Once, after surviving yet another round of redundancies in a former job, I did something very odd. I turned off the lights in my room and lay face-down on the bed, unable to move. Rather than feeling relief at having escaped the axe, I was exhausted and numb. I’m not the only one. Fatigue, apathy and hopelessness are all textbook signs of burnout, a bleak phenomenon that has come to define many of our working lives. In 2025, a report from Moodle found that 66% of US workers had experienced some kind of burnout, while a Mental Health UK survey found that one in three adults came under high levels of pressure or stress in the previous year. Despite the prevalence of burnout, plenty of misconceptions around it persist. “Everybody thinks it’s some sort of disease or medical condition,” says Christina Maslach, the psychology professor who was the first to study the syndrome in the 1970s. “But it’s actually a response to chronic job stressors – a stress response.” Here we separate the facts from the myths.
Table of Contents
Burnout is just tiredness
FALSE Exhaustion isn’t the only key symptom – another is depersonalisation, or a sense of emotional detachment and cynicism. In medical staff, that might show up as compassion fatigue (leading to diminished empathy and increased irritability). For those not in healthcare, “they may find that it’s hard to care as much about their colleagues”, and their work, leading to feelings of irritation, says Claudia Hammond, the author of Overwhelmed: Ways to Take the Pressure Off. The third sign is decreasing productivity and competence – whether real or perceived. “You get less and less done, which can often result in feelings of great shame or guilt,” explains burnout coach Anna K Schaffner.
Burnout is different from depression or anxiety
TRUE The World Health Organization (WHO) doesn’t consider burnout a mental health condition or illness. Having said that, “anxiety and depression can be signs of burnout”, says Hammond, “but not everyone with burnout will be feeling as hopeless as people feel when they’ve got depression.”
It’s always work-related
FALSE While the WHO classifies burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” related to long-term, badly managed work stress, scientists are now expanding their research to include parents and caregivers. “It’s a job that is incredibly emotionally draining, taxing and physically demanding,” explains researcher and Burnout Immunity author Dr Kandi Wiens. “Regardless of whether you’re getting paid for it, that can all lead to burnout.”
Only weak or unmotivated people get burnout
FALSE “If working hard cured burnout, so many of us would be cured,” says Amelia Nagoski, the co-author of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, who was hospitalised twice by stress-induced illness from their high-pressure musical conservatory. The syndrome can actually be an indication that you are overinvested in a job, notes Wiens. “We see this a lot with people who work for mission-oriented institutions or nonprofits. People who feel very passionately about their job will overly emotionally commit themselves; that can create emotional exhaustion.” Paradoxically, loving your job can make it harder to recover from burnout. “People often struggle to step away … If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t burn out,” explains Prof Gail Kinman from the Society of Occupational Medicine.
It’s not a personal failing
TRUE “It isn’t the job itself that causes burnout,” Kinman says. “It’s often the way the organisation is managed and the support that people get.” Research on healthcare workers has found that organisational factors play a much bigger role in burnout than the person themselves. These include intense workloads, long hours and lack of support and agency in decision-making. Maslach points out that any meaningful response involves re-evaluating work conditions. “Too often the response is to figure out how to deal with burnout – rather than addressing chronic job stressors.”
Taking a holiday will fix burnout
FALSE “One myth is that a very short break will make a difference,” says Hammond. You need “a reasonable amount of time away”, advises Kinman, but the length depends on the severity of the burnout. Most of Schaffner’s clients recover with three to six months off work. While physical rest is important, she cautions against going into hermit mode and swerving social connection: “Don’t let your life shrink – make sure you reintroduce good things.” If you can’t take time out, try to build “micro-recoveries” into each day to regulate your nervous system and stress levels. Avoid scrolling mindlessly on your phone – try listening to music, doing some chair stretches or looking at family photos. “It could be something as simple as a walk outside for two to three minutes,” Wiens suggests.
