Tired, exhausted, burned out—which are you?
And how to avoid them all
Tired, exhausted, or burned out?
I’m a little exhausted at the moment.
My current job’s the most fulfilling one I’ve ever had, but my medical team leadership role is a big one that, despite being shared, is beginning to wring me out. I had last week off and went to see the new Superman film (ridiculous but fun). Afterwards, I switched on my phone to texts about three different work things. Meanwhile, I seem to have hit that point in life where working during the night, as I do when covering our emergency room a couple of times a week, leaves me with a hangover that lasts days.
I need a break.
But I’m not burned out. This is a distinction that matters. Let’s define three concepts for ourselves.
(1) Tired
You, me, and everyone else. Sometimes there’s something serious wrong (depression, say, or some other undiagnosed medical condition) but usually it’s 21st-century life. We cram in too much, and don’t rest well. We don’t afford sleep the vast respect it deserves. We disappear into mind-mushing social media. We prioritize not what matters most, but that which leaves us feeling drained. You’re tired? Welcome to the club. But read on for some ideas that may help.
(2) Exhausted
‘Exhausted’ comes from Latin words meaning ‘drained out’. I want to define it as something more dysfunctional than 21st-century tiredness. Exhaustion from work accumulates over time, and there’s a risk that your perspective starts becoming impaired. You may still be enjoying your work, getting moments of meaning and a sense of achievement from it—but perhaps less. You begin anticipating breaks as recovery, rather than just a shift of gear. People or things could begin to irritate you more than they should. Hang out in exhaustion-land for too long and it may get a lot worse: unless you do something about it now, you’re in danger of straying into the land of …
(3) Burnout
There’s a lot out there about burnout.
In the work context, burnout has an authoritative (if imprecise) definition, published by the World Health Organization:
“Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.” (ICD-11, § QD85.)
Focus on those words negativism and cynicism, and the sense of lack of accomplishment: with burnout, your work’s now making your life significantly worse.
Of course, work that’s burned you out may well be a bad job by anyone’s standard. But once you’re here, you’re unlikely to be seeing it from a healthy perspective, accurately evaluating its pros and cons. You’re seeing it negatively (‘negativism’) or cynically. You’re fed up, pissed off, ground down. Burnout’s closely related to, perhaps even a form of, depression. This is serious.
And worse?
There’s a fourth concept, beyond tiredness, exhaustion, and burnout. The Japanese language has a word for this: karoshi (過労死). Karoshi means death from overwork. But there’s nothing uniquely Japanese about karoshi: one international study estimates that, globally, three-quarters of a million of us die early each year as a result of excessive work hours.
Let’s try and fix this before we get anywhere near karoshi.
The wrong answer: resilience
Focusing on burnout seems to me a little like, when improving your swimming technique, focusing on drowning. There’s got to be a better approach.
The buzzword that often follows burnout is resilience, which might mean the ability to cope well with stressful situations, and perhaps to learn from adversity and bounce back stronger. This is obviously a Good Thing, though I’m not wild about resilience as a concept. It’s unambitious: we should aspire to thrive in our work, not just to cope. And the implication’s that the problem is that we’re weak, and we just need to toughen up. That’s both unhelpful and wrong. The solution is to improve work itself, and make next week, and next month, and next year, better. But that’s a tough project when we’re exhausted and beginning to lose perspective.
The right answers: several
As the writer H.L. Mencken noted, there’s a solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.1 Were there one simple answer to our feeling wrung out by work that we started off caring about, you’d know it already. But there are some good, effective, answers (plural).
The starting point is recognizing where you are on this spectrum that runs from 21st-century tiredness to karoshi, death from overwork. Know thyself. Pay regular attention to how you are, and ask yourself honestly: is this just the tiredness of everyday life, or are you—even if you’ve grown used to this—now exhausted or, worse, burning out?
The critical thing here is to spot that you’re becoming exhausted before you start burning out.
And then you need to figure out what to do about it.
Tired?
Think about how you can build in more true rest and leisure, every day, and every week. You’ll get more done and do it better if you do.
