The Pendulum of Burnout
For a long time, I thought of the spectrum of burnout as a speedometer.
If you’re working long hours and going at 110%, you’ll feel the pain. You need to dial it back before it screws you. Looking back to college, I distinctly remember the first time I felt that same pain.
It was the middle of my sophomore year and I was stuck between two equally attractive desires: a major in Maryland’s Business School or majoring in psychology.
A bad accounting exam would prompt me to google clinical psychology doctorate programs. The cost of those same programs would spark a switch into googling consulting salaries. The next day would find me obsessed with a new concept in a social psychology class and the wheel would spin again.
It was a vicious cycle.
Inevitably, it began to take a physical toll on me. I was taking twice the amount of classes in an effort to bet on both careers. I was rarely sleeping. I was stress eating taquitos from the campus seven eleven.
The mutual exclusivity of the whole dilemma irked me. I felt all the pain of Hermione Granger with that godforsaken time turner, yearning to do and learn everything without acknowledging the impossibility of it.
With impending graduation as a forcing function, it ended.
I chose business, ended up getting an offer in strategy consulting and did a few years at IBM before I hit another wall.
But this time, it had nothing to do with the physical toll.
In fact, my last few months at IBM gave me the most freedom I’ve had in my career. I was leading my own team, working largely my own hours, and could even opt not to go into the office if I wanted to. I was making okay money. I had time. I was comfortable. Almost too comfortable. How do you even burn out in this case?
At first, I confronted the idea that I wasn’t finding “meaning” in my work, but that wasn’t right. It felt like a slap in the face to the thousands of people using the product we were working on and benefiting from it.
But I realized what I was missing was independent of meaning — it was the challenge. Even as I regained more and more control, the lack of challenge over time eventually led to its own state of burnout. A motivational burnout.
Is that an actual thing? Burnout from boredom?
Some brief research led me to a term: Boreout. In Diagnose Boreout, the authors describe a theory called Boredom boreout syndrome, a “psychological disorder caused by mental underload at the workplace due to lack of adequate quantitative or qualitative workload.”
It is a thing! The greater irony is that in some ways, we dig ourselves into this hole. The better we get at our job, the more inadequate the same job becomes for our liking.
It did cause me to rethink my philosophy on burnout a bit, specifically the metaphor. Now, instead of a speedometer, I think of it more as a pendulum.
On one side, you have challenge. On the other, you have comfort. Both are generally important ingredients of a job that doesn’t burn you out.
If you have too much challenge with no sense of comfort, the pendulum gets stuck. It will take a physical toll on you. You won’t be able to plan around the job. You’ll constantly feel stuck in a state of now knowing what you’re doing. You lose your agency, and with that, your voice.
But then there’s the flip side: if you have too much comfort with no challenge, you’ll deal with motivational burnout. The monotony may hit you to the point where it will have you questioning if you’re worth more than what you’re currently doing if you get too good at it.
Finding comfort means we need to find things we’re good at, have a sense of autonomy over, and also signal to management to help us find those things. If you’re constantly throwing someone into an ocean with no life jacket, it will only be a matter of time before a wave steals them away.
Challenge is similar: a level of self-awareness around boredom and finding opportunities to chase down that audacious new goal you know you’ll suck at the first time.
In a good job, it’s impossible to avoid either. Nor should it be desirable. You want to have a sprinkle of challenge and you want to have a sprinkle of control. You should want the good, at the expense of some of the bad.
One of the common adages I hear is that burnout can come when you no longer find meaning in your work. But even in that lens, there’s a meta layer: you could be working on things that matter but still burn out, if you’re not working on the right things for you.
If you’re working for a mission-driven company, but your exact work isn’t supporting the mission, it might not be helpful. If the tasks are too easy for you, same. Similarly, working on things that you find meaningful can only take you so far if you’re burning the candle at both ends. It’s why non-profit employees can still have some of the highest burn out rates, despite mission driven work.
It might seem the pendulum should always stay in the center, where our job is equally challenging and in our control. But the catch is that we all have different pendulums.
Some people prefer jobs with a bit more consistent comfort and stability. Some prefer jobs with a bit more continuous challenge. It’s the classic small startup vs. big company argument, and I’m not here to justify where a pendulum needs to be. Just that it exists inside of all of us!
One more caveat — your pendulum also doesn’t have to swing from your job. If you find a job with a sense of freedom that gives you more time to pursue some hobbies and you find your challenge and motivation from those hobbies, it’s a perfectly good reason to keep that job.
It’s a big reason why I keep writing my newsletter. On some boring days or weeks at work, I know it’s an outlet that exists and keeps me happy. (I sometimes joke about how the newsletter almost helped me find a footing in the world of psychology I once craved!)
Is it this simple? Just two variables that decide if you burn out? Absolutely not. It would be insulting to think a single Medium article can address the wider emotional and physiological causes of burnout. There are hundreds of reasons someone can burn out and I think there’s a world where balance isn’t always the right answer.
But if you’re at the point where you feel lost, soul sucked, or ready to quit, consider where you are on the pendulum.
Where should the ball tilt next?
I’m currently a growth marketer based out of the Bay Area. In addition to the piece you read, I like writing about marketing, meaningless controversies (i.e. ranking of the best fast food fries) and spending my days finding the best Super burrito in San Francisco. If you have any thoughts, get in touch here or via @kushaanshah on Twitter!
