Unfairness
Breakdown of community
Let’s talk about #6, because we often underestimate its power to make or break burnout
All of these are important, and burnout almost always happens when there’s more than one of these challenges, but number six is big and not talked about often.
Humans need connection. We’ve heard about the loneliness epidemic, we know how hard it is to make friends after college, we know that chronic loneliness can have the same physiological impact as 15 cigarettes a day.
But we often forget that can - must - expect work to generate connection too. We spend a LOT of time there! Theoretically away from kids! We don’t have to be best friends with everyone, and it certainly should not be overtly labeled “family” (see toxic workplace signs, below), but the safety and connection of human interaction happens in micromoments.
Barbara Fredrickson, in Love 2.0 convincingly argues that love isn’t the eternal bond and commitment of marriage or partnership - that’s the byproduct of love.
Love, as the body knows it, which is what actually counts when we are talking about human well-being, is actually a “micromoment of warmth and connection you share with another human being”. It needs regular renewing, and can’t be faked (your body knows the difference).
Connection at work isn’t just “Are there happy hours and ping pong tables and people who will tell me if I have a stain on my shirt?”.
It’s: Do I regularly feel trusted, cared for, seen, loved? Do I feel accepted, fully, as myself? Do I trust, care for, and deeply accept other people? When I’m down, stressed, over capacity, does my body believe I can be vulnerable with people safely? That I can work with my colleagues to find a way out? If I’m down or different from my normal self, will someone notice, will someone care?
If you see that dysfunctional behaviors are tolerated, if passive aggressiveness is the preferred mode of peace-keeping, if people only talk about work, or themselves at those happy hours - your body doesn’t feel love, it doesn’t recognize community.
Because we’re not culturally attuned to the power of a healthy community - and the destructive power of it’s opposite, an empty or even hostile environment - we’re slow to notice the effects. But they creep up, mostly manifesting as apathy - these people don’t care about me, I don’t care about these people… or the work we do together.
3. Who is most likely to burnout?
The people who are most likely to burnout are those who have the hardest time completing stress cycles and making changes.
We talked about some of the factors that lead to a highly reactive stress response system. Usually, early conditioning makes it hard to recognize stress as abnormal and something worth addressing through assertive change.
Layered on top of that, there are important identities, experiences, and characteristics that tend to correlate with a hypervigilant and highly reactive stress response - and difficulty completing, sometimes even starting, the stress response cycle.
Specifically:
People with a strong flight, freeze, or fawn stress response
Avoidance, procrastination, then panicked completion
People pleasing
Conflict avoidance
Co-dependency (high need to manage other people’s problems)
Over-responsibility for fixing, shielding, rescuing
Challenges with vulnerability
Perfectionism
Fear of failure
Emotional avoidance (note: this does not mean having no emotions; people with strong emotions are most likely to practice emotional avoidance)
Identities tied to external factors: achievement, titles, likes, salary, other’s perceptions
People who struggle to identify emotional states (alexythymia) and internal bodily sensations (interoception)
Neurodivergence: shame, struggle to keep up; feel like the world wasn’t made for them to succeed, work overload can happen very fast; deep sense of justice and moral compass so values misalignment, unfairness, lack of control, and breakdown in community (esp tolerating bad behaviors) are all more likely
Chronic illness, including mental health struggles, and disabilities: visible or invisible; managing chronic illnesses is a full time job; everything is harder, often no one sees it
Other historically marginalized including POC and Queer folks: Othered, shame, never good enough, always wondering if their identity is the reason for good or bad events; weathering - allostatic load
Trauma history (which can activate and/or intensify almost any bullet on this list) - profound physiological, cognitive, and mental health effects
4. What do people believe are the causes of burnout, but actually aren’t? What are some myths about the sources?
There are a lot of myths about what causes burnout. For example:
It comes from work, only. Mostly working too many hours.
Individual poor choices. That’s your fault if you signed up for too many bake sales, too many direct reports, too many projects… too many (i.e. > 0) kids.
Burnout comes from our individual inability to “handle” the stress of work, of work and life. Whoever can’t hack it pulls out the “Burnout Card” and leaves the work to people who can handle it.
Burnout comes from stressors - the external factors that make life hard.
Not just working in a hard job, but working in a hard job while your sleep-deprived, young-child-parenting self manages family doctors appointments, maybe coordinating a house move, finding and managing babysitters, sourcing and wrapping (side note: I HATE wrapping) all the family birthday gifts, physical and emotional parental caretaking, and tries their best to keep up with the subtle, or not so subtle, expectations of the PTA, the influencers, the #bossbabe life.
The stressors.
But burnout is actually the result of chronically unprocessed stress, which is our body’s natural, learned reaction to all the stressors. Not just the stressors from work, but from anywhere and everywhere. Including from completely invisible, pervasive forces that make it almost impossible to process that stress.
Not everyone reacts - even can react - to the same stressor in the same way, the same one a disturbing event may evoke post traumatic stress disorder in one person, but not in another.