We’re living in a pandemic of inadequate slumber. Sleep is phenomenally good for us: we should be protecting and prioritizing it at all costs.2 Aim for seven or eight hours, regularly, at the same time, undrugged.
And put your phone somewhere else for large chunks of every day and find things to enjoy that don’t involve the Internet.
Exhausted? Burning out?
The prerequisites are the same: prioritizing rest, true leisure, and sleep, and getting off those bloody devices.
But this is now more serious. Those basics are vital, but may not be enough.
Drop all responsibilities and commitments that aren’t either nourishing you or truly essential. You might be able to start doing this as soon as you’ve finished reading this.
Chew things over with someone who knows you and has good judgment.
Go on vacation somewhere where you can rest, regain perspective, and think about your next move.
Consider how you want to be spending your working life, and what you really don’t want to be doing: I’ve written more about that here.
Think about how you’re reacting to your current situation and how much of that’s the situation and how much is you. Could that change for the better?
And then, if things aren’t right, figure out what you can, and what you should, do about it. (And do follow the links if they look like they might be relevant.)
Do you need to say no to things to which you’ve been saying (or perhaps even already have said) yes? (How to say no well. And here’s something on pulling out of something to which you’ve previously signed up.)
Can your job be changed?
Can you reduce your hours? There’s good evidence that, paradoxically, most of us would get more done and do it better if we worked less hard. Teams and organizations that experiment with a four-day working week usually stick with it: people paid the same to work four days instead of five achieve more.
Would a sabbatical help?
Should you be looking for a new job?
Sometimes the answer will be to consider a new job or role. Remember that, if the problem’s partly how you’re handling things, as it almost always is, you’ll take your personality and all its idiosyncrasies and foibles with you to a new job. Would it be better to stick, for a while, in your current role, and work on better ways of handling its challenges? But perhaps the right thing for you, right now, is a change of job. If it clearly is, don’t be afraid to make a radical change just because it’s radical. Sometimes that’s just what’s needed.
My exhaustion, right now? I’ve reached the point where I need to give up the medical director job. And it took longer than it should have to realize that I have to stop working nights. But now I have realized. I’m sad to be saying goodbye to the remote Indigenous community that has so generously welcomed me for these last four years or so. But I’ll now be working here for only a few more months. And there are new and exciting challenges after that.
Thanks for the feedback
My last email was a snack-sized (really short) one. Thank you to those of you who clicked on the survey about whether you wanted more of those or whether you prefer these longer ones. Most of you prefer the deeper dives. Message received!
Where’s the book got to?
I’m writing a book about this stuff—and, honestly, these ideas fit together best in a coherent, practical manual that sets out the whole Great Work approach.
I now have a first draft of that book. And I know what I need to do to turn that into a better, second draft.
But to get this sort of non-fiction published successfully, you need what people in publishing call a platform: the influence, as an author, to ensure a good volume of early sales. I’m not there yet. I’m not a social media kind of guy. And you’ll have noticed I’m no Taylor Swift.
This Substack newsletter is my main platform. There are more than 1,700 of you reading or listening to it, which I can’t quite believe. But I need to add at least a zero to that number.
So I’m working on spreading the word. More on that soon. And doing some other platform-building things: I’m increasingly asked to speak at conferences, and on podcasts and in webinars, and that’s something I love doing. (Interested?)
I’ll be taking a writing sabbatical over the winter to finish that second draft. I’m excited about that: the writing’s something else I really enjoy.
My goal’s that, in six months’ time, I’ll be ready to start pitching the book to agents and publishers.
There: I said it!
And meanwhile, if you’re able to spread the word about this newsletter and help with that much-needed zero, I’d be hugely grateful. Use the button, or this link: www.adamsandell.com/newsletter.
Comments? Ideas? Reactions? Do click on the ‘Comment’ button near the bottom—or just reply. All replies come directly to me—and I reply.
Next time: lessons from a middle-school teacher.
If you found this useful, do send it to others who might too. Thank you!
H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1920).
I’ve been promising for a while to write more about this. I will!