How to Recover From Burnout: 5 Steps to Get Back on Track

Do you work hard to the point where you feel stressed out, cynical towards your peers, and hopeless about what you want to accomplish? Or do well and crush whenever you deliver a more significant project? This is not depression, nor a disease you recently discovered on Google two minutes ago. It’s something more slippery: burnout.

Don’t take it all out on you, though. Think about how Western society champions stress and the idea of putting in long hours at your job: “Work hard,” “Never settle,” and “Comfort is mediocrity.” This is all struggle or hustle porn that encourages you to brag about your failures and quote other hustle gurus to be successful. Reality is much harsher; you’re barely winging it this way.

There’s nothing wrong with focusing on high-impact goals, productivity, and the desire to perform better. But working 100 hours a week? That screams lack of sleep, if not karoshi, or ‘death by overwork’.

So how do you spot burnout early on before it creeps in?

What is burnout?

The term ‘burnout’ was first coined in the ‘70s by Herbert Freudenberger and Christina Maslach, two psychologists who independently studied this phenomenon in social service and health workers. They specifically targeted them due to the high volume of human interaction and chronic stress experienced daily.

To put it in Dr. Maslach’s words:

Burnout is a psychological syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishments that can occur among individuals who work with others in some capacity.

As it turns out, it’s not all about exhaustion. There’s also detachment in the form of a cynical attitude toward peers and clients and a sense of hopelessness about yourself and the work that you’re doing.

She further developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), an inventory of 22 items that measure the three dimensions mentioned before, which soon became the leading measuring tool in the industry.

There are four types of burnout:

1. Overload burnout: when you grind and hustle and keep working harder and harder.
2. Under-load burnout: in contrast to the overload type, it’s when you are bored or under-challenged at your job, slightly becoming cynical or doing the bare minimum.
3. Habitual burnout: when the physical and mental burnout is already chronic, seeping into other life areas; it can develop into depression if left unchecked.
4. Neglect burnout: This type of burnout is caused by past failures, under-achievements, or when you feel incompetent and underqualified to do your job.

In 2005 though, a couple of Danish scientists developed a new model, the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI), that analyzed burnout on three levels: personal, work-related, and client-related.

These are all complex models. So instead of going through all of them, look at the following symptoms. You might be on the burnout express if you:

• Feel exhausted most of the time
• Have no interest in your current job but can’t quit it
• Have to motivate yourself for even the smallest tasks
• Have unrealistic deadlines to fulfill
• Get paid less compared to how much work you put in
• Become short-tempered with your colleagues and clients
• Withdraw from social interactions
• Work in a caustic work environment
• Resort to toxic behavior like alcohol, drugs, and food to cope with the stress
• Question your career and life choices in general

Did you tick any of those boxes? The good news is that you can battle burnout once you’re aware of it.

How to identify job burnout?

Burnout doesn’t show up overnight. It builds gradually with every task, project, and small favor you half-heartedly accept despite your current workload, health, and values.

Sure, you can overcommit and put in 3 more hours to finish the “ultimate” project. But then, each task increases your cognitive load, meaning that easy tasks will feel a lot more difficult than they are, making your workload unbearable.

Time tracking is one of the best methods to prove your over-commitment. But it will catch up sooner or later, leading to unintended time theft, making you wonder how you put on weight or why everybody is avoiding an overachiever like yourself.

In fact, a recent Gallup study on 7,500 full-time U.S. employees reported that 23% often felt burned out or always at work, while an additional 44% felt burned out sometimes. The same study concluded that out of this batch, 28% of millennials experienced frequent levels of burnout compared to 21% of the older generation, while only 45% felt it sometimes. That’s 7 out of 10 millennials. Remember this next time you want to blame this generation for your problems. 😉

Plus, we’ve all lived through a pandemic, lockdown, and abrupt transition to a remote and changing work environment, which prompted the Great Resignation of 2021.

To make sure you don’t pull the smaller stick, diagnose yourself first. Sit down and think about all the situations that made or make you feel exhausted, anxious, or furious. It may be something like a nagging manager, the narrow deadlines that you need to hit consistently, or the coffee machine, which is always dirty. It doesn’t matter. Your goal here is to identify the root cause of burnout.

