Feeling burned out? Here’s what to do.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, the novel’s central protagonist, asks his father for permission to join a monastery, where he seeks to purify his soul and sanctify his work. Cynical and half-drunk, Alyosha’s father makes a prediction about what monastic life will do to the saintly youngster: “You will burn and you will burn out.”

Not until nearly a century after the novel’s 1880 appearance did social science come up with a definition of what that phrase, burn out, meant. In 1974, the German American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger supplied a definition of the noun burn-out as the state of being “exhausted by making extreme demands on energy, strength, or resources” from one’s job, which would cause one to become ineffective in achieving “all intents and purposes.”

If you are feeling burned out in your work, you are far from alone. In 2015, 51 percent of American corporate workers surveyed said that they had experienced burnout more than once in their current job, according to the consulting firm Deloitte. The coronavirus pandemic made this worse: Researchers writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2021 reported that 89 percent of their survey respondents said that their work life was getting worse during the pandemic. More than three in five admitted to “struggling to manage their workloads” and said they’d experienced burnout “often” or “extremely often” in the previous three months.

When you are feeling like a desiccated husk of a human being, everything seems like an insurmountable task. Ordinary work is extraordinarily taxing; it is hard to see how you can ever make things better, and you want to just give up—to quit, to run away. But you don’t have to be overwhelmed. If you understand how the burnout cycle works, you can disrupt and reverse it with a few simple changes.

Psychologists studying workplace burnout find that it tends to manifest through three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization, and a negative view of personal effectiveness. When you are burned out, you feel a weariness about being able to face work demands (sometimes bleeding into a sense of actual physical exhaustion). You lose enthusiasm for your work or its quality, and start to doubt your own ability and competence. If you think this syndrome might be affecting you, many self-evaluation surveys are available online, such as this one from the magazine Psychology Today.

Burnout is not merely a problem of the mind; it also affects the brain and body. For example, being burned out is associated with a high degree of fragmented sleep, and with dysfunction of the sympathetic adrenal medullary axis, which relates to an overproduction of the hormone cortisol. In lay terms, you feel stressed out. Because of this physiological effect, sustained burnout can lead to systemic inflammation, immunosuppression, metabolic syndrome (and its relative obesity), cardiovascular disease, and even premature death.

Certain job characteristics tend to cause burnout. Surveying the scientific literature in 2022, Spanish researchers identified work overload, “emotional labor” (which includes having to control or hide negative emotions), a lack of autonomy, ambiguity or conflict about one’s role, inadequate supervision, lack of social support, and working hours that impinge on personal life. In other words, people burn out when their employers work them into the ground and don’t support them, and when the employees have no say in the matter.

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Certain workplaces and industries are more liable than others to burn out their workers. Last year, Gallup polled employees across the economy and found that the highest burnout levels occurred in K–12 education, universities, professional services, and government or public-policy jobs. Significantly lower levels were found in manufacturing, utilities, and construction. This helps make sense of another finding from a large survey of workers conducted during the coronavirus pandemic, which showed that one of the most glaring sources of burnout is meeting fatigue. The occupations that typically suffer the worst burnout rates are the ones that function as meeting factories, something I’ve seen firsthand.

Burnout is an especially obdurate happiness problem to solve because once you are in the dreaded vortex of exhaustion, cynicism, and self-criticism, even what would once have made you happy at work now makes you unhappy. This was the conclusion of research published in The Journal of Psychology in 2016. The authors found that employees who were engaged and not burned out met their personal needs and stayed happy when they did their core work, met clients, and interacted with colleagues. This was in contrast, the researchers found, to their very burned-out colleagues, who reported that these same activities made things worse. The finding explains how two people doing the same job can have such different happiness experiences.

For employers, my advice to avoid burnout happening in your workplace is straightforward. First, don’t ask people to sacrifice all of their time and their relationships for their job. Let people say what they feel at work within rational limits, and give them control. Also, make sure they know what their job is and feel supported. And finally, for God’s sake, get rid of as many meetings as possible.

My advice to employees is more challenging to put into practice: It is more abstract and depends on the feedback loop that causes even normal work to burn you out, which in turn lowers your ability to engage in the normal work. The key is to disrupt this loop—by creating more “space” between your life and your job so that they don’t drag each other down and there is a chance to reverse the cycle. As the Dalai Lama advises, “If you feel ‘burnout’ setting in, if you feel demoralized and exhausted, it is best, for the sake of everyone, to withdraw and restore yourself.”

The easiest way to achieve this is to work only in defined hours. With the spread of mobile technologies, for many people, work can creep into almost every waking moment, from when you receive your first text of the day at 5 a.m. to the last email you send at 10:30 p.m. Working like this doesn’t just occupy your time; it also hijacks your thoughts, so that you get virtually no relief from professional concerns. One associate of mine told me that as devices have facilitated the sprawl of his work across his life, he thinks less about friends, family, and hobbies, and finds himself even dreaming about work.

Set times when you resolve not to write or check work email. If necessary, you might consider getting a personal phone so that you can leave your work devices behind when you exercise, sleep, and spend time with family and friends. You might even make a rule with loved ones not to talk about work during certain hours and days, or while on vacation. These breaks are like little sabbaths, which can be very effective in helping you refresh and renew your engagement with work. And lest you worry that this habit will hurt your productivity, research has shown that people who use this technique can maintain, and even improve, their productivity and work quality.

Separation of life and work has been a particular problem throughout the pandemic for people who work from home. Burnout is extremely high for remote workers. According to 2022 survey data from the recruiting firm Zippia, 86 percent of fully remote workers experience some degree of burnout in their job, as opposed to 81 percent among hybrid workers, and a 70 percent rate for those working fully in person. Of course, this finding does not account for the fact that some jobs—notably, the ones that Gallup found to be low in burnout—can be performed only in person, so we don’t yet know how much of this discrepancy is attributable to remote working per se. But what the data do suggest is that moving to remote work is by no means a solution to burnout—to work from home is the antithesis of creating space between life and work.

For many people, sorting work from life might seem nigh impossible—without its being the fault of their boss or company. These people are burning themselves out through their own need to work more, accomplish more, and achieve more success.

If that is you, the monastery that Alyosha’s father maligned might actually hold the key to your recovery. One writer researching a 2022 book on work burnout asked a group of Benedictine monks about how they avoid the problem. He found that, following Saint Benedict’s nearly 1,500-year-old rules, the monks limited working at chores to three or four hours a day, and never let their labors infringe on their time for prayer. The writer asked what they did if that wasn’t enough time to finish their tasks. “You get over it,” they said.

If you are a burned-out workaholic, a little Benedictine spirit might be just what you need. Stop working, get over it, and say a prayer instead.

Arthur Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the host of the “How to Build a Happy Life” podcast. ©2023 The Atlantic Monthly Group. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.