Why am I so tired? First came the devastating Black Summer bushfires of 2019. Then out of the ashes COVID emerged and, on top of the pressure cooker of homeschooling and isolation, the rapid erosion of our work-life boundary. After that, life went back to normal, right?
Throw in several years of destructive flooding, mounting hybrid workloads, shrinking job stability, rising inflation, housing insecurity and cost-of-living pressures and it is little wonder so many of us feel like we haven’t a lot left in the tank.
The stats confirm that “I’m so tired” is the catch-cry for a nation feeling weary: Mental Health First Aid Australia says Australians have the highest rates of burnout in the world. According to Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trends Index, 62 per cent of Australian employees are experiencing burnout, compared with a global average of 48 per cent. In 2023, The University of Melbourne’s State of the Future of Work report showed half of the 1400 workers surveyed aged between 18 and 54 felt exhausted, and a third were considering quitting.
Globally things don’t look so flashy either. A 2023 Deloitte study that sampled 22,000 people across 44 countries found stress levels were rising for young people. More than half of Gen Z and Millennials reported they felt burned out, prompting a viral ‘quiet quitting’ boom on social media (now with over a billion hashtag views on TikTok). The movement spawned a plethora of snappy spin-offs, from “bare minimum Mondays” to “lazy girl jobs” and “silent partners”.
It begs the question: Has our hustle culture finally caught up with us?
According to former GP Dr Amy Imms, “Being busy and feeling tired have been culturally normalised, and the pervasiveness of fatigue can reduce our ability to recognise burnout and take it seriously”. Dr Imms, who experienced burnout herself as a working mum of four young children, studying for medical exams and supporting her mother through breast cancer, now specialises in helping people recover from burnout (theburnoutproject.com.au).
Exhaustion, she says, can occur to wildly different degrees. It can be “a badge of honour reflecting hard work, dedication or an altruistic commitment to others”. It can also describe someone who is “absolutely pushed to the end of their coping ability and on the brink of collapse”.
Under the World Health Organization definition, burnout is a state of exhaustion resulting from chronic workplace stress. It is characterised by three key things: A feeling of depletion, cynicism and reduced professional effectiveness.
“As an organisational psychologist, I welcome the emphasis on burnout as a work-specific condition,” says Vicki Kavadas, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Deakin University. “Given the average person spends a third of their life at work, it’s important to acknowledge that while work can enhance our wellbeing, it can sometimes have a negative impact depending on the environment.”
Yet calls are growing to look at burnout beyond the occupational context and consider how it potentially affects anyone overwhelmed by responsibilities. “We cannot isolate work as a sole factor causing burnout,” says Dr Imms. “Burnout almost universally arises because of a complex interplay between numerous factors – additional stresses in relationships, housing, finances, health, or more broadly in society, such as a pandemic.”
“Burnout can often feel like you’ve hit rock bottom and that there is nothing that anyone can do about it. Please know that you can recover from this.”
Dr Amy Imms, founder of The Burnout Project.
Studies such as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which examines burnout in volunteers and students, show that unpaid work can lead to the same symptoms as workplace burnout. “Informal family caregivers and parents can become overwhelmed, exhausted, depleted, cynical, detached and lose confidence due to the ongoing stressors in these roles,” says Vicki. “That sounds like burnout.”
Burnout and stress-related absenteeism cost the Australian economy an estimated $14 billion annually. It also comes at a great cost to society – dutiful, diligent and conscientious partners, parents and community members succumb to a state of sheer exhaustion that can lead to compassion fatigue, cognitive impairment, unsettled moods and insularity – a life that has lost its joie de vivre. Studies have shown that women, particularly those in ‘caring’ professions such as health and education, are at higher risk. So are high performers and perfectionists who put a lot of themselves into their work.
Among the latter was veteran ABC TV journalist Sophie Scott who, after suddenly feeling like she might collapse on stage at an awards night, realised her autonomic nervous system was no longer working the way it should. “Burnout often shows up in a physical way,” says Sophie. “We cognitively think we can keep pushing through but then your body has other ideas. I definitely ignored a lot of the red flags. The inability to switch off was one … I was always thinking about work, even on weekends and holidays. When my body started showing signs it wasn’t dealing with the ongoing stress in a good way it was a wake-up call for me that I need to change how I was living my life and working.”
Nobody’s life is stress-free – a little bit of stress is even good for us – but our bodies are designed to rest and rejuvenate after a surge of cortisol so that we are ready to face the next challenge. That’s what makes chronic stress, often a series of constant micro-stresses, so insidious.
“In burnout, you are constantly in the survival-mode state and your body is always looking for signs of danger,” says Sophie Scott. “If you are constantly switched on and stressed, the body becomes over-reactive to signs of stress.”
That, says Dr Imms, can lead to a life on autopilot. “When we have a stressful day, we grab a packet of Tim Tams, or snap at a colleague or our partner, cancel a social occasion or do an even more, perhaps unnecessarily, thorough job with our work,” she says. “But there are a multitude of strategies you can learn that will help you change the way your brain responds to stress so that it doesn’t have such a profound impact upon your experience of life.”
