Your Attachment Style Is Making You Burned Out
By: Emily Underwood
Tags: Relationships, Psychology, Work, Burnout, Succeed

Your Attachment Style Is Making You Burned Out

The way you relate to other people may be the key to staying engaged at work

Photo: Caiaimage/Paul Bradbury/Getty Images

When psychologist Michael Leiter gets called in to consult for a company that wants to reduce burnout in its employees, his options for advice are typically limited. Reducing staff workload, the most obvious answer, is rarely a possibility.

So instead, he focuses on another way to ward off the exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of productivity that define burnout: teaching employees to get along better.

Plenty of research has shown that the quality of our relationships at work makes a huge difference in how happy and productive we are. One Gallup survey, for example, found that employees who have a best friend in the office are 50% more satisfied with their jobs and seven times(!) more engaged with them.

But it isn’t always easy to keep things so positive. For many people, the social demands of office life — the small talk, the performative Slack chatting, the theoretically optional but secretly mandatory happy hours — are more exhausting than enjoyable. And, as Leiter notes, there’s a “small but persistent” group that has such a difficult time getting along well with co-workers that they cross over the line to rudeness or even abuse, especially in settings that involve a lot of super-stressful interactions with people.

Leiter’s research looks at why some people are more prone to these toxic social interactions in the workplace. He studies the problem through the lens of attachment theory — a psychological taxonomy of the ways we connect (or don’t) with the people around us. Our relationships with our co-workers, Leiter argues, hold the key to predicting and preventing burnout.

What is attachment theory?

You may have heard the term attachment theory used to describe how little kids relate to their parents, and that’s where it originated. Attachment theory was originally developed in the 1960s by British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who believed that the human drive for attachment is a survival mechanism, helping defenseless primate babies keep their caregivers close.

Since Bowlby, however, the concept has taken on a new life. Researchers have applied attachment theory to adult relationships, hypothesizing that each of us has a distinct attachment style that we carry from childhood. Today, psychologists talk about those styles as falling into two broad categories: secure and insecure.

People with secure attachment, the theory goes, are comfortable forming close relationships because their early life experiences taught them that people are reliable. People with insecure attachment, on the other hand, struggle to form those bonds because they learned early on that other people can’t meet their needs and may even hurt them.

Within insecure attachment is a continuum of styles that range from anxious to avoidant. On the anxiety end are people who doubt their own worth in relationships and look for constant reassurance. Ironically, this often ends up pushing people away, says Peter Harms, an organizational psychologist and a professor of management at the University of Alabama: “They desperately want that affection, but the way that they seek it is kind of annoying.”

On the avoidant side are people who don’t believe others will come through for them, and so they keep everyone else at a distance. For people with this style, the pressure to form warm, fuzzy relationships at work and collaborate on close-knit teams can induce real misery, Harms says. “If you’re avoidantly attached, this is your kryptonite.”

How does that relate to burnout?

Like all theories about human behavior, attachment theory can’t explain everything about your love, social, or work life. “It’s not an absolute, immovable part of a person,” Leiter says. Our styles can be overwritten by new experiences as we get older, like when we find good friends or a supportive romantic partner.

But research does suggest that people with insecure attachment tend to have the biggest struggles with burnout at work. In a 2015 study published in the journal Burnout Research, Leiter gave more than 1,600 health care workers a quiz to determine where they fell on the attachment continuum, then measured their levels of burnout and asked them to describe their interactions with their colleagues.

True to form, people with more insecure attachment styles tended to perceive those interactions as more negative, the researchers found. “They knew that they were somewhat socially inept and not quite on their game,” Leiter says. The anxiously attached group also had the highest burnout rates, possibly because they were more emotionally drained by the stress of what they saw as uncomfortable social experiences.

Workers with more avoidant attachment didn’t typically report the same levels of burnout as their anxious colleagues, probably because they were better at maintaining emotional distance as they navigated high-pressure days at work.

Leiter notes that people in management and supervisory positions often score higher on the avoidant end of the attachment continuum, likely because they tend to be self-starters who don’t need much encouragement or external praise.

But the downside of avoidant attachment is that you’re not forming the kinds of meaningful, rewarding relationships that can also make work worthwhile and enjoyable, he says. While they weren’t really burnt out, Leiter says, the avoidant employees “weren’t really engaged, either, and it kept them in a sort of flat relationship with their work.”

Okay, what do I do with that?

Just because a person has an anxious attachment style doesn’t mean they can’t thrive in the workplace, Harms notes. In a 2016 study, for example, he found that when anxiously attached people work for a boss who is good at providing reassurance and support, they do just fine. The problems start when you combine a distant, unsupportive, avoidantly attached boss with an anxious employee.

For managers, it’s important to know that attachment styles are likely shaping how people act at work, Leiter says. “You need to have some insight into why people are behaving the way they are.”

As a rule, it’s probably not a good idea to play armchair psychologist and start diagnosing people’s attachment styles as if you were trying to guess their zodiac sign. But we can reflect on our own behaviors — or consult a therapist — to figure out if there are any patterns that consistently hinder us at work. Maybe our constant complaining or exhaustion is totally justified, because our supervisors and co-workers are legitimately crappy. But it’s also possible that because of our attachment style, we’re interpreting even minor slights more negatively than we need to or not letting others in enough to truly collaborate as a team.

In general, Harms says, employers need to do a better job of valuing the often-unsung office heroes who provide the social glue at work, organizing after-work drinks and office softball leagues or lending a supportive ear when someone is having a rough time. These “citizenship behaviors” at work are vital to a company’s productivity but typically aren’t rewarded, he says. If, as a boss or supervisor, you don’t feel comfortable letting your employees know that you care about them, then it especially behooves you to value — or even designate — staff members who can, he says.

Harms also notes that to the extent they can, managers should also do their best to cultivate a culture of trust among employees. This can be tough in competitive fields, like sales, where workers often feel pitted against one another. But it’s a vital part of acknowledging our human need for connection, which doesn’t just disappear when we swipe our key cards to get into the office.