You can push through if you try hard enough
FALSE “People used to talk about type A personalities who worked all the time and had heart attacks in their 40s,” says Maslach. We now know why. Soldiering on can mean gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal and cardiovascular problems. The Harvard physician and author of The 5 Resets Dr Aditi Nerurkar experienced this herself when she developed heart problems during medical training. “I thought: ‘Stress doesn’t happen to people like me, I’m resilient.’ Now we know that that’s scientifically untrue – resilience, while protective, is by no means preventive for burnout.”
People use burnout as an excuse to avoid work
FALSE “Burnout has become a buzzword,” Nagoski acknowledges, but decades after it was first observed by Maslach, “there’s overwhelming evidence that burnout is becoming more and more common”. According to TUC research, a “perfect storm” of factors is to blame, including intensifying work demands, chronic staff shortages, worsening work-life balance and the use of surveillance tech to monitor productivity. People are also feeling the effects of an economically and politically unstable, screen-obsessed world, says Schaffner: “We live in worrying, wearing times.” The idea that burnout has been weaponised to avoid work is one Maslach strongly rejects: “It’s easier [for employers] to say there’s something wrong with staff, they’re weak and lazy, and they don’t want to work, rather than saying: ‘What would make the work more doable?’”
Physical symptoms aren’t part of burnout
FALSE You can experience physical side-effects such as muscle tension, headaches, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure and more. That’s because stress is an age-old biological response designed to help escape emergencies like running away from a predator. The problem is when the body is placed under chronic stress, explains Kinman: “These adaptive responses tend to become maladaptive and cause all kinds of problems.”
Burnout is a sign you need to quit your job
FALSE Not necessarily. Broadly speaking, Schaffner says, you have three options: leave; improve your working conditions; adapt by prioritising your wellness – or a combination of the last two. That can mean tackling perfectionism, putting down boundaries or scheduling downtime. “Studies have found that even just 10-minute breaks can make an incremental difference in your brain and your body,” says Nerurkar. But don’t beat yourself up if it doesn’t work. “Sometimes people are in horrific working environments that are making them ill,” Schaffner explains. “They can have all the self-mastery skills in the world and it won’t help. If I discover that [with my clients], they need to get out.”
Everyone’s a little burnt out
FALSE “The data right now shows that about 76% of people experience burnout,” says Nerurkar. That doesn’t mean that everyone has it severely enough to need months off work. “Proper burnout is a really serious and existentially threatening condition,” says Schaffner, in which sufferers “are chronically tired, but continue to be high-functioning at work at a really high cost”. At its worst, she says, those with burnout “sometimes can’t even get out of bed and suffer brain fog, meaning they can’t read or write any more”.
You can fix burnout by reducing your work hours
TRUE AND FALSE This depends. If your case was related to work hours, then reducing them may alleviate early symptoms – though not if it comes with the expectation that the same amount of work still needs to be done. “Reducing workload may help a little bit if they’re able to use that time to reconnect to the things and people they really love,” cautions Wiens, “but not if they’re just getting thrown back into a work environment that’s not healthy.”
You can’t return to the same job if you’ve already burnt out
TRUE AND FALSE If, by “the same job”, you mean the exact same work environment, then no. People can make a full return, but adjustments such as tweaking your job spec, seeking occupational health support or a gradual ramp back up to work may be necessary. If that’s not possible, it may be time to wave goodbye. “One woman I interviewed said it very well: she finally realised that she could not recover in the place that was making her sick,” says Wiens.
Breathing exercises/meditation/yoga will solve burnout
FALSE Practices such as yoga or breathwork may help calm a stressed-out nervous system, but no amount of savasana will compensate for a toxic workplace. “Burnout is a very complex phenomenon,” says Nerurkar. “Focusing on a little bit of breathing is not going to do it.” Other than eliminating the chronic stressors in your job, there are some smaller things you can do: protect your sleep; minimise screen time; introduce some form of movement into your daily life. Wiens encourages her clients to revisit the people and experiences that made them happiest. “Positive reconnections help people change their perspective on the work environment,” she explains. “They suddenly start to see they have options that they might not see when they’re immersed in it.”