These are not just individual choices, folks.
5. If these systems produce such awful results for many people, why do they continue?
They’re continuing because, as you’ve probably guessed, they produce pretty decent results for some people who have always had power. Those people have a LOT to lose if the systems erode.
Again: these systems aren’t inherently and uniformly bad (except for one ;), but they have no inherent reason to care for humans in a way that undermines the results they are designed to produce (status quo; economic efficiency and production; power; hierarchy).
So just call it out! Fight back! Say no!
Sure. And also, it takes enormous energy, privilege, courage, and awareness to do so
Because here’s the thing: those systems also know how to
Keep themselves hidden and
Convince people they harm that their pain isn’t real, or it’s their fault.
That’s right. These systems perpetuate themselves, in part, through the classic emotional abuse technique of gaslighting - convincing you that you are crazy or weak for complaining, for experiencing pain. All so the systems keep system-ing, the people in power stay in power, the economy keeps “humming”, and nothing changes.
So “calling it out” and “fighting back” isn’t even… on the radar for most people.
And even if we DO see the systems for what they are, most folks hold those beliefs, habits, assumptions, and subconscious behaviors we talked about earlier that prevent them from pattern interrupting these behemoths.
6. What are internal stressors that contribute to burnout?
Remember when I said not everyone responds the same to stressors? Not everyone experiences the same kind of stress, the need for the same level of stress cycle intervention, for the same stressors?
That applies to your internal beliefs too. As they saying goes, “don’t believe everything you think…”
That’s easier for some people than others. While these social and economic systems are everywhere - the air we breathe - they’re not uniformly everywhere. Every family relates to and passes on the messages of these systems differently. Every work, family, and community culture has its own take.
The systems are just like air: they’re almost impossible to see when you’re in them and their density varies.
For example: Maybe your air is a little lighter than most.
If you come from a family that held these systems at a healthy arm’s length, helped you develop an authentic and confident connection to yourself; if you grew up with your parents modeling and encouraging your full emotional expression, and helped you make sense of and name the feelings your kid self couldn’t understand; if you were taught to see injustice and call it out, to not normalize, rationalize, or hide to protect your own feelings of discomfort and you carry that edge with you today; if your circle now includes people who “produce” in all kinds of ways, for all kinds of pay, because their worth as a friend isn’t tied to their job status; if your family and friend group normalizes direct conflict, opting out of gatherings when you’re depleted, and otherwise speaking truly and kindly; if your people generally light up and become more engaged when you offer a differing opinion (“I actually didn’t like that movie”, “Oh really! Tell me more!”)…
… then your air is lighter, healthier. And when you’re in air dense with the ill effects of the systems, you feel it immediately. You’re not well-adapted, and that’s a great thing.
But that’s not the story for most of us.
Most of us were raised by families, and cultures, who were themselves raised in these systems, for generations. Many of those generations, down through our parents, risked their lives to disagree with those systems. So of course, part of our inheritance is not just the unconscious patterning of those systems, but a deathly, almost existential fear of behaving outside of the system, of going against the grain, of exile from the group.
Our adult worlds echo that childhood when we were praised for being agreeable, for acquiescing, for prioritizing the experience of others over our own, for intolerance of “bad” expressions (anger, jealousy, crying, unproductivity etc), for being tough and minimizing our pain, for meeting the conditions of love (manic studying and good grades, extra work, the most competitive colleges, the most stable and lucrative career paths...
What that looks like today, in your adult life, are conscious and subconscious beliefs that function as internal stressors. If you believe them - if you let the hooks find the loops - they will activate your stress response.
Examples include:
“If I’m not helping and serving to an extreme degree, I’m selfish. I’m lazy or not good enough.”
“If I don’t make a lot more money this year than last year and every year in the future, I’m a terrible provider, I’m a failure.”
“If I’m not constantly available for my bosses, my colleagues, my kids, my spouse, my parents, my in-laws, my friends, I’m irresponsible and inconsiderate and not a team player.”
“If I show weakness, if I admit this is too hard, if I cry, if I say no or push back, if I disagree with an opinion, if I ask for help, especially if I ask for help before it’s an obvious crisis, if I’m vulnerable in any way - I’m not good enough. I’m not strong, I’m incapable, not worthy.”
“If I don’t look or act like them - my natural hair, the clothes I’m comfortable in, the way I most naturally speak - I’ll be fired, and never be hired. I’ll lose everything I’ve worked for, and my whole life will be at risk.”
“If I show them who I really am and ask for what I really need - more time, clear tasks, more time for breaks, more things in writing, fidgets in meetings, not to be penalized when I don’t want to go to happy hour… they’ll roll their eyes, they’ll think I’m lazy, I might be fired. I won’t ever be good enough, I won’t ever be able to earn a living.”
If these beliefs sound familiar, if just reading these beliefs knot up your stomach or hunch up your shoulders, let me first say, it’s not your fault.
But it will be your responsibility to see it and do something about it if you want something to change.
