Burnout: What is it and how to Treat it.

Introduction

Lately there has been considerable concern among effective altruists about burnout. People are worried about themselves or others being less productive* or just plain miserable. The goal of this report is to bring people up to speed on the scientific research about burnout and, when possible, make recommendations about alleviation and prevention. Unfortunately, the scientific literature has few specific recommendations to make, so I would like to use this as an opportunity to foster discussion about what has worked and not worked for people personally. Look for those comments below. The goal is for this to be useful to individual workers in treating their own burnout, and to organizational decision makers in preventing burnout organization-wide.

[*Studies are actually mixed on if burnout reduces productivity, with some even showing burnout associated with higher productivity. My interpretation here is that high standards for yourself lead to both high performance and burnout.]

Tl;dr

Social support == Good.
Sleep == Good.
Ambiguity == Bad.
Vacations == Meh.

What is Burnout?

The official definition of burnout is “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress”. That kind of implies that a person can’t work when burnt out, but that’s not my experience- ceasing work when you’re burnt out is a privilege. But working when you’re burnt out is miserable, and makes burnout worse, so even if circumstances improve you’re in a hole.

Burnout was originally conceived of in the caring professions (e.g. nursing and social work), which are emotionally demanding in several different ways. This has by and large not been born out scientifically; other professions burn out just as hard, with perhaps slightly different patterns on the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the most popular measure of burnout. Based mostly on personal observation I strongly suspect there are multiple types of burnout, which can co-occur, and which current instruments are not sensitive enough to differentiate. Of particular interest to this crowd is the difference between burnout caused by hating your job or not having the resources it demands, vs. loving your job too much and being sucked into giving more than you should. I suspect that the latter is more heavily represented among effective altruists than in the literature.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory (used in >90% of studies) divides burnout into three parts: exhaustion, cynicism, and (perceived) personal efficacy. The MBI has been shown to be internally consistent and cross-culturally valid. On the other hand, it has mixed results in distinguishing burnout from traditional depression or anxiety, and I could find no studies demonstrating any predictive value of the inventory — the closest was two studies showing MBI predicted an increase in thoughts of suicide and dropping out of school among med students.

In contrast, the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory has one whole study showing a that a high score predicts future sickness absence, sleep problems, and use of painkillers. The CBI measures only exhaustion, and separately tracks personal burnout, work burnout, and client burnout. I would have liked to give preference to studies using the CBI because it has more empirical validation, but there simply weren’t enough to rely on, so most of the studies referred to in this post use the MBI.

By far the most popular model of burnout in the literature is “Job Demands – Resources”, or “JD-R”, which posits that high job demands lead to exhaustion, and low resources lead to cynicism and feelings of low personal efficacy. “Demands” and “Resources” are defined fairly broadly here. Demands includes things like “coping with conflicting goals” and resources includes things like chances for advancement.

There is a similar theory called Conservation of Resources. It has less empirical support and does not make noticeably different predictions, so I won’t pay it further attention.

What Can You do as an Individual?

An unfortunate fact is that the more privileged you are, the easier it is to create workplace that accommodates you. These suggestions will be easier to implement for people in higher demand professions, who earn more money, or have better bosses.

A second unfortunate fact is that the literature was not very helpful in recommending ways to prevent or relieve burnout. The following are either based on interpretations of literature (e.g. because social support is correlated with low burnout, I recommend social support) or my own beliefs based on what I’ve observed personally.

I’ll create threads for all of these seeking anecdotes about how you’ve achieved them for yourself in the comments.

Seek Social Support

The most consistent finding in all burnout literature is that social support (leadership and peer) reduces burnout. That is not even all the studies I found on this point.

Sleep

Unsurprisingly, sleep duration is negatively correlated with burnout. I think the causality here is up for debate — stress causes poor sleep in parallel to poor sleep causing depression — but to the extent you can improve your sleep, it’s likely to be helpful.

Seek Clarity in Your Role and Goals

Ambiguity (or worse, conflicting goals) leads to internal conflict, which leads to burnout.

Shorten Your Commute

Commuting is an absolutely miserable experience. It is one of few miseries humans can’t acclimate to. It cuts into sleep and personal time. Do whatever you can to shorten your commute.

Buy Yourself Out of Work-Life Conflict

This is a more general application of “don’t commute”.

Of course, this advice is only actionable if you have money. However there is a noticeable contingent within EA of people pushing themselves to live on much, much less than they earn, and it’s worth examining whether this is penny-wise-pound-foolish for you personally. Buying rest might reduce your donations in the short term, but if it increases your long term capacity, it is the right thing to do.

Keep a Healthy Personal Runway

80,000 hours goes into the multitude of reasons you should do this here, but I want to explicitly call out savings’ role in fighting burnout. Knowing you can leave can enable you to demand better treatment. Knowing you don’t need a particular job lets you hold out for a better fit.

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