How to Deal With Work Burnout

In the 1970s, New York psychologist Herbert Freudenberger felt overworked, but also like he wasn’t accomplishing anything—a confusing combination. After some expert self-analysis, he determined that he wasn’t suffering simply from exhaustion or depression. Rather, he identified a new condition, which he termed burnout, after the listless drug addicts he treated who’d watch their cigarettes burn down instead of smoking them. He wrote a book on his discovery in 1980—Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement—but the term didn’t really catch on until the paperback came out in 1989, when he was interviewed by both Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue.

Today burnout is a widely accepted idea, though it hasn’t made it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, aka the bible for mental health professionals. “ ‘Burnout’ is such a catchy word, so I can understand why a lot of people say it’s pop psychology,” says Christina Maslach, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. That said, not being in the DSM has its advantages. “For a lot of us in the field, to reduce it to ‘there’s something wrong with the person’ isn’t seeing the bigger picture,” says Maslach, who developed a widely used diagnostic inventory for the condition.