I need a break. I try not to wish my life away, but for a few months now, I have been looking forward to these December holidays. I am tired. I am tired in a way I have never experienced before.
Not much has changed about the things I do every day. I have an amazing job, and I truly love coming to work. I have an amazing family, and I truly love going home to them.
But, the world has changed. The environment in which we all operate now is unsettled and uncertain, and most of us have found ourselves hurt, fearful, sad, and/or angry at some point over the last year.
I think the intense tired that I feel is a result of the intensity of emotion I have been stuck in for too long.
I am burned out.
Data suggest you probably are, too.
Results of a Gallup poll published in March 2020, just before the pandemic really started to hit the U.S., showed 76% of employees experience burnout on the job at least sometimes. 28% reported feeling burned out very often or always.
Not surprisingly, in a survey by Indeed a year later, 52% of respondents reported currently feeling burned out, and 67% felt that burnout had worsened during the pandemic as a result of several factors including anxiety about finances or healthcare, increases in work hours, or a struggle to establish healthy boundaries between work and home life while working from home.
Last month, Gallup found that burnout is decreasing again among most categories of worker but that it is still increasing among managers – both people managers and project managers.
The literature is pretty clear about the fact that burnout has a significant negative effect on the workforce and, by extension, on the economy as a whole. Harvard Business Review reported in 2019 that about 8% of Americans’ spending on healthcare and 120,000 deaths annually were attributable to workplace stress. Additionally, the Review cited an APA study estimating that workplace stress costs the US economy over $500 billion per year through increased turnover and decreased productivity.
I spent a night in the hospital last month with a stress-related illness. Thankfully, it was a Friday night, and I was fine by Monday, so my employer did not miss me.
The tough thing about burnout is that it has never been easy to cure, and the pandemic has made it harder. I did a quick Internet search, and I found countless articles published before the pandemic pointing to causes of burnout—unhealthy work environments, lack of self-care, etc. And, for the most part, these causes are things employers and employees could work on improving.
Now, though, for many of us, the causes of burnout are nobody’s fault. There may be some things here and there that we could do better, but as I stated in the beginning of this essay, the primary catalysts for my stress are shifting world dynamics, not anything my employer or I have done.
And our burnout is worse than workplace burnout. It’s life burnout. Going home is not less stressful than going to work.
Last week for this column, Dr. Don Mathews wrote about the large number of workers who are not returning to work post-pandemic. I think there are a handful of reasons why, and burnout likely is among them. When you left work burned out and when life outside work is as topsy-turvy as it is right now, going back to work seems like a really big ask.
I don’t know the answer to the problem of pandemic burnout, but I am praying these holidays bring light and joy to a weary workforce. Y’all take care.
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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu.
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