Understanding Burnout
Burnout is Cumulative
A lot of people come to therapy when things fall apart.
You don’t have to wait for that. And with burnout — and most things — it’s better that you don’t. The research on burnout shows that it is a chronic condition rather than a temporary state; without intervention, the cumulative weight of burnout can persist or worsen over time.
If you are experiencing burnout —and many capable, committed people do — you may have spent months or years trying to hold yourself together while chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors continue to exact a toll.
While you may have been able to function well and push through for a while, over time, you may find yourself overriding your body’s warning signals, carrying a silent burden solo, and feeling less able to rely on the strategies that had previously seen you through. If this has become your norm, or if you feel like you may be on your way there, it may be time to get some help.
The kind of exhaustion and depletion associated with burnout isn’t solved by getting rest, starting a better routine, or trying harder.
You don’t have to keep pushing through alone.
Burnout is Not Simply About Resilience
For many highly capable people, the experience of burnout can feel like a personal failing. Seen through this lens, some people respond by working harder, blaming themselves, or withdrawing from others — adding to an already vicious cycle of masking, avoiding and disconnecting to protect themselves from further harm while also putting in more hours. As they experience themselves as less and less productive, with less and less energy and focus to bring to the work at hand, they may experience additional pressure, either from others or from within, to double down, try harder, and endure more.
However, when capable, committed people are exhausted, the issue is not resilience; it is not a failure in muscling up and powering through. Rather, there are likely external and internal systems that are creating a sustained burnout dynamic. This dynamic can wear typically high achieving people down, cut them off from themselves and others, and diminish the capacity to access meaning and connection that may have initially left them feeling like what was being asked of them was worth it.
As constant urgency, overriding nervous system needs, interpersonal disconnection, and dis-alignment with what feels connective and worthwhile become normalized, so, too, do exhaustion and depletion. Over time, if left untreated, burnout often persists alongside — or can escalate into — Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or Acute Stress Response.
Burnout Dynamics
Burnout is a relational challenge that is both institutional / systemic and personal. To understand how you came to experience burnout as well as the conditions that allow burnout to persist, it is important to understand the particular dynamics impacting you and the situation you find yourself in. While the list below isn’t exhaustive, it offers some sense of the possible dynamics that may be fueling burnout:
External Norms and Expectations. Unspoken norms related to work, education, and performance can create a sense of expectation and pressure. When a social system rewards only extraordinary achievement, or renders someone’s position tenuous until they meet a set of high expectations, or unknowable or ever-shifting expectations, this can fuel burnout, particularly where the resources a person needs or wants — financial security, health insurance, recognition, validation — hang in the balance.
Internal Dynamics and Existential Quests. It’s also helpful to consider what drew a person to a particular role or line of work.
How did you come to land on this particular role, and what did they hope it might provide in terms of existential significance, for example, recognition, respect, connection, or personal fulfillment?
How do you feel that existential quest is going — is it mostly working out, or do you experience a sense of frustration or failure in that existential quest? And how might that sense of your existential quest — however it’s going for you — be related to your experience of burnout?
What changes might need to take place for you to derive a sense of existential significance from your work or your role?
Nervous System Regulation. Burnout isn’t just psychological. It’s biological. It’s neurological. It’s systemic. Stress is a temporary state of activation. Burnout is a chronic, dysregulated stress response that has not been completed or restored. Stress is designed to be adaptive. Your nervous system mobilizes you to respond to challenge, solve problems, meet deadlines, protect what matters, and perform under pressure. Burnout happens when activation becomes your baseline.
When this happens, the nervous system is in a chronic state of dysregulation, meaning that your body is in a prolonged, “fight-flight” (sympathetic) or “freeze-fawn“ shutdown (dorsal vagal) state. This results in emotional exhaustion, disconnection, reduced satisfaction and accomplishment, and symptoms like fatigue, anxiety, sleep issues, and cognitive fog. Healing requires more than a weekend off; the nervous system needs to be restored to safety through vagus nerve activation, consistent self-care, and lifestyle adjustments to rebalance the autonomic nervous system.
Caregiving Roles and Emotional Labor. Unfairly, burnout is more likely to be experienced by those in ‘caring’ or ‘giving’ professions or roles. These roles, whether within a family or organization, create distinct kinds of pressures and expectations, which may be intensified by a person’s sense of personal commitment to the work or role. The ongoing demands of caregiving roles and unrecognized emotional labor they often require can drain any remaining emotional fuel, which can make it difficult both to access any sense of self as well as what initially might have made a person’s role and work feel meaningful.
ADHD / AuDHD Tax. For those living with ADHD or Autism and ADHD (AuDHD), the extra, often hidden costs of managing ADHD symptoms can cause significant stress, debt, and shame, leading to long-term financial, professional, and personal consequences. For those with Autism, masking can lead to a state of chronic exhaustion and reduced capacity as a result of trying to hide or suppress expressions of autism in order to fit into neurotypical environments. The cumulative effective the “masking debt” can result in increased meltdowns, sensory sensitivity, and mental health struggles.
Competence and Perfectionism. When competence begins to slide toward perfectionism, this can be an onramp for burnout. Superficially, a person might generally say they value traits we tend to associate with being dependable and reliable:
“I try to do everything as well as possible”
“I put high standards on myself and most things I take on”
“I push myself to be the best at most things I do”
“I commit myself to most things I take on.”
However, in practice if showing up as dependable or reliable comes to mean longer hours, no breaks, skipping meals, and little sleep, a person may be on their way to burnout.
Here, it’s important to understand both the cumulative toll of chronic stress and any underlying fears or underlying hopes that may feed perfectionism.
Power, Risk, Reward. When burnout persists despite a person’s individual effort, it can signal a breakdown in how power, risk, knowledge, and reward are structured at work or at home. If a person has great responsibility but limited authority to carry out their work in ways that seem best to them or if the risk of decision making regularly falls to them without any safety net in place or reward on the other side, the pressure of bearing up under high risk, low satisfaction situations and the added impacts of feeling isolated can over time erode any sense of competence and connection that had previously made their efforts feel worthwhile.
If something here feels familiar, let’s talk.