Self
How to Escape The Grasp Of Career Burnout
Finding a new job is one answer, but not the only.
I pulled into the headquarters for Home Shopping Network. It was a towering corporate building with reflective windows and an HSN logo as its crown. In front, was a wide still pond with several alligators floating leisurely. Some dark and cynical part of my brain wondered if underperformers were thrown in.
In the waiting room, five TVs softly played different shopping channels, forming a strange and quiet montage of ridiculous products and quirky actors evangelizing them. A mousey and grandmotherly woman greeted me and sat behind the counter typing as I waited for my interviewer.
I was looking for a new finance job after working too hard for too long, for too little money. The first 70+ hour week I’d put in felt like a big accomplishment. But as these bender weeks bled into each other, it stopped being another cute chapter of hustle culture.
Home Shopping Network wasn’t the answer and I learned that quickly. A woman came to escort me to the interview room and, as the elevator opened to the fourth floor, I saw a wide and dense grid of cubicles that looked like the aftermath of a paper storm. They were abandoned, with cables dangling out of walls, computers seemingly ripped from their wombs. Lonely sticky notes dotted walls and keyboards languished without monitors.
As we walked, I saw two employees total on this huge floor, and they did not look happy. One looked exhausted. The other looked frustrated. I’d seen this play before so I tried to finesse a question to my escort, “So is it always this busy?”
She turned and said, “We did some cost reductions and layoffs recently. But it has already passed. We have great opportunities going forward.” I grimaced inwardly, knowing that macro issues usually bled downward onto the backs of workers. In my experience, a financially unhealthy company will struggle to maintain a healthy culture.
The subsequent two-part interview didn’t go well either. I sat across from a nice blonde woman who interviewed me, and then conferenced with the biggest jerk I’d ever dealt with. He was hostile and pushy, like I was being investigated for a homicide.
Though this job paid well, I knew my burnout shouldn’t trick me into taking the first opportunity to present itself, or my solution would prove worse than the initial problem.
I eventually found the right job. Years later, I now work on my own as a writer, yet still see the desperation of so many workers. The frustration and job fatigue arr well evidenced by the wave of labor strikes in 2023. And yet finding another job is no easy task. It is complicated for many of you. So how do we overcome this tricky predicament?
Feeling like a husk of a person
The term burnout wasn’t actually a thing until 1974, when German American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger defined burnout as a state of being “exhausted by making extreme demands on energy, strength, or resources”, which renders a person ineffective, unhappy, and unable to achieve their goals.
Dr. Freudenberger noticed this after establishing a free clinic to treat poor patients in his off hours. He worked 10 to 12 hour days, and then logged several hours alongside other volunteer doctors. Eventually, he noticed these same doctors became tired, snippy, cynical, and difficult to work with.
Psychologists define burnout through three dimensions: cynicism, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization — which is when you develop a negative view of your effectiveness. This compounds when there’s pressure to keep a happy face at the office. Often, I felt an unspoken cultural expectation to never complain, to be agreeable and say every request was, “No big deal.” This dilemma is common and creates emotional fatigue, which is when you present emotions that don’t match what you are feeling.
For people feeling burned out, there are several solutions. First, at the office — protect your time. I often found myself helping people and trying to be a team player — to a fault. Don’t let your compassion lead to doing other people’s jobs. The other strategy, that many seem afraid of approaching, is to discuss your hours and workload with your manager. Your boss is the one other person in that building who can help reduce your workload. Often, they’ve been in the same dilemma, and can sympathize with the demands.
Yes, being upwardly mobile in a corporate environment requires periods of intensity. But working intensely long hours for months on end generally means something is broken.
Other strategies to employ
Studies have shown that setting time windows each day where you don’t discuss work, and don’t check work emails at home, are highly beneficial to your wellbeing. We do this at home and it’s especially useful for my partner, who is a workaholic and obsesses over her job. She could spend an extra eight hours just talking about her job if we didn’t pump the brakes.
The other useful strategy is to demarcate work and personal life in a structural way. When I was in grad school and also working a full-time job, I deliberately segmented my day and stuck to a schedule. I also found time to exercise and do non-work related tasks. The time was there — it just needed to be managed correctly.
What I would caution you against is quiet quitting because, let’s be clear, it isn’t actually quitting. It is doing the bare minimum and showing no enthusiasm for your job. Doing that will put any competent manager in a position where they must question your value to a company. Quitting is fine, but do it on your own terms.
The other issue is putting of the cart before the horse. Burnout can be a symptom of depression, or other underlying issues, like you being in the wrong career or doing something you aren’t passionate about. Yet even for me, doing something I am deeply passionate about in writing — I still have succumbed to burnout. Writing too much can take the joy away out of this craft, as it will with any passion.
Realizing a job isn’t going to work out is depressing, and akin to a breakup. You see more and more evidence that this relationship isn’t what you thought it was, and that you aren’t valued in the way you’d hoped to be. There is an entire grieving process that must be respected.
The cure for burnout won’t always be self-care. It is inevitable that some situations won’t improve, and no amount of exercise, meditation, mental downtime, or repeated conversations about your workload will change that. Remember that your wellbeing is more important than a big paycheck.