Use a design research technique like the 5 Whys or keep a stress diary to evaluate the time of the day, intensity, duration, situation, triggering events, and reactions that occur during burnout, like in this template.

There’s also a Burnout Self-Test to check your stress level on a 15-75 point scale that only takes a few minutes.

Stages of burnout

Gail North and Herbert Freudenberger, psychologists, have outlined a comprehensive 12-stage model that describes the progression of burnout. These stages provide valuable insights into the development and identification of burnout among professionals. Here are the stages according to their model:

1. The compulsion to prove oneself: feeling the constant need to demonstrate one’s worth obsessively.
2. Working harder: becoming a work “addict” with an inability to switch off.
3. Neglecting needs: disrupted sleep and eating patterns, along with a lack of social interaction.
4. Displacement of conflicts: blaming others or external circumstances for stress and problems.
5. Revision of values: prioritizing work over friends, family, and personal interests.
6. Denial of emerging problems: intolerance towards colleagues, perceiving them negatively.
7. Withdrawal: avoiding social interactions and using substances for stress relief.
8. Odd behavioral changes: displaying impatience, aggression, or unusual behavior.
9. Depersonalization: feeling detached from oneself and others, losing a sense of value.
10. Inner emptiness: seeking activities like overeating and substance use to fill a void.
11. Depression: feeling lost, exhausted, with a bleak outlook on the future.
12. Burnout syndrome: Total mental and physical collapse requiring medical attention.

This model was developed in the 70s, and since then there have been further developments regarding burnout and depression:

The difference between burnout and depression

Burnout is definitely not the same as depression.

Burnout often stems from prolonged exposure to stress, demanding situations, excessive work, or neglecting personal needs. It is temporary and tends to improve when individuals take a break or address the stressors. Managing burnout includes setting boundaries, practicing self-care, taking breaks, and seeking guidance from therapists.

In contrast, depression is a diagnosable mental health condition that can persist even after the stressor is gone. Symptoms include loss of interest in activities, feelings of sadness or emptiness, low self-esteem, and changes in appetite. Depression can have various causes, like genetics, childhood environment, significant life events, trauma, or the presence of other medical or psychiatric conditions. Treatment typically involves therapy and medications such as antidepressants.

Burnout is mainly characterized by extreme tiredness, ennui, and reduced work performance. Depression is more serious; negative thoughts and feelings are no longer just about work but become personal and lead to low self-esteem, hopelessness, and suicidal tendencies.

Do not self-diagnose, but please seek medical help if you’re experiencing any of these. Once a professional correctly diagnoses you, it’s time to protect yourself from burnout.

How to recover from burnout

When it comes to job burnout, the hardest part is breaking out of it.

“But you don’t get me, Marcel; I have so many things to do, and there’s no one in my team who can actually do this right now besides me!”

While I don’t deny that, neglecting yourself all too often comes at the expense of your health and social life. Apart from the most common-sense advice like sleeping for 8-9 hours each day in a pitch-black room, exercising regularly, and eating healthy food, here are five steps on how to recover from burnout:

1. Take regular breaks

Our brains are not engineered to sustain extended periods of attention. According to this study, focusing too long on a task can decrease the motivation and performance needed to complete it.

The antidote is to have short interruptions (a.k.a. breaks) throughout the day: leg stretches, calls with your loved ones, walks in the park, you name it. Basically, anything that moves you away from the computer and allows you to regroup your mind. Don’t shy away from taking vacations, especially after an extensive, stressful project – provided that you have other similar ones lining up around the corner.

Using a Pomodoro timer is a great way to insert those breaks into your work naturally. The method helps you focus and review your efforts by breaking them into 25-minute work sessions punctuated by 5-minute breaks. This way, your brain “stretches” enough to regain focus when tackling a repetitive or long-term task.

2. Control your devices

On average, people check their phones 150 times a day. Yes, you read that right; there’s no typo. Although this compulsive behavior is seen as a way to cope with stress and keep yourself up-to-date, it only creates a state of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Turn off notifications or your devices at work to take charge of your day. A much lighter version of the control is to uninstall all apps on your phone that have infinite scroll, like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Avoid social media doomscrolling. Or use tools that temporarily disable notifications and block certain websites; the choice is yours.

