Understanding Burnout Part 2: Root Causes
A complex problem with complex root causes
This post is the second part of a three-part series I’m putting together about burnout. In the first post, I explored the definition and of burnout and some of the key symptoms that people experience. In this post, we will explore some of the more complex and perhaps less obvious causes for burnout, focussing on how we as individuals are impacted by the environments, systems, and contexts that we exist within.
The following quote is from Dr. Darcia Narvaez, a psychologist who integrates a wide range of anthropology, neurobiology, clinical, and developmental lenses into her work, and who has proposed that human beings have become species-atypical. Dr. Gabor Mate refers to Dr. Narvaez’s research in his 2023 book “The Myth of Normal” [1]:
“No other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, never mind to convince itself that such is the way things ought to be.”
One of the reasons I am so interested in burnout myself is that it seems to no longer be an unusual experience; it’s something that seems quite normalized in a wide variety of contexts: work, parenting, relationships, physical fitness, academics, and beyond. Narvaez’s quote resonates with my own curiosity around how and why we as humans are able to become untrue to ourselves in ways that result in burnout.
In Part 1, we defined burnout as “A state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress” [2]. Now we’ll explore some theories around what the underlying root causes of burnout might be. Before we dive in, I’ll note that these ideas may or may not resonate with your experience of burnout. Every individual is different, and brings a different set of life experiences, relationships, and world views with them.
Many people think they’re burnt out because of personal shortcomings, and this can lead to feelings of shame and inferiority. My hope in sharing these ideas is to provide insight on why burnout is so widespread and systemic, in order to reduce shame and help folks understand that this problem is much bigger than any individual.
What causes burnout?
I came across many theories about what causes burnout in my research. In this post, I’ll highlight the more compelling ones that feel relevant to psychotherapy and also feel like they take a more holistic approach to understanding the problem. There were five compelling theories I came across in my research:
Self objectification
Self exploitation
Pathological individualization
Work-person mismatch
Work idealization
1. Self objectification
One theory is that burnout is caused by self-objectification. Baldisarri describes how when we are treated as resources or objects by others - whether that’s managers, colleagues, or family members - we internalize that perspective and begin to objectify ourselves [3].
“Perceptions of being viewed by others in objectifying ways may lead individuals, over time, to internalize the observer’s perspective on the self, and thus engage in objectification themselves.”
When a workplace or a manager objectifies an employee, they view the employee as a collection of different functions that meet a need. Self-objectification causes people to perceive themselves as lacking a sense of humanity [3]. We can understand how being treated as a series of functions can actually cause us to then split ourselves into a series of parts, and to replace our true personality and authenticity with a list of functions that meet the goals of a manager or organization.
The objectification of women in Western cultural contexts is an area that has been studied in terms of symptoms and impacts, and research shows that when women are objectified, they internalize this treatment and do it to themselves [3]. Negative outcomes of women’s self-objectification include increased anxiety and shame, depression, eating disorders, and reduced intellectual performance [3]. Other impacts of objectification include denial of one’s feelings, denial of one’s autonomy, a sense of interchangeability with others, and a diminished sense of self esteem [3].
Baldissarri suggests that workers who are treated like objects by their employer have two options: either they leave the workplace, or they have to adjust their own personal expectations to align with the workplace, which can result in this phenomenon of self-objectification [3]. In a society where we continue to experience higher costs of living, stagnant wages, and less worker protections, individuals are in the difficult position of having to work in environments with lots of these objectifying pressures, and little ability to simply quit due to the very real need for income.
2. Self exploitation
Another theory is that burnout is the result of chronic self-exploitation. Philospher Byung-Chul Han suggests that burnout runs rampant in a society where there is what he calls an "excess of positivity", characterized by the idea that one can do anything they put their mind to. Everything becomes a project, and the individual becomes an entrepreneur of their own self, constantly exploiting and exhausting themselves [4].
