I bet you’re burned out after enduring a full year of the Covid-19
pandemic. If you have kids, you’re probably trying to teach them at home,
either between work shifts out in the world or while sharing a kitchen-table
office with them. You might have had to care for sick family members while
somehow avoiding the virus yourself. And if your job is in health care,
education, transportation, or retail, then you have likely worked nonstop at
great risk for months on end.But even if you didn’t have to do any of those things,
you’re probably still burned out. Are you tired of endless videoconference
calls? You might have Zoom
burnout. Do you dread making yet another meal at home? Sounds like “cooking
burnout,” according to an article on the website Eater. Is your skin
“overly sensitive, dry, or dull”? Could be skin burnout.
Maybe you’re spent after the first weekend of the NCAA tournament—not playing
in it, just watching it. If so, good news: An Austin hydration lounge
touts itself as the antidote to March
Madness burnout.In the last few years, burnout has become an important keyword
for understanding our misery at work and frustration with the rest of our
lives. The pandemic only increased burnout’s relevance. But not all forms of burnout
are borne equally, and the popularization of the term has both flattened its
meaning and diluted its usefulness in addressing the problem with work in
America. By all accounts, frontline workers really are frayed.
Nurses, for instance, speak of moral
injury from working in impossible conditions, and many have considered
quitting. But the burnout conversation often turns frivolous, hyperbolic, and
absurd. The Eater article on cooking
burnout described roasting a week’s worth of chicken and root vegetables—a
kitchen shortcut as old as the home
refrigerator—as a solution we need “now more than ever.” In a survey
commissioned last year by cannabis dispensary Verilife, 92
percent of respondents said that burnout affects their everyday life. This is a
meaningless number, the result of an overly broad survey question. Even so, for
fun, can you guess what product nearly four in 10 respondents found effective
for dealing with burnout? Our incessant talk about burnout is an obstacle to ending it.Paradoxically, our incessant talk about burnout is an
obstacle to ending it. The cloud of marketing nonsense obscures the real
phenomenon of workers’ exhaustion and despair. The person who is bored of
cooking and the nurse who might quit in the middle of a pandemic both claim the
label of burnout, but they are not dealing with the same malady. It seems that
everyone is burned out, but no one knows precisely what that means. Until we develop
a more precise language for talking about burnout, we will never be able to
help workers who are on the verge of a breakdown. The definition of burnout has always been vague. When
Herbert Freudenberger, one of the first psychologists to publish a paper on the
phenomenon in the 1970s, described
burnout among the staff at a free clinic in New York City’s Greenwich
Village, the list of physical symptoms encompassed “a feeling of exhaustion and
fatigue, being unable to shake a lingering cold, suffering from frequent
headaches and gastrointestinal disturbances, sleeplessness and shortness of
breath.” In other words, any common complaint could be a sign of burnout. More recently, the German scholars Linda and Torsten
Heinemann have argued
that the lack of a clear definition is part of burnout’s appeal as a
self-diagnosis; you can claim you’re beset by work-related malaise without
admitting to any specific disorder. This can be dangerous, though, as workers
might think they’re just struggling at work when, in fact, they are undergoing
a life-threatening
depression. In the most widely accepted definition, burnout is a
work-related syndrome with three dimensions: exhaustion, depersonalization (or
cynicism), and a sense of ineffectiveness. That is how Christina Maslach, a
psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, defines it—a
definition that was ratified two years ago by the World
Health Organization, which labeled burnout an “occupational phenomenon,”
though not a medical condition. In burnout research, the three dimensions are
usually scored on a standard test called the Maslach Burnout Inventory. When you get down to the nitty-gritty of how researchers
conduct their studies, though, definitions vary widely. One meta-analysis
of 182 scientific articles found 142 different definitions of burnout. It’s no
surprise, then, that the articles claimed that anywhere from 0 percent to 80
percent of physicians suffered from it. Even when researchers were all using
the same survey to measure burnout, they used it in dozens of different ways. Our
public conversation about burnout needs to follow scientific consensus;
unfortunately, there isn’t much.Still, one promising trend in the research is a focus on the
different categories of burnout, including partial forms. Burnout isn’t
just one condition; it is not like Covid-19, which you either have or you
don’t. This is why alarming reports that many workers “are burned out” don’t
tell us very much. They lack the nuance human experience demands.Some leading researchers, including Maslach, now see burnout
as a spectrum of experiences that vary according to their chief symptoms. One
person might have exhaustion only; another might turn cynical but still feel
competent. The most all-encompassing form of burnout, featuring high levels of
exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of ineffectiveness, could be found in about
5 to 10 percent of hospital employees, according to multiple studies.
These workers exhibited strong negative feelings about several key areas of
their jobs, from their workload to their relationships with co-workers and
general job satisfaction. But not everyone goes through the full burnout experience;
they’re at a different point on the spectrum. In a study of
workers at Veterans Administration hospitals, the most common form of
burnout, affecting 20 to 25 percent of employees, was a high level of
ineffectiveness without major exhaustion or cynicism. These workers were not
worn out from overwork and had not turned cynical, but it wasn’t clear to them
what their work was accomplishing. Their burnout was quieter and milder but
still damaging.This frustration was especially prevalent among
administrators and wage-grade workers like cooks and janitors. They are not the
“heroes” of health care. No one thanks them for assisting with a birth or
sending cancer into remission. They are essential workers, too, but are often
underpaid and unrecognized. As one longtime employee of a Washington, D.C.,
hospital told Brookings
Institution researchers, “These are people who work very, very, very hard,
and who make very, very, very little.”We must also recognize that burnout is not a straightforward
index of how crummy your job is. If it were, then physicians would not have
been reporting much higher
levels of burnout than workers in general prior to the pandemic. Burnout is
not the only way your job can be crummy. Burned out or not, if your schedule is
unpredictable, your pay is inadequate, or your workplace is unsafe, you deserve
better conditions. “Burnout” would not appear in so many clickbait headlines if
people didn’t relate strongly to the term. Work really
does suck, and “burnout” gives a satisfying name to that experience. I know
this firsthand. Once I started to learn more about burnout, five years ago, the desolation
I felt at my otherwise
great job as a tenured college professor started to make a lot more sense. Saying you’re burned out is a subtle form of
self-praise.But there is also a deeper, more insidious side to our
eagerness to claim burnout. Saying you’re burned out is a subtle form of
self-praise. If you’re burned out, then you must have been a roaring blaze of
productivity to begin with, an ideal worker in a culture that values work
practically above all else. In the religion
of work, the burnout is a martyr. We reach so often for the term burnout, then, because it
perfectly reflects our ambivalence toward work. We complain that work is
crushing our bodies and souls, but we also love it. The pain is how we validate
our lives. On some level, we want to burn out.We didn’t always think of work this way. In his book Worked
Over, the sociologist Jamie McCallum notes that employers started
promoting the idea that work was lovable, that it was a source of purpose,
during the mid-1970s, as a way to compensate workers for declining wages and
job security. Not coincidentally, that period was right when psychologists
first identified burnout in free-clinic workers and poverty attorneys.
Americans’ ideals for work rose not just while their working conditions
eroded but because they eroded. That gap between ideal and reality is
what fosters burnout.Ending burnout will require not only labor
organizing and policy
changes but also a new vision of how work fits into our lives. Workers
ought to demand more from their employers: more money, more security, more time
off. But they also need to demand less—less meaning, less fulfillment, less assurance
that they are loved—from work itself.
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