From moms to medical doctors, burnout is everywhere these days

Ninety-five percent of human resource leaders say burnout is sabotaging workplace retention, often because of overly heavy workloads. Poor management contributes to the burnout epidemic.

“Organizations typically reward employees who are putting in longer hours and replace workers who aren’t taking on an increased workload, which is a systematic problem that causes burnout in the first place,”

Ziegler defines burnout as “chronic stress gone awry.” The big three symptoms are emotional exhaustion, cynicism and feeling ineffective. Other symptoms can include frequent colds or sicknesses, insomnia and a tendency to alleviate stress in unhealthy ways, such as with too much alcohol or online shopping.

Burnout is caused by chronic stress, not stressors. It’s important to differentiate the two. Stressors are external: to-do lists, financial problems or anxiety about the future. Stress, on the other hand, “is the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body when you encounter [stressors],”.

To fix burnout, people need to address the stress itself. They must allow their body to complete its stress response cycle. Instead, people tend to focus on stressors. “They assume their stress will go away if they’re on top of things, if they’re accomplishing things and constantly checking things off their to-do list,”.

“There’s nothing fancy about what it would take to turn things around,” says Ziegler, the “Mommy Burnout” author. “But it’s a huge shift in the cultural mind-set. That’s the challenge.”Plus, fixing burnout can feel like adding more stressors.

One reason was because women have more work-and-family conflicts. The women’s rights movement was “supposed to give women choices,” Ziegler says. “Sounds awesome, but it became you need to do it all. You need to run your house and be the perfect wife and mom and work. The stress on women got higher.”

Making space in our lives so we’re not so hurried and harried isn’t easy, especially in a culture that shames slow living, Amelia Nagoski says. Preventing burnout requires hard decisions. Everyone has the same amount of time in a day: 24 hours. To rest — whether with a walk, an extra hour of sleep or a talk with a friend — means something else drops off the schedule.

At first, you might panic that you’re not “accomplishing” something. But before long, you may notice you’ve moved farther away from a breaking point. Your downward spiral will change directions.