“In an ‘achievement society’, characterized by an excess of positivity where the individual believes he can do anything, everything becomes a project, and he becomes an entrepreneur of his own self.”
Social psychologist Devon Price explores how social media’s selection bias feeds into this achievement mentality [5]. So-called self-made social media icons and celebrities attribute their success to hard work, but selection bias means that we never see or hear from everyone else who worked just as hard, but struggled and suffered and ultimately failed. This leads to an inaccurate perception that anyone can succeed if they work hard enough, when the reality is that most do not; we just don’t get to see them on social media platforms [5].
Social media and advertising create a “keeping up with the Joneses” dynamic, and Price describes how the Jones family was never actually seen or known; they were just an unknowable ideal that people strived towards without ever getting to a point of satisfaction [5]. Constantly striving to achieve this illusion of success, never getting there, internalizing it as our fault, and trying over again hoping it works next time creates a clear recipe for burnout.
3. Pathological individualization
Another theory is that burnout is caused by something psychotherapist Alex Delgou calls pathological individualization, where the individual internalizes the idea that they are solely responsible for all of their successes and failures, without any regard for external factors [6]. This sort of individualistic ideology is foundational in Western capitalist societies. An individualistic view of the infinite potential of the individual contributes to deep depression and helplessness when an individual is unable to achieve happiness, wealth, and freedom; in other words, if you aren’t achieving these things, it’s due to your own shortcomings, and your inability to work hard enough [6].
“The individual takes on full responsibility for their successes and failures in life, disregarding any sort of external impacting factors.”
This dominant mindset that you are the sole determinant of your destiny completely dismisses any sort of systemic factors such as racism, sexism, ableism, or class dynamics, which create an inherently uneven playing field for individuals that they have no control over.
We can understand why it’s appealing to believe in individualism. Professor of developmental psychology Julie Hicks Patrick points out that having an internal locus of control—in other words, believing we are at the root cause of our success and problems—causes lower anxiety for individuals [7]. An external locus of control suggests that there are things outside of our control, and this can cause anxiety if it is never processed or worked through. So we can understand why individuals might gravitate towards more of an individualistic approach whereby everything becomes a matter of your own personal actions, but we can also see how this sets individuals up for burnout in creating the false belief that they have control over factors that are out of their control.
Poet, performance artist, and activist Tricia Hersey emphasizes how burnout today is enabled by capitalism and racism, which are systems that “refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings… [making] us all into human machines, willing and ready to donate our lives to a capitalist system that thrives by placing profits over people” [8]. She points out that America was built upon slavery and exploitation of Black and Indigenous people, forced into labour for centuries as the country built it’s economic power. Hersey sees burnout as the internalization of capitalism resulting in an inability to rest and an unwillingness to make space for others to rest, and she points out that grind culture offers the myth of control, which is similar to the concept of pathological individualization. Hersey’s work is grounded in the concept of rest as a form of resistance against capitalism [8].
4. Work-person mismatch
The idea of burnout being caused by work-person mismatch suggests that people burn out when their job doesn't reflect their true nature. Christina Maslach, one of the founding researchers on burnout, saw this misalignment as a major cause of burnout [9].
“Burnout is not a problem of people so much as it is of the social environment in which they work… when there is a major mismatch between the nature of the job and the nature of people, then there will be a greater risk of burnout.”
Mate and Mate suggest that humans need to gain meaning from work, and that work can help meet other core needs including “competency, mastery, and a sense of purpose”, but that in modern society, it is increasingly difficult to find work that actually is meaningful due to the stress and uncertainty generated by capitalism [10]. This constant stress leads to dissociation, which as mentioned in Part 1 of this series, is a coping mechanism people use in the face of both chronic and one-time event trauma, allowing them to disconnect from themselves to survive. Long-term dissociation can cause us to treat ourselves in a mechanical way, because we don’t actually feel the impacts in the moment.
It makes sense that many of us end up in jobs that misalign with our true nature and passions and that this leads to a sense of exhaustion and burnout.
