Is Burnout an Epidemic Among American Workers? Experts Are Divided.
By: Markham Heid
Tags: Work Life Balance, Mental Health, Work, Burnout, Life

In a story published in January on BuzzFeed News, reporter Anne Helen Petersen details her struggle with what she calls “errand paralysis,” or her inability to summon the energy for tasks that aren’t vital to her life or work.

Petersen identifies her brand of selective procrastination as a symptom of burnout, which she describes as a fundamental component of the modern millennial’s existence. “Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time,” she writes in the essay, titled “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.”

Petersen’s story went viral, and her sentiments helped crystalize a trend that has lately attracted greater acknowledgment and analysis from mental health researchers, human resource experts, and most recently, major public health organizations: namely, that burnout is widespread among today’s workers — especially young ones — and it’s a noticeable drain on their health and professional well-being.

“There is now a lot of academic literature on burnout, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that it’s a real phenomenon,” says Gloria Mark, a psychologist and professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine.

A 2018 study in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that the rate of “overall burnout” among the general U.S. workforce was 28%. A 2017 Kronos survey of human resources leaders concluded that employee burnout is both an “epidemic” and a “crisis.” And a recent Gallup study found that 23% of American workers feel burned out “often or always.”

Mark says that a confluence of factors — incessant email communication, for one, but also America’s shift toward more solitary leisure-time pursuits — have created a “perfect storm” of work stress and overload. “A lot of people are being caught up in this maelstrom, and it’s hard to get out of,” she says.

But not everyone is buying the burnout hype.

In a recent New York Times op-ed titled “Is Burnout Real?,” Weill-Cornell psychiatrist Richard Friedman questions the notion that burnout is truly more common now than it used to be.

Friedman argues that “unrealistic and misleading” expectations resulting from “a shift in cultural attitudes” may be causing many workers — as well as the people who study them — to misconstrue run-of-the-mill job stress or dissatisfaction as something more insidious. In other words, what a lot of people today describe as burnout is the result of improper framing or overzealous pathologizing, not of real changes to the nature of job-related stress. “When a disorder is reportedly so widespread, it makes me wonder whether we are at risk of medicalizing everyday distress,” Friedman wrote. “If almost everyone suffers from burnout, then no one does, and the concept loses all credibility.”

Some commenters to Friedman’s piece point out that his logic here is dubious; if most Americans are obese, one wrote, that doesn’t mean obesity ceases to exist. (Friedman did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.)

But Friedman is not alone in questioning the realness of the burnout epidemic or in fretting about the disorder-fication of a common human experience. More and more researchers are raising alarms about “diagnosis creep,” which refers to the progressive loosening of the criteria a person has to meet to be diagnosed with a mental disorder or physical disease. “We are labelling more and more healthy people as sick and building bigger potential markets for those selling medicines,” writes the author of a 2016 paper in Psychological Inquiry.

Meanwhile, some experts who study burnout agree its current definitions and diagnostic criteria are nebulous. “There has been a great deal of variability and inconsistency in the measurement and conceptualization of burnout, which has made it challenging to be able to accurately evaluate and classify burnout,” says Elaine Cheung, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Currently, there is no established cutoff for diagnosing burnout, and there has been no clinical research that has been done to establish a diagnosis for dysfunctional levels of burnout.”

It’s also hard for researchers to untangle burnout from other work-related funks such as boredom or job dissatisfaction, or from related mental health disorders such as depression. “There is no doubt that mental health issues are on the rise and so is work-related stress — the question is whether burnout is actually on the rise,” says Torsten Voigt, a professor of sociology at Germany’s RWTH Aachen University. “As burnout is not clearly defined, it is challenging to count burnout cases.”

Voigt co-authored a 2017 review study on the mental state. “Even though burnout is one of the most widely discussed mental health problems in today’s society, it is still disputed,” he and his colleague wrote. The burnout studies to date have produced “problematic” results, they said, and the concept of burnout remains hazy. “Instead of clarifying and critically discussing the concept of burnout, most articles study the causes and associated factors, or measure the prevalence rates of a mental state that is not even properly defined,” they wrote. “This raises the question of whether all the studies that identify particular causes of burnout or measure the prevalence rates [of burnout] are actually investigating the same phenomenon.”

“We don’t go at a steady pace — we go at a fury and we run ourselves ragged.”

But while the formal definitions of burnout are still a bit wishy-washy, Voigt and others who study burnout, or work with people who experience it, say the current panic is not groundless. “Work-related stress is on the rise and there are several statistics that show that,” Voigt says. “Thus, one may say burnout is on the rise too.”

Experts say there are several factors that can help explain why this sometimes tough-to-define mental state is more commonplace today than in decades past. But addressing its causes is the greater challenge.

What is burnout?

The World Health Organization (WHO) formally recognized occupational burnout as a “syndrome” in May 2019, and the group included several predictable characteristics for the issue. These characteristics include feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from work or a cynical or negative attitude towards work, and a drop in professional performance.

Some news outlets initially misreported WHO’s announcement as an acknowledgment that burnout is a medical condition — an understandable mistake, considering WHO has included burnout in its “International Disease Classification” (ICD) compendium. But WHO clarified its position, which is that burnout is a “phenomenon” driven by chronic unmanaged stress, and that it’s not an illness in and of itself.

WHO’s burnout characteristics closely map onto the diagnostic inventory developed by Christina Maslach, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of the foremost burnout researchers in the world.

“Exhaustion is the central quality of burnout and the most obvious manifestation of this complex syndrome,” Maslach and her co-authors wrote in a 2001 paper in the Annual Review of Psychology.

But by itself, exhaustion does not amount to burnout. “Although exhaustion reflects the stress dimension of burnout, it fails to capture the critical aspects of the relationship people have with their work,” Maslach and her colleagues wrote. “Exhaustion is not something that is simply experienced — rather, it prompts actions to distance oneself emotionally and cognitively from one’s work, presumably as a way to cope with the work overload.”

Both WHO and Maslach stipulate that burnout’s symptoms are “work-related,” and that the term shouldn’t be applied to non-work contexts. If a person is questioning the impact or import of their professional tasks — and this cynicism is a new thing — then this, coupled with exhaustion, is indicative of burnout. On the other hand, if a person is feeling insipid toward just about everything, that could be a sign of depression or some other issue unrelated (or at least, not directly related) to work.