How to overcome burnout

This story is part of our mental health series. Find out more here.

If you wake up every morning feeling exhausted, can't focus at work, or get antsy every time you hear the ping of your Slack messages, you may be burned out.

During the pandemic, more people started to complain that they felt done in by hustle culture, or the idea that we need to relentlessly overwork ourselves at the expense of our well-being. More and more people started quiet quitting, a phenomenon that spread on social media where people said they were only doing the bare minimum at work.

Burnout is “caused by a toxic environment, being overworked, unrealistic workloads, and it can also be caused by just the fear of losing one's job,” said Angela Neal-Barnett, a psychology professor at Kent State University and author of the book, “Soothe Your Nerves The Black Women's Guide to Understanding and Overcoming Anxiety, Panic, and Fear.”

“It's not going to go away in one day or two days because it's the environment. It's what's happening at work that is creating the burnout,” she said. “We think, ‘OK, if I just get through this day, it'll be OK.’ And then you realize, ‘Oh my goodness, I've got to get through every day feeling like this.’ ”

What are the signs of burnout? 

“The fear that when that Slack bell goes off or if you drive to work and you find yourself gripping the steering wheel for 10 minutes, steeling yourself to go into the building. It can be things like you're just sitting in your office and you look up and an hour has passed and you've done nothing. Just dread, anxiety, all those types of things are symptoms that you are burned out.”

How is burnout different from depression? 

“Well, depression is a mental health disorder, and it's not uncommon for people who are experiencing burnout to actually undergo a depressive episode. But depression is different than burnout. It's characterized by sadness or irritability for most days, most of the time, so a major depressive episode would be feeling sad or irritable for two weeks for almost the entire day.

“And then there's some other things that go along with that something called anhedonia, which is nothing gives me pleasure. You may sleep all the time or you may sleep not at all. You should see changes in your eating. You can also find yourself not wanting to be around people, so isolating yourself, and that's different than what we get with burnout.”

What can you do about burnout?  

“The first place to go to tell is [human resources]. They're tasked with helping to change the environment. If you're in a toxic environment, if there are people in your department who are making unrealistic demands on everyone, then change cannot occur if people don't know.”

How can you set better boundaries between work and life? 

“One of the first things that people do is they just take a mental health day. That's helpful, but that's not going to change much. You set that boundary that I will not bring work home, or I will not work from six to nine, particularly if you have children.

“You come home, maybe we will eat dinner together. I'll help them with their homework, or we'll stream a program. We'll watch a sporting event, and then I will work after they go to bed. But you set those kinds of boundaries or you just say, ‘I'm not going to work once I get home. I am going to be home and attempt to be present.’ ”

How can leaning on your support system help you overcome burnout? 

“I can use myself as a success story. During the pandemic, we were all working from home, so there was not a workplace and not setting boundaries. [So I went to] a trusted group of friends and said, ‘This is how I am feeling, and I don't want to do this anymore,’ because that's one of the signs of burnout saying, ‘I don't want to do this anymore,’ and coming up with solutions with setting the boundaries. When I had to work, [I worked] and when I didn't have to work, [I was] not working. And putting that into place certainly, for me, helped greatly.

“So I share that to say it's having people remind you that you don't have to be everything to everybody, and having people remind you that who you are doesn't depend on the amount of work that you do and also just remembering that work doesn't love you back.”

Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Raphelson also adapted it for the web.