5. Work idealization
Finally, burnout can be understood through the idea of work idealization, which is common in wealthy post-industrial countries where work has in many ways replaced the roles previously played by community or religion. At the same time, work conditions continue to decline, due to many of the tenets of capitalism, a few which have been touched on above.
“An underlying belief in wealthy, post-industrial countries is that work is not just a means to survival, but a path to purpose, self actualization, and status. Work plays the role that religion used to play, even as work conditions continue to markedly deteriorate.”
Jonathan Malesic is a journalist and academic who explores how the sixteenth religious concept of predestination had a significant impact on how we value and idealize work today. Predestination is the belief that God chooses who is worthy of salvation in the afterlife, and according to Calvinist theology, while good works cannot earn salvation, they can be a sign of being chosen for salvation [11]. This work ethic allowed believers from the sixteenth century onwards to cope with religious anxiety. Similarly, secular twenty-first century workers can deal with their status anxiety within capitalism by proving their value to employers and to themselves through hard, disciplined work [11]
Malesic views burnout as the result of the gap between one’s expectations of work and their reality. While he sees capitalism as a contributor to this gap, he connects burnout to a deep underlying belief in wealthy, post-industrial countries that work is not just a means to survival, but the main path to purpose, status and self actualization [11]. Delgou emphasizes this concept, and he suggests that a common assumption within capitalist societies is that work is a fundamental human trait, and that having a job is an ultimate indicator of being a successful person, a belief held and promoted by mainstream psychiatry [6].
Malesic describes his own experience as someone who always dreamed of becoming a tenured university professor, and how despite ultimately achieving this goal, he eventually found himself overworked, frustrated with low engagement from his students, and deep in the pits of fatigue, hopelessness, and cynicism [11].
Over the last 50 years, the gap between workplace expectations and reality has widened; people expect more from their work, while work conditions continue to deteriorate. Since the 1970s, North American workplaces have shifted costs and risks from the employer to the worker [11]. This can be seen in the rise of temporary contract work, removal of pensions and benefits programs, and decreased power and existence of worker unions.
The current 40 hour work week is proven to be unsustainable for the majority of people, and they present research that shows that office workers are only capable of being productive for approximately three hours per day. Technological advancement means that 40 hours of work in the 1950s now only takes the average worker 11 hours, but despite this huge leap, wages have declined, hours have increased, and the average American only takes about half of their paid vacation days annually [5].
So as our expectations and idealization of work continues to increase, the reality of our workplace conditions are decreasing. This gap can be understood as a major source of dissatisfaction and burnout.
If you found that some of the underlying causes resonate with your own experience of burnout and want to learn more, check out the other posts in this series:
References
[1] Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2023). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness and healing in a toxic culture. Vintage Canada.
[2] Career Burnout. CAMH. (n.d.). https://www.camh.ca/en/camh-news-and-stories/career-burnout
[3] Baldissarri, C., Andrighetto, L., & Volpato, C. (2014). When work does not ennoble man: psychological consequence of working objectification. Testing, Psychometrics, Methodology in Applied Psychology, 21(3), 327–339. https://doi.org/10.4473/TPM21.3.7
[4] Han, B.-C., & Butler, E. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press.
[5] Price, D. (2022). Laziness does not exist. Atria Books.
[6] Delgou, A. (2021). The Individual and Work: Politicised Psychotherapy. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 21(4), 4–8. https://iacp.ie/files/UserFiles/IJCP/Article%20 Winter%2021%20-%20Individual%20and%20Work.pdf
[7] Patrick, J. H., Hayslip, B. Jr., & Hollis-Sawyer, L. (2021). Adult Development and Aging: Growth, longevity and challenges. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd.
[8] Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: Free yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life. Aster.
[11] Malesic, J. (2022). The end of burnout: Why work drains us and how to build better lives. University of California Press.
[9] Maslach, C. (1983). Burnout: The cost of caring. Malor Books.
