The Burnout Age: Real Pain Requires Real Solutions

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The pressure to “do more with less” is wearing people out. Burnout affects at least half of us: In a 2024 survey of 1,500 full-time employees of U.S. companies, 51% said they’d suffered burnout in the past year. Nearly two-thirds cited mental and emotional stress as the top cause. Fifty-four percent cited long hours, 52% cited a shortage of workers, and 38% cited the challenge of maintaining work/life balance. A recent survey of 8,200 tech workers had even worse findings, with 84% reporting burnout at work. AI is adding fuel to the fire, with 88% of the most active AI users saying they’re burned out. It’s probably no surprise that nearly the same number of people in that survey reported that they’re more polite to AI than to humans.

Burnout is more than fatigue. The MIT Sloan Management Review article “With Burnout on the Rise, What Can Companies Do About It?” uses a definition based on the work of Christina Maslach, a researcher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley: “a psychological response resulting from chronic stress in the workplace that shows up through three primary symptoms: feelings of exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment, and a perceived lack of accomplishment.”

Increasing burnout rates aren’t healthy for individuals or for organizations. So, what can we do about it for ourselves, and what can we ask our organizations — or at least the teams we’re part of in our organizations — to do about it?

The starting point is not trying to treat third-degree burns with first-degree salves.

Burnout Calls for More Than Simplistic Care

Nick Petrie, an organizational psychologist, spent five years researching Navy SEALs, surgeons, CIA agents, and business leaders. His research and client work found that most organizations treat burnout as a binary condition: You’re either burned out or you’re fine. As he explained during a recent Work Forward Forum session, most workplace wellness programs are designed to address so-called first-degree burns — the temporary, acute stress that comes and goes when we’re feeling overwhelmed. This kind of stress is typically followed by a quick recovery.

But many high performers are experiencing “second-degree burns” — chronic stress and fatigue, leading to decreased motivation that persists — or even “third-degree burns,” a full burnout where even simple tasks can feel overwhelming and emotions become difficult to control. Both require deeper interventions.

“Organizations often provide first-degree solutions to third-degree issues,” Petrie explained. But chronic burnout can’t be treated with a day off. Organizational solutions like providing access to meditation apps are comical for those in the second- or third-degree stage.

Petrie’s research found that rest isn’t the long-term solution. Instead, people need a different approach to personal growth and different workplace conditions.

Most organizations treat burnout as a binary condition: You’re either burned out or you’re fine.

The type of personal growth Petrie is talking about doesn’t come from small adjustments or recovery periods. It’s typically a break-induced life transition involving an investment in gaining a deeper understanding of how you work. It’s more than a brief break many of us are used to taking at the end of one job before starting the next. Too often, those mini breaks lead us back to the same patterns in the new organization.

Getting off that wheel takes a bigger effort and sufficient time to look back at what’s working (and not working) for you. That said, Petrie has seen people make significant changes with initial concentrated thinking and then light coaching every couple of weeks. He said he’s seen people who have figured out how to emerge from burnout and reinvent a new formula for their next stage of life go on to experience what he terms post-traumatic growth: “They didn’t bounce back to where they were; they bounced forward.”

Three Keys to Finding Personal Balance

Petrie’s insights lead to three key ways to reduce personal burnout: finding a balance between being in “perform” and “grow” modes, recognizing your own early warning signs when it comes to burnout, and building healthy habits. (After detailing those, I’ll discuss how organizations need to adjust more broadly to improve workplace conditions.)

Balance perform mode and grow mode. Petrie’s team discovered that high performers operate in two distinct modes: perform mode (exploiting existing skills) and grow mode (exploring new territory). Across thousands of assessments, Petrie found that the average split is 61% perform mode and 39% grow mode.

But many leaders and others who veer toward burnout skew heavily toward performance, to their detriment. They spend an extra-high percentage of their time doing what they already know, and too little time learning anything new.

“When you stay in perform mode for too long, people go backwards,” Petrie said. For instance, “doctors and teachers actually get worse over the course of their career, not better, because they get in this mode and repeat the same things over and over,” he said, referencing research into how people acquire expertise.

