How to Recover from Burnout

Have you been feeling helpless, powerless, or cynical? Are you having trouble keeping up with tasks that used to be easy? Are you drained, fatigued, or just running on empty?

You may be burnt out. Before we dive into how to recover from burnout, let’s first dive into what burnout is and how it occurs.

Burnout is the experience of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion or fatigue. The World Health Organization (2019) defines burnout as a specifically workplace phenomenon, though in reality it is as something we can experience in any domain of life – at work but also in household and family obligations or anything else we spend significant amounts of our time engaging with.

A more complete list of symptoms of burnout includes:

• Helplessness
• Hopelessness
• Powerlessness
• Low self-esteem
• Cynicism
• Distress
• Performance difficulties
• Sleep impairment (Khammissa et al., 2022)

What causes burnout?

Burnout can be caused by many factors. Some of the more common ones include: workload, lack of control, lack of connection or community, and emotional labor (Leiter & Maslach, 1999; Hochschild, 1983). Let’s take a look at each one of these in a little more detail.

Workload

Work can be a surprising source of satisfaction – when the challenge it presents is proportional to our ability to meet that challenge (Wang et al., 2023). That is, when the challenge of work tasks fall in a sweet spot between ‘too great’ and ‘too small’. But when the challenge falls out of that sweet spot, we may come to feel helpless, powerless, and cynical about being thrown into a position with unrealistic expectations.

Maybe things had been going well, but the office structure got shuffled around and now you’re doing two (or more!) full-time jobs. Or, maybe a new project was dropped on your plate minus the training or support you actually need to do the job well. There are any number of reasons why your workload may be out of sync, and they can each lead to burnout. 

This extends beyond the workplace, too. Maybe the workload of running a household or raising kids has gotten disproportionate to your ability to keep up with it. The laundry, which used to sit neatly folded in drawers, is now in a permanent pile on the spare couch in the corner. 

And then there is the problem on the other extreme: if your work challenges are too low, that’s not helpful either. This can lead to boredom, restlessness, dissatisfaction. And, again, burnout. This is the burnout from trudging to a job day after day that bores you to tears, where every hour feels like a day. This burnout arises from feeling like there is no room to grow, no hope of reaching your potential. 

Lack of control

We enjoy our work more and are more productive when we have some freedom, flexibility, and autonomy to solve problems (Johannsen and Zak, 2020). Call this creative freedom. But workplace culture often constrains creative freedom. We live in an “age of metrics” where it can feel like every little thing we do is tracked and quantified. The feeling of lack of control that arises from being micromanaged and excessively monitored at work can be a contributing factor to burnout.

But that’s not the only way we can feel a lack of control. Maybe you just aren’t given a choice about your work projects or goals, or about your work hours or travel schedule. Maybe you’re often asked for input, but you know no one is actually listening.

Emotional labor

Emotional labor occurs when employers commercialize their employee’s emotions (Hochschild, 1983). Feigning positive emotion in this way is correlated with emotional exhaustion and burnout (Gabriel et al., 2015; Li et al., 2024). Burnout from emotional labor is very common with jobs that involve “people work” such as customer service or other direct client services (Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002), though recent research has suggested that even jobs with minimal “people work” can lead to burnout (Li et al., 2024). Sometimes, this can involve seemingly innocuous stuff, like feeling pressured to act enthused about an idea you actually dread, or even to laugh at the boss’ unfunny jokes (Hu et al., 2024).

The slow build

Burnout doesn’t happen in a day, and it often doesn’t happen as a result of one single factor. More likely it’s the result of the cumulative effect of multiple issues (like the above) over an extended period of time. 

How to recover from burnout

So, now that we’ve covered some of the primary factors that lead to burnout, let’s get to the more important question of what how to recover from burnout. There are a number of changes we can make to help recover from burnout They broadly fall into two categories: individual changes and environmental changes (De Simone et al., 2021) .

Individual changes.

The biopsychosocial model of well-being (Engel, 1977) suggests that biological, psychological, social, and spiritual spheres of life are each important for overall wellness. Using this model as a basis, I refer to diet, sleep, exercise, and relationships as the four table legs of well-being (with spirituality as an optional fifth). If one leg falls away, the table may still be able to stand, though it will be wobbly. But if two or more fall away . . . watch out! 

If you’re burnt out, it’s likely that many of your table legs are worn and rickety.

Sleep

There are a number of well-known tenets of good sleep hygiene, including: keeping a consistent sleep schedule, keeping healthy boundaries around alcohol and caffeine intake, creating a relaxing routine before bed, and others (Harvard Health Publishing, 2025). These are best practices, not ironclad rules. For example, ideally you will find a consistent 8-hour block that you can commit to 7-days a week (e.g. 11pm-7am) even on weekends. Of course, this is the ideal and we don’t live in a perfect world. In reality, there may be the odd late-night or early-morning event(s) you want to enjoy, and that is fine. It isn’t all or nothing. The principle is: the more consistent your sleep schedule, the better. This goes for all of the tenets of sleep hygiene.

Diet

We all know what a healthy diet looks like, more or less. Research suggests that eating a diet heavy in low-fat dairy products, fruit and vegetables, and white meat while limiting unhealthy foods is associated with lower levels of burnout (Penttinen, 2021). 

