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What to do about burnout at work

Listless? Exhausted? Feeling useless? You might be burnt out.

Jonathan Malesic knows burnout firsthand. He was working his dream job, teaching at a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania. He was publishing papers, working toward tenure — doing all the things on the professor checklist. He was happy; until one day, he wasn’t.

“I was constantly exhausted. I dreaded going to work,” Malesic told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. A combination of unenthusiastic students, a budget crisis, and seeing colleagues let go had him on edge and feeling “sort of useless.” He didn’t recognize himself.

Eventually, he realized something had to give. He left academia, but remained curious about what derailed his career. It turns out, the answer was burnout. He discovered the work of psychology professor Christina Maslach, who literally wrote the book on burnout.

“There are three dimensions to burnout,” Malesic explained. “The first is exhaustion, and the exhaustion is something that has to be chronic. You can’t be burned out for a week or a month. It’s a kind of exhaustion that does not improve with rest. The second dimension is called cynicism or sometimes depersonalization: You treat people as not full persons. And that can manifest itself in anger, gossip, and frustration. And the third dimension is a sense of ineffectiveness, a feeling that your work is not accomplishing anything.”

Malesic took the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the standard test that measures burnout, and he found he was in the 98th percentile for exhaustion. “In American society, we value work so highly,” he said. “We put so much of our identity and self-worth into work.” Eventually, he wrote a book called The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives.

Danielle Roberts had a........

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