Spending time in perform mode, where you’re exploiting the skills you already have, can be rewarding personally, through increased confidence. It’s certainly a plus organizationally. But exploring new territory in grow mode is equally important. It is what allows you to develop future capabilities and build resilience.

Know your early warning signs. High performers often miss the early signals that they’re heading toward burnout. “They said looking back, it was so obvious,” Petrie noted about people who had burned out completely.

Warning signs are deeply personal, but Petrie shared his own discovery process: “I didn’t know what mine were, so I not only thought about it, I asked people close to me. And I realized, actually, there’s three for me: I stop sleeping properly, I get irritable for no good reason, and my wife notices and points it out to me.”

Many leaders who veer toward burnout spend too little time learning anything new.

Common early warning signs from Petrie’s research include engaging in snippy behavior with colleagues and family, feeling overwhelmed, and working weekends to “get ahead” for Monday. A participant in the Work Forward Forum session added “rage cleaning and an aggressive vacuum” to the list.

The important step is recognizing those signs and acting on them. You want to figure out what puts you back in equilibrium. For Petrie, it’s spending time with friends, playing golf, or going to a movie alone during the day. “I know those three things work for me,” he said. “What are your if-thens that work for you?”

Build healthy habits. Beyond having the mix right on perform and grow modes, there are a series of habits that people who sustain high performance exhibit. Some are work routines: scheduling daily blocks of time for deep, focused work and creating transition rituals that allow them to “reattach” to personal time away from work, for instance. It also requires that they set boundaries, particularly around devices and communication. “Always on” is a recipe for “always burnt out.”

Another major trait that required many leaders to make big adjustments was making peace with doing less than they’d planned. “Early in their careers, they took great pride in getting everything done,” Petrie said. “Then they got into roles where it was just too big,” and they had to accept things going unfinished. He noted that for middle-aged leaders, “the things which make you successful in your 20s — having an awesome work ethic, saying yes to everything, having no boundaries, being super responsive at all times — those are the things which burn you out in your 40s.”

Perhaps the most powerful pattern is having activities that engage completely different parts of your brain and body than work. Petrie terms this finding your “opposite world.” One tech executive told Petrie that Argentinian tango saved his career. “He told me, ‘When I go there, my work world disappears,’” Petrie said. “‘I’m in my heart, I’m in my body, completely absorbed.’”

Three Keys for the Organizational Challenge

Individual strategies alone aren’t enough to address burnout, of course. Workplace conditions today often work against sustainable performance. “If you wanted to create conditions for people to be effective, you’d do the opposite of what we have at the moment,” Petrie said.

The most common organizational challenges include excessive workloads, meeting overload, constant interruptions, collaboration burdens, and difficulty prioritizing. An oft-cited statistic is that workers switch tasks every three minutes during the workday and that after an interruption, it takes 23 minutes to refocus.

Here are three ways that organizations and their leaders can change those workplace stressors.

Support team norms that enable boundaries. Team norms, or team agreements, are often cited as an effective tool for determining what work is best done in person, but their potential uses are much broader. Teams that set boundaries on meeting hours and make clear what, why, and how issues will be escalated outside of work hours enable teams to turn off the various notifications that can plague their nights.

Create clear goals and priorities. Organizations and teams often lack clear goals and priorities, driven in part by loss aversion — the fear leaders have that they might not get the last erg of effort out of a team. But leaders pile on more work than is realistic, which impedes progress through diffuse priorities. Making short lists of three to five clear goals, stated quarterly and measured transparently, can help teams align on what matters most and reject the next item being added to the burnout stack.

Enable a balance of the perform and grow modes. Individuals aren’t going to be able to explore and build new skills if their managers continually put them in perform mode, asking them to once again perform tasks at which they already excel, perhaps faster. Instead, employees at every level need to get new opportunities that they find stimulating and allow them to build new forms of mastery. Such an investment is often suboptimal in the short term — it means that the organization will not be fully utilizing someone’s best current skills — but it creates longer-term, sustainable high performers.

For organizations, the purpose of these keys is creating conditions that support sustainable high performance rather than burning through talent. The companies that figure this out won’t just retain their best people — they’ll unlock performance levels that seemed impossible under the old paradigm of grinding harder.