Exercise

Physical exercise has been found to reduce exhaustion in workers experiencing burnout. And, it may not take a whole lot of it. Research suggests that one hour of high-intensity (e.g. running) workout a week can reduce burnout-related exhaustion, as well as one-hour moderate (e.g. swimming) and lower-intensity (e.g. walking) workouts (Naczenski et al., 2017). Aerobic, strength, and flexibility exercises have all been demonstrated to have this potential.

Social support

Increasing the quality of our social support has been found to alleviate burnout symptoms (Cao et al., 2024). According to Cao et al., social support can include many things including instrumental and informational support (e.g. providing resources and tools) and also emotional support (e.g. care and compassion) and companionship

In my practice experience, I find emotional support to be one to be one of the most effective ways to help my clients recover from burnout. Therefore I put a high emphasis on genuine dialogue as a means of compassion and connection – sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to improve our ability to hold a caring conversation, whether with others or with ourselves. I draw on the work of Martin Buber, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Socrates to inform what exactly genuine dialogue is and why it is so crucial to well-being. 

Environmental changes

Research suggests that while individual changes can help to reduce burnout, they may not be enough if the environment you find yourself in is simply too unhealthy (De Simone et al., 2021) . 

Think of it like this: if someone is following you around and stepping on the heels of your shoes over and over and over again, there will be some individual things you can do to cope with this very annoying situation. You may be better able to deal with it if you are well-rested, for example, or if you have someone available who will validate your frustrations with this person. But you may find that there is a limit to how effective those things will be. These things alone won’t, after all, stop that person from stepping on your heels. And ‘drip-by-drip’ impositions are the things that often lead to burnout – it’s the accumulation of things that aren’t unbearable as a one-offs, but add up to something greater than the sum of their parts.

So, tackling burnout often may require a willingness to be assertive, to ask for changes, to delegate tasks, or perhaps to make even bigger changes. Panagioti et al. (2017) suggest that organizational changes like addressing schedule issues (e.g. intensity and frequency of the work) or the size of the workload itself are among the most impactful, while making positive changes to the organizational social culture can also help to alleviate burnout symptoms.

Working with me on recovering from burnout

I primarily draw on cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which has been shown to be highly effective in treating burnout (Han et al, 2025; Michelsen & Kjellgren, 2022). 

I find that, generally speaking, a good guideline to follow for treating burnout is to work inside-out. Start on the inside, with internal change, and progressively work your way out to bigger and bigger change. This means, as one example, prioritizing self-care before talking with your boss about how to take a task off your plate and talk with your boss about how to get a task off your plate before putting in your resignation! Start inward, work your way outward to bigger and bigger changes. This is a guideline, not a rule, as everyone’s circumstances vary and sometimes the script needs to be flipped.

Internal changes

This includes exploring your own beliefs and attitudes about your burnout and its causes and gaining insight into your own responses and reactions to your environment. From there we will explore whether any cognitive distortions may be exacerbating your burnout and draw on the cbt triangle to look at how these thoughts and attitudes may be impacting your emotions and behaviors.

Individual external changes

Once we have begun to connect dots between the ways in which your thoughts and behaviors are influencing each other, we will start looking at which individual behavioral changes may be helpful. This includes things like diet and exercise habits, social and community engagement, and things like that.

Environmental changes

When you have begun to find relief from your burnout from internal and individual external changes, we will then start to look at what can be the most difficult or intimidating changes to make: environmental changes. This may involve having conversations with coworkers or supervisors, or other support staff at work to advocate for healthy change. 

In laying out these steps, it’s important to reiterate that this is just a rough guide. Everyone’s circumstances are unique – one person may not need to make any environmental changes, whereas one person may not need to make any individual external changes. One person may want to prioritize individual external changes over internal changes. Often, we will work on internal and individual external changes at the same time.

Is it burnout or something else?

Burnout is distinct from depression and anxiety, though there is considerable overlap between them (Bianchi et al, 2016). Sometimes clients seek me out for help with burnout when in reality it may be anxiety or depression (or both). Other times they seek me out for help with anxiety or depression when in reality their symptoms more closely align with burnout. If you’re not sure what it is, but you’re sure you don’t feel how you want to feel, that’s okay.

References

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Cao, B., Hassan, N. C., & Omar, M. K. (2024). The Impact of Social Support on Burnout among Lecturers: A Systematic Literature Review. Behavioral Sciences, 14(8), 727. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14080727 

Chung, K. F., Lee, C. T., Yeung, W. F., Chan, M. S., Chung, E. W., & Lin, W. L. (2018). Sleep hygiene education as a treatment of insomnia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Family practice, 35(4), 365–375. https://doi.org/10.1093/fampra/cmx122 

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Penttinen, M., Virtanen, J., Laaksonen, M., Erkkola, M., Vepsäläinen, H., Kautiainen, H., & Korhonen, P. (2021). The association between healthy diet and burnout symptoms among Finnish municipal employees. Nutrients, 13(7), 2393. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13072393 

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World Health Organization. Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases, 2019. May, 2019

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Sleeping man by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash