The Cause of Burnout: A User Error or a Flawed System?

Photo by Карина Невская on Unsplash

We name it burnout, as if a word could contain the quiet collapse of meaning. The World Health Organization calls it an occupational phenomenon, born of chronic, unmanaged stress. It can get easily brushed off as ‘just tiredness’ or ‘just stressed’, but it is not as simple as “needing more coffee and fewer emails”, as recognised by Demerouti in his review from 2024. Burnout is characterised by three dimensions; exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy. Applied to the work culture, it evokes feelings of personal failing from the inability to cope or poor resilience. On the other hand, it can also parade as a badge of commitment from taking on too much work in order to ‘prove’ something. When it all comes down to it, what could really be the cause of burnout? Demerouti suggests that it is primarily about what the job demands and how well the resources allow success. It is not about the person, it’s about the system. And yet, the person carries the symptoms of that system in their body.

After over 50 years of research, burnout is still not universally defined. There are as many, if not more, than 13 definitions, but the aforementioned three dimensions are consistent:

1)       Exhaustion – an empty battery that never seems to recharge, regardless of time

2)       Cynicism – or mental distance, a creeping emotional numbness towards work that was once important

3)       Reduced Efficacy – the sense of incapableness and the quiet belief that nothing matters anyway

A clinical triad, yes, but also the emotional cartography of despair.

While these dimensions may be measurable, they are not diagnostic tools, unassuming of other conditions like fatigue, anxiety and depression also playing their parts. So what is a person really saying when they claim to be ‘burned out’?

The answer may be disarmingly simple: burnout happens when the demands of a job chronically exceed the resources available to meet them. It may seem obvious that high workload, time pressure and constant change would be components in burnout, but what is missing from the discussion is the conditions required to manage those heavy duty day to day experiences. Feedback, recognition, time for recovery and psychological safety offer protection from the worst case scenario. If demands are high but resources are rich, work can still be energising, but if the demands are high and the resources are lacking, the repercussions are great.

These repercussions are not abstract, research has suggested over decades that burnout can lead to cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, sleep disruption, depressions and anxiety. And from an organisational level? Absenteeism, high turnover, performance decline. Interestingly, it could be considered that burnout is less of a personal well-being issue and more of a design flaw, an economic and leadership error, and maybe even a moral one. These are not necessarily internal issues but external ones that cannot be fixed with a mindfulness app.

Interventions may target individuals, offering coping strategies for stress through courses, cognitive behavioural therapy or yoga, but if these helped, why does burnout reoccur? If the structure causing burnout remains the same, there are no amounts of deep breathing exercises that can fix a broken system, and burnout continues. Coping becomes collusion when the structure itself is unexamined. If interventions focussed more on organisational change through job redesign, improved leadership behaviour and putting that missing support in place, there would be far stronger and sustained effects. The trouble is, creating this change is time consuming, politically charged and requires power to cause the shift; it is easier to blame the individual than to accept accountability for the environment.

What must be considered is how easily chronic demands become invisible through habit. Exhaustion becomes normalised; detachment is mistaken for professionalism. Sometimes it is difficult to see burnout brewing until it is too late.Cynicism may feel like a character flaw, not a signal to look out for. The question moves from ‘how can I be more resilient?’ to ‘what am I trying to be resilient to?’, compelling the individual to acknowledge the pressure of their environment and not to blame themselves for not being able to ‘deal with it’. True leadership may be to create fewer reasons for people to need resilience to just do their job. Perhaps it’s more useful to address burnout as the body’s communication that the environment is wrong, and to listen to that instead of the misinformation about the self.

Burnout lives in the unconscious; depth psychology might call it the protest of an overwhelmed psyche, unable to connect to something that has become too demanding, and no longer meaningful. The reduction of effort is not laziness but refusal: the psyche’s way of saying no more pretending. Perhaps burnout is not the end of resilience, but the beginning of a more truthful relationship with work, with life, and with the self.

For the full review published in Wissenschaftliche Beitrage, 2024, follow this link:

Burnout: a comprehensive review | Zeitschrift für Arbeitswissenschaft

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