Dealing With Burnout: A Career Survival Guide

What Burnout Actually Is

Burnout is not the same as being tired after a hard week. Everyone gets tired. Burnout is a chronic state of physical and emotional depletion that fundamentally changes how you feel about your work, your competence, and your future.

The World Health Organization formally recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon in 2019. They define it across three dimensions:

1. Energy depletion or exhaustion — you are running on empty and rest does not fix it
2. Increased mental distance from your job — cynicism, detachment, or actively dreading work
3. Reduced professional efficacy — feeling like nothing you do matters or that you have lost your ability to perform

If you are nodding along to all three, you are not just having a bad month. You are burned out, and it will not resolve on its own.

Recognizing the Warning Signs

Burnout does not arrive overnight. It builds gradually, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. By the time you realize what is happening, you have often been operating at a deficit for months.

Here are the warning signs, roughly in the order they tend to appear:

Early Signs

• Sunday anxiety becomes Sunday dread
• You stop caring about work you used to find interesting
• Small tasks feel disproportionately difficult
• You are more irritable with coworkers (or everyone)
• You start fantasizing about quitting without a plan

Intermediate Signs

• Sleep problems — either you cannot sleep or you cannot stop sleeping
• Skipping meals or overeating as a coping mechanism
• Withdrawing from friends, family, or social activities
• Physical symptoms: headaches, stomach issues, muscle tension
• Using alcohol, food, or screen time to numb out after work

Late Signs

• Persistent feelings of hopelessness about your career
• Inability to concentrate on basic tasks
• Emotional numbness — not angry, not sad, just flat
• Calling in sick frequently, not because you are ill, but because you cannot face the office
• Seriously considering walking out with nothing lined up

If you are seeing late-stage signs in yourself, this is not something a productivity hack will fix. Consider talking to a therapist or counselor who specializes in occupational stress. There is no resume tip in the world that matters more than your mental health.

Why You Burned Out: Finding the Root Cause

Recovery requires understanding what caused the burnout. It is rarely just "too much work," although overwork is usually part of it. Research by Christina Maslach at UC Berkeley identifies six organizational factors that drive burnout:

Most people who burn out can point to 2-3 of these factors operating simultaneously. If your only problem is workload, a conversation with your manager about capacity might fix it. But if you are dealing with a values mismatch or systemic unfairness, no amount of time management will help. The structure itself is the problem.

Immediate Recovery Steps

If you are currently burned out, here is a practical sequence to start recovering.

Step 1: Create Space

You need breathing room. This might mean:

• Taking PTO or sick leave (burnout is a legitimate health concern)
• Dropping non-essential commitments at work and in your personal life
• Saying no to new projects for the next 30 days
• Delegating or deferring anything that is not truly urgent

If you feel guilty about this, consider that burned-out employees produce lower quality work, make more mistakes, and are significantly more likely to leave. Your employer benefits from you recovering.

Step 2: Restore Your Body

Burnout is a physical state, not just a mental one. Your cortisol levels are elevated, your sleep is disrupted, and your body is in a sustained stress response.

Focus on the basics before you try anything else:

• Sleep: Aim for 7-8 hours. No screens for 30 minutes before bed. Same wake time every day, including weekends.
• Movement: Even 20 minutes of walking per day. You do not need to train for a marathon. Just move.
• Nutrition: Eat actual meals. When you are burned out, the temptation is to live on coffee and takeout. Your brain needs fuel to recover.

These are not productivity tips. They are baseline requirements for your nervous system to return to a functional state.

Step 3: Identify Your Non-Negotiables

Once you have some space and your body is starting to recover, get clear on what has to change for you to stay in your current role. Write down 3-5 non-negotiable changes. Be specific:

1. I will not check email or Slack after 6:00 PM
2. I need at least one day per week with no meetings
3. My workload needs to be scoped to 40 hours, not 55
4. I need clear criteria for my next promotion
5. I need to stop being the on-call backup every weekend

These are not wishes. They are boundaries. Some of them require a conversation with your manager. Some of them you can enforce unilaterally.

Step 4: Have the Conversation

If you have a decent manager, tell them what is happening. You do not need to use the word "burnout" if that feels uncomfortable. Frame it around sustainability and performance:

"I want to keep doing great work here, but my current workload is not sustainable. I would like to talk about what we can reprioritize or shift so I can focus on the highest-impact work without burning out."

Most reasonable managers will work with you. If your manager dismisses the conversation, minimizes your concerns, or responds with more pressure, that tells you everything you need to know about whether this problem is fixable.

Building Burnout Resistance Over Time

Recovery is not a one-time event. If you go back to the same patterns that burned you out, you will end up right back here. These practices build resilience over months and years.

Set Hard Boundaries and Defend Them

Boundaries only work if you enforce them consistently. If you say you do not work weekends but then answer Slack messages every Saturday "just this once," you have no boundary. It will be uncomfortable at first. Most people will adapt. The ones who do not were going to burn you out anyway.

Protect Your Identity Outside of Work

Burnout hits hardest when your entire sense of self is wrapped up in your career. If the only thing you do is work, then a bad day at work is a bad day everywhere. Maintain relationships, hobbies, and interests that have nothing to do with your job title.

Do Regular Check-Ins With Yourself

Once a month, ask yourself three questions:

1. Am I looking forward to anything at work this week?
2. Do I feel like my effort is making a difference?
3. Am I recovering on my days off, or just dreading Monday?

If you answer no to all three for two months in a row, it is time to make a change before the burnout cycle restarts.

When It Is Time to Leave

Sometimes the right answer is not recovery — it is exit. If the root cause of your burnout is structural (toxic leadership, broken culture, fundamental values mismatch), no amount of personal boundary-setting will fix it.

Start preparing your exit while you are still employed:

• Update your resume (burnout makes this feel impossible, but future-you will be grateful)
• Reconnect with your professional network
• Save enough money to cover 3-6 months of expenses if possible
• Start applying selectively to roles that address the root causes of your burnout

Leaving a job that is destroying your health is not quitting. It is self-preservation.

Moving Forward

Burnout is not a personal failure. It is a signal that something in the system is broken — the workload, the culture, the fit, or some combination. The path forward starts with honest diagnosis, immediate recovery, and structural change. Whether that change happens at your current company or your next one is up to you.

If you are getting ready to make a move, Superpower Resume can help you build a resume that positions your experience for roles with better balance, stronger culture, and compensation that reflects your worth.

Sources

• World Health Organization: Burn-out an "Occupational Phenomenon" — WHO's formal recognition and definition of burnout as an occupational syndrome
• Harvard Business Review: Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People — Research on organizational drivers of burnout and why individual fixes are insufficient
• American Psychological Association: 2023 Work in America Survey — Data on workplace stress, burnout prevalence, and the impact on employee well-being