3. Learn to say no

Don’t take on any additional work or projects when you recover from severe burnout. Yes, there will still be chores and people who depend on you. But trust me, you already have your plate full and can do so many things at a time.

If you want to be at the top of your game and achieve excellence (not perfection), think in terms of momentum. What does it take to sustain long-term results? Otherwise, you’ll crash and burn after each significant project because you didn’t respect your boundaries. Brendon Burchard put it best when he said:

Set yourself up for excellence, not exhaustion, for excellence, not mediocrity—for something you can be proud of and feel good about inside.

Talk to your boss or manager about dropping off tasks and projects that are not urgent, or try to delegate some of your responsibilities to your colleagues – even when you know they’re not going to carry them out the way you would.

4. Rely on job burnout recovery strategies

Do you often think you can do so much in a day yet barely finish half of your to-do list?

It happens to all of us—don’t worry. The solution is to know how much time it takes to complete a task and then figure out how many you can do in a day. Sounds easy, right?

Wrong. Estimating tasks is more art than science, requiring considerate practice before getting a grip on it. There are strategies you can rely on to ensure nothing falls through the cracks while you work only on the tasks that matter. Here are a few of them:

• Prioritize tasks. By setting task priorities, you will know what to work on first and in which order. These can be either time—or urgency-based, but for something more complex, go for the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, which identifies four different priority buckets (urgent/not urgent/important/not important) and gives further action steps for each one.

• Delegate. This is worth mentioning again. Outsource as many things as possible until you arrive at the tasks that concern you, are actionable, and take more than 2 minutes to complete, as the popular productivity method Gettings Things Done (GTD) recommends.
• Manage your commitments. With the help of timesheet entry software, track your time spent on work and non-work activities and lay it out on a calendar (weekly) or agenda (hourly). Check whether you’ve overbooked or overcommitted and make adjustments.
• Visualize work progress. A Kanban tool gives you perspective on your work by tracking tasks on a sequential board, from To Do to Done.
• Set uninterrupted time for yourself. With one of these personal task management software or a cloud-based work management tool like Paymo, you can block out time for the most important tasks of the day without being nagged by your team for every minor thing. They’ll be able to see your daily schedule and how long you work on a specific activity in the 1-Day Timespan from the Team Scheduling module, which acts as a calendar for the entire team for a specific day.
• You can also go for top employee time tracking software, which usually has a built-in time clock to register your daily efforts. Or, if you prefer more complex things to schedule hours, a Gantt Chart tool is the answer.
• Focus on each day at a time. Pick one task to focus on and celebrate the small wins:

5. Consider a support group

In a recent study, Dr. Maslach argued that human connection is the best way to heal burnout. To put it in her words:

That social network, that each of you has each other’s back, that they’re there for you and you’re there for them, is like money in the bank. It’s a precious resource.

So look out for mentors and professionals who can support you in your career and shine a bit of light on the problems that you’re currently facing. Find them in your company or industry-specific organizations, like the Project Management Institute (PMI®), that organize open platforms and events for people to come together, interact, and exchange ideas.

You could also bond with people outside work by joining different hobby classes, volunteering, or attending local meetups. If you’re still uncomfortable meeting new people, resort to your family’s support. After all, they’re the ones who know you for better or worse. The whole idea is to share your feelings and create meaningful, positive relationships, which reduce the isolation that often comes with job burnout.

Looking at the half-full glass

Burnout might feel like an inescapable burden at first. The chances are that you’ll still experience it at one point in your career, if not several times, especially if you’re a leader or a successful professional in tech. Maybe you’ve even considered what it takes to be a project manager, but you were too burnt out before.

In addition to the strategies we’ve laid out, understand the silver lining behind job burnout. This might be the perfect chance to reassess your goals, dreams, and values. To test a few assumptions that you took for granted.

Who knows? Perhaps you’ve done too much overtime in the hope that you’re going to jumpstart your career. As a result, you have little to no time to enjoy life—the classical “Work to Live” versus “Live to Work” debate. Or maybe you’ve put too much effort into building an online persona completely different from the real you.

When the next time burnout hits, take a step back to rediscover yourself again.