Does it only affect weak people? Is work always the cause? Burnout myths, busted by the experts
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nce, after surviving yet another round of redundancies in a former job, I did something very odd. I turned off the lights in my room and lay face-down on the bed, unable to move. Rather than feeling relief at having escaped the axe, I was exhausted and numb. I’m not the only one. Fatigue, apathy and hopelessness are all textbook signs of burnout, a bleak phenomenon that has come to define many of our working lives. In 2025, a report from Moodle found that 66% of US workers had experienced some kind of burnout, while a Mental Health UK survey found that one in three adults came under high levels of pressure or stress in the previous year. Despite the prevalence of burnout, plenty of misconceptions around it persist. “Everybody thinks it’s some sort of disease or medical condition,” says Christina Maslach, the psychology professor who was the first to study the syndrome in the 1970s. “But it’s actually a response to chronic job stressors – a stress response.” Here we separate the facts from the myths.
FALSE Exhaustion isn’t the only key symptom – another is depersonalisation, or a sense of emotional detachment and cynicism. In medical staff, that might show up as compassion fatigue (leading to diminished empathy and increased irritability). For those not in healthcare, “they may find that it’s hard to care as much about their colleagues”, and their work, leading to feelings of irritation, says Claudia Hammond, the author of Overwhelmed: Ways to Take the Pressure Off. The third sign is decreasing productivity and competence – whether real or perceived. “You get less and less done, which can often result in feelings of great shame or guilt,” explains burnout coach Anna K Schaffner.
