The 6 Causes of Burnout (and How to Avoid It)

Burnout is miserable. You feel exhausted, but you still need to keep showing up to the job, day after day. Whatever fire you had for your work has now fizzled out — making you wonder whether you should quit and start over.

Why does burnout happen, and how can we avoid it?

Christina Maslach is one of the world’s leading experts on burnout. In the 1980s, Maslach and her colleagues developed one of the first psychological assessments for burnout. In the subsequent four decades, she has built a career investigating the causes of burnout.

Burnout is More than Just Being Tired

Maslach’s research finds that burnout is more than being tired or overworked. Instead, burnout is a combination of three different factors:

1. Exhaustion. Extreme fatigue is the first, and most prominent, symptom of burnout. This fatigue is what most people associate with burnout, and it often sets the stage for the other two symptoms.
2. Cynicism. Early studies of burnout looked at healthcare workers. To cope with job stress, burned-out doctors and nurses stopped treating patients like people, which was called “depersonalization” in the literature. As burnout research expanded to other jobs, researchers observed that this same phenomenon of emotional distancing and cynicism was associated with burnout regardless of the field studied.
3. Ineffectiveness. In addition…