WTF Is Burnout: A Short History of Human Overwhelm

Burnout isn’t some modern excuse to slack off… though sure, that’s how people dismiss it. In truth, it’s older, darker and far more universal than many grindset gurus care to admit. 

As with so much in modern parlance, it was first used as a term by Shakespeare.

Back in 1599, Old Bill wrote: 

“She burn’d with love, as straw with fire flameth

She burn’d out love, as soon as straw outburneth”

Yeah, its initial use referred to love. Today, its meaning is far less romantic, linked to overflowing Google Calendars and a world where always on is our default setting, rest is optional and output is mandatory.

Etymology’s all well and good – might be a point for you in a future pub quiz – but to reach a pathological setting, we need to skip forward a few hundred years. In 1869 American neurologist George Miller Beard described a proto-burnout, labelled neurasthenia. 

Literally meaning “nerve weakness,” neurasthenia was understood as a severe mental and physical fatigue arising “primarily as a disorder of modernity, caused by the fast pace of urban life…[which] puts excessive demands on peoples’ brains… in turn…causing symptoms such as exhaustion, anxiety, despair, insomnia, palpitations and migraines.”

Emerging from descriptions of literal expenditure, in the 1600s burn out meant “burn until fuel is exhausted.” By the 1930s this had subsumed an electrical meaning from circuitry, to “fuse or cease to function from overload,” and by 1972 a burnout described drug users.

Outside of an eerily prescient description of malaise in Graham Greene’s 1960 A Burnt-Out Case, the actual coinage of burnout to describe the malady we understand today arrived in 1974 by way of psychologist Herbert Freudenberger. Having experienced the sensation himself, his specific understanding was loss of motivation, reduced commitment and gradual emotion depletion among volunteers working with drug addicts and the homeless.

Freudenberger observed that affected individuals shared similarities with a dictionary definition of burnout: “to fail, wear out, or become exhausted by making excessive demands on energy.” And so, the modern understanding of burnout that we recognise today took shape.

How Burnout Manifests

Beyond the outliers who needn’t work to keep a roof over their heads, the modern definition of burnout is inextricably linked with the workplace. There is a general sense among many – psychologists, philosophers and clinicians – that burnout has emerged in tandem with modernity.

Building on Freudenberger’s work, Christina Maslach was the first, in 1981, to properly outline exactly what burnout entails. Her three-part definition identified a triad of issues, all of which need to be experienced in order for someone to be clinically burnt out.

First is exhaustion. You wake up tired. Return from a week off still feeling empty. Every demand feels untenable.

Second is cynicism. The development of an overwhelmingly negative attitude towards work and other people. Depersonalisation is key here, life feels increasingly stressful and unrewarding. 

Third is inefficacy. Nothing you do feels like it matters. Agency and autonomy is diminished and a loss in belief is expected. You do the bare minimum to get by and feel guilty in doing so.

Finding & Fixing Burnout

The test to find out is called Maslach’s Burnout Inventory. As you’d expect, it’s developed in the past forty years. It boils down to how frequently you experience the negative aspects of burnout. You can do your own tests here.

Maslach herself says, with regards to workplace burnout, the remedy is usually to try to make the individual more resilient, rather than make the environment more suitable. 

In other words, if life outside work is a sensory assault, your nervous system logs it all as “too much.” Instead of trying to become a superhuman sponge for stress, change the damn water. Re-do the office. Move gyms. Delete the stuff in your phone that holds your consciousness hostage. Prioritise genuine rest and moments where you have permission to be offline – literally and spiritually.

As we’ll see with Han’s philosophical angle below, it’s simply not productive to lambast ourselves for not being more productive.

Burnout As A Modern Symptom

“The modern man things everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, never for its own sake” - Bertrand Russell

Byung-Chul Han wrote a seminal work in the 2015 The Burnout Society, positing that burning out has proliferated as economically developed cultures shift from a “disciplinary society” characterised by rules, prohibitions and power structures that dictated what we could and couldn’t do, to an “achievement society” where individuals believe they have every avenue available to them and are expected to constantly optimise in order to achieve and perform.

Han says that as we have bastardised our collective perspectives by viewing the constant drive to do/achieve/produce more through a positive lens. Even when we have our hobbies, or take time off, these decisions are forced through the prism of productivity as a means to replenish ourselves to then work harder upon our return.

The essential idea here is that as we’ve collectively become more free, the notion that anything’s attainable actually becomes a form of violence. Han’s solutions are found in the experience of negativity – which he claims “not all is destructive” – including “hesitation, pausing, boredom, waiting [as] prov[ing] constructive,” because it, writes philosopher Andrew White, “creates a dialectical balance to frantic activity.”

Soul Searching

Here are a few questions to ask yourself covering the gamut of burnout to reflect on how things are going:

• Do you question the value or meaning of your work?
• Have you lost interest in activities you once enjoyed?
• Are you physically and emotionally drained even after a good night’s sleep?
• Have your eating/sleeping habits changed significantly?
• Do you drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started?
• Have you withdrawn from social activities or responsibilities?
• Do you feel a lack of accomplishment even when you complete tasks?

We know a lot of you might respond “since COVID, yeah.” But that’s not an excuse. If the answer to many of these are yes, and frequently, that’s not a good sign.

Let that all sink in. We’ll be back next week for the second half of the piece with a dive into the biology, psychology and, most importantly, the route out.