Do You Have Burnout or Are You Just Bored at Work?

It’s a familiar feeling to many of us: You’re on your fourth Zoom call of the day and your eyes are itching. Your head hurts and your body feels weighed down with rocks. You’re not sure you even remember what happiness feels like. This must be the infamous burnout, right? Or, bear with me, could you just be really bored?

Burnout has become a modern buzzword. It was first described back in 1974 by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, who found himself incapable of experiencing joy after an extended period of working long hours. Today, the term defines a psychic state marked by unshakeable mental and emotional exhaustion, a pervasive sense of futility, and the depletion of empathy, care and compassion. In 2019, it was officially recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a “syndrome” – just in time for everyone’s minds to be fried by COVID. Crucially though, the WHO defined burnout as “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Basically, the term should only really be used to describe symptoms caused by work. But this hasn’t stopped the condition taking on a life of its own.

Now, burnout is seen as the ultimate expression of the psychic distress wrought by “life under late capitalism”. You can trace it back to a 2019 Buzzfeed article titled “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”. “It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments,” its author Anne Helen Petersen argued. “And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.” Four years and a global pandemic later though, some people are starting to think broad-brush definitions like this might have led us to misunderstand or misdiagnose our experiences.

Obviously, it’s clear that a lot of people aren’t having a great time. The phrase "I am tired" is at its most googled point since Google Trends data began in 2004, and a Gallup poll published last year found the world was sadder and more stressed than ever before. Another poll from last year, conducted by Future Forum, also found that burnout from workplace stress is at an all-time high. But, are all these things one and the same, or are we actually in danger of watering down what burnout really means – using it as a convenient catch-all for feeling sad, stressed, bored or a bit tired? Are we really all burnt out all the time?

New research from Aalto University has found that “Zoom fatigue” might actually be a result of boredom. Assistant professor Niina Nurmi, who led the study, wrote that she “expected to find that people get stressed in remote meetings. But the result was the opposite.” She found that the exhaustion people reported didn’t stem from stress or mental overload, but mental underload. Differentiating between the two is important because – surprise, surprise – different problems have different solutions. And it’s an important distinction to make: Calling everything burnout, and then saying that it’s just the way things are doesn’t actually help make things better.

Psychologist Dr Ree Langham from Impulse Therapy, lays out some guidelines. “Stress is usually short-lived and situation-specific,” she says. “It’s an acute and immediate response to a specific task and often alleviates once completed. Boredom typically stems from a lack of engagement and is alleviated by a change in environment.” Burnout can be brought on by prolonged stress, but the important point is when symptoms shift from acute to chronic, Langham says. “Stress might lead to hyperactivity and urgent feelings, but burnout is associated with hopelessness and disengagement.”

“You can be stressed about your job, and not burnt out,” says Jill Cotton, career trends expert at Gumtree, “you can be bored and not burnt out.” She believes the intricacies of burnout are often misunderstood, especially since the pandemic. “Burnout became a buzzword of the COVID era as many struggled to fit work alongside homeschooling, or experienced being cut off from the normal support networks of family and friends.”

But, she says it’s important to be able to distinguish between temporary pressure and stress, and the chronic condition of burnout. “True burnout is so much more,” Cotton says. “It can leave you with crippling exhaustion and cause a total lack of disengagement from those you work with and the role you have been employed to do.” She suggests a simple test: “If you still have space in your mind to think about other things, it’s likely you’re simply not being challenged, and are bored rather than burnt out.”

Dr Ritz, a consultant counselling psychologist, also stresses the intense nature of burnout. “The daily ability to function at work decreases to the point of impossible,” she says. “A job that maybe once brought purpose and joy can be experienced with feelings of dread, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment.” So, while many may have felt intense pressure at work, “far fewer experience the levels of exhaustion and depletion needed to meet the true definition of burnout,” Cotton says. Essentially, we might be wildly over-diagnosing it and undermining its true severity in one fell swoop.

There are good reasons for this, though. “The combination of pressures affecting employees can explain why there is a growing misdiagnosis of burnout,” says Dr Alexandra Dobra-Kiel, behavioural scientist and workplace expert from Behave Consultancy. “The shift to remote work, while providing flexibility, has introduced new challenges,” Dobra-Kiel says, “including difficulty in separating work from personal life, technology-related stress and, most importantly, loneliness.”

Georgina Fairhall, founder and CEO of WAC (a worker-tech app for hourly-paid workers) also suggests changes in work culture might be contributing to a widespread psychic crisis. “Often people will self-diagnose burnout when in actual fact they are experiencing stress from being constantly available with no clear separation to maintain their work-life balance,” she suggests. With work emails only a thumb’s distance from dating apps, and professional messages dropping into WhatsApp alongside invites to the pub, it’s hardly surprising so many people are googling “I am tired”. Can anyone really switch off anymore?

On top of this technological blur, many employees have to contend with heavy workloads, long working hours, and the expectation to do more with less. Dobra-Kiel dubs this "everything all at once" syndrome. “Employees continuously shift from one high-priority task to another without allowing time for recovery in between,” she says. And it's this lack of recovery that can push people from stress or fatigue, into full-blown burnout.

The good news is that this shifts the onus away from individuals and onto employers. MQ Mental Health Research recently commissioned a piece of research with NorthWest University and Peopleful into burnout, stress and the workplace. They found that one in four employees are at high risk of burnout. Dr Kate Duckworth, a data specialist at Peopleful and the report’s main author, says: “Many employers continue to overlook the crucial role the workplace plays in driving employee mental health and wellbeing; continuing instead to focus on individual interventions that remediate symptoms, and are far less likely to have a sustainable impact on employee health, rather than systemic solutions.”

This isn’t even good for business in a monetary sense: Those at high risk of burnout cost nearly 11 times more than those with manageable stress levels. “When the demands of work are relentlessly high, organisational and social supports consistently too low, and effort and reward are completely imbalanced, employees are at risk,” Duckworth says plainly. And while excessive workload is the main driver of burnout, Duckworth says "burnout through boredom" is also a real thing. As she puts it, “Too much and too little is problematic.”

“Not every job can be hyper-interesting or challenging every day,” Cotton concludes, “but this is OK if employers have created an environment where people feel comfortable and valued.”

@eloisehendy