Lisa O’Neill, a sought-after speaker and author of Energy: Get it. Guard It. Give It. (Major Street Publishing), puts it like this: “In our busy, overstuffed and overwhelmed modern world, the secret is to do more with less.” As a child, she played a game with her brother in which they licked things they wanted or loved as a sign of ownership (think the biggest scone freshly out of the oven). “The lickable stuff in your life is the best stuff. Removing the non-lickable stuff will improve everything. I reckon that’s about one-third of everything in your life: one-third of the people, the stuff, the clothing … of every area of your world. We are all here for a limited time, so we need to be ruthless with our lives. The lickable third is about being discerning, it’s about saying ‘no’ to the things that don’t matter so you can say ‘yes’ to the things that do.”
The average Australian spends nearly two hours on social media every day. While our personal screen time is something we can actively choose to control, managing the intrusion of digital communications beyond office hours can be harder.
“One of the biggest shifts since the pandemic has been the increase in remote and hybrid work,” says Vicki Kavadas, who adds that “techno-stress” can prompt feelings of anxiety, fatigue, doubt and reduced effectiveness. “Digital communication can play a positive role in our work life by allowing us to work flexibly or by providing effective and speedy ways to communicate. But it can also be effortful, increase pressure and disturb the flow of the workday … more communication does not necessary mean you are communicating effectively.”
“Burnout is not a personal failing or a ref lection of your ability. Burnout is just a mismatch between the workload and the support.”
Sophie Scott, veteran TV journalist.
Moreover, too much can actually be bad for our health. A 2019 Swedish study found correlations between high-communication technology demands and poor health outcomes, and a US study that connected 40 knowledge workers to heart rate monitors for almost two weeks found their stress levels rose higher the longer they spent on email.
Not only do clogged calendars, chat functions and email notifications force us to switch attention from one target to another, but they can also trigger what Sophie dubs an “urgency fallacy”. “If everything is urgent then nothing is urgent,” she says. “If you put the same sense of urgency on everything then you are not prioritising your time and doing the important tasks first. We don’t have to get through everything in a day, there will be a new list tomorrow!”
The mounting research on wellbeing shows that prioritising social connection is vital. People experiencing burnout are twice as likely to suffer from loneliness. Which the World Health Organisation says can reduce your lifespan as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
“The number one predictor of your physical and mental wellbeing is the quality of your connections,” says Sophie. “We often put so much of our energy into work but, as good as we are and as good as our work is, there is always someone else who can do it. Maybe not as well as you, but they can still do it.” The message? Have a life outside of work – see your friends, spend time with your family, or get a hobby – so that your identity is not tied to one thing.
Ask for help from your ‘village’. “Women that bear the brunt of the home workload are more likely to experience work-home conflict, which has been associated with burnout,” says Vicki. “But workplaces and cultures also need to adequately support people … the workplace is part of that ‘village’. Research suggests that receiving social support from your organisation, supervisor and co-workers can ease the stress and strain.”
That starts with discussing flexibility. The 2024 State of Workplace Burnout report, which canvassed 2008 people in 43 countries, found that people in a hybrid work arrangement (two to three days per week in the workplace) and those working less than 40 hours a week reported the highest levels of well-being.
If it’s not just the workload but also the work culture that is wearing you down, you may be facing a more challenging ‘canary in the coal mine’ scenario. “If we nursed that canary back to good health after its experience and send it back down into the coalmine, it will just get sick again because the environment has not changed,” says Vicki. “Workplace wellbeing initiatives that just focus on ‘fixing’ the individual and not the environment they work in can have a similar outcome for employees.”
It’s also worth asking yourself if the stresses are coming from the workplace or whether the pressure is coming from expectations you put on yourself. “We live in a culture that values achievement, success, productivity and on top of that we need to look a certain way, keep up with health trends and be good parents, wives and daughters,” says traditional Chinese medicine practitioner Dr Marina Christov. “If we feel compelled to meet and continuously achieve these high standards and expectations, whether they come from us, our peers or social media and society at large, we become ‘wired and tired’, neglecting our personal lives, relationships and self-care in pursuit of our goals.”
Dr Imms agrees that striving to maintain unrealistic expectations is something that can be damaging to women’s health. “Society expects women to perform highly in all realms of life: their career, parenting, relationship, organisation of their life, their health, and upkeep of their home,” says Dr Imms. “In order to prevent burnout on a large scale we must address the workplace factors, but also the pervasive cultural and societal pressures.”
Wherever the pressure might be coming from, perhaps it boils down to this simple question: Is pouring all your energy into work, paid or unpaid, really serving you in the long term?
“In a lot of ways, we are selling ourselves short by making being ‘busy’ our goal and ideal,” says Sophie. “Your biggest responsibility is really to your own self, to your own wellbeing, and to be happy and healthy for the people that really care about you. That is something we sometimes forget when we are caught up in going a million miles an hour. As Oprah said, ‘Nobody is coming to save you!’ You have to make the changes yourself’.”
Beating burnout
All the experts concur that setting stronger work-life boundaries and focusing on the basics – nutrition, exercise and sleep – is vital for improving energy levels. Ironically these are usually the first things we ignore when life is stressful.
Sleep is increasingly regarded as a vital protective factor. But, it can also be harder to control than exercise and diet.
Dr Marina Christov says small, consistent efforts in self-care can lead to meaningful long-term benefits. “Create a morning ritual to start your day with intention, such as stretching or enjoying a cup of tea. Similarly, develop an end-of-day ritual to unwind and transition out of work mode, such as taking a walk, practising relaxation techniques or journalling.”
This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest issue from your local newsagent, or subscribe so you never miss an issue.
