Burnout is not mere exhaustion. It’s an emotional and even spiritual depletion. It’s a loss of the drive to do the things that before meant so much to us. Jobs. Passions. Even relationships.
It can be incredibly lonely and isolating. The shared meaning that brought us close to others begins to fray. We doubt whether we have anything to offer anyone. We don’t have the energy to do anything but curl up on the couch with our creature comforts.
Christina Maslach, a pioneer in the field of burnout studies, identified the erosion of community as one of the core drivers of burnout itself — not just a symptom of it. Isolation and burnout feed each other in a loop: we withdraw because we’re depleted, and the withdrawal depletes us further.
For that reason, an overlooked peace practice is simply spending time with others, especially those in the throes of burnout. It’s telling them about your burnout. It’s admitting that it is real.
The research backs this up. Since psychologists Sheldon Cohen and Thomas Wills first proposed the “stress-buffering hypothesis” in 1985, decades of research have confirmed it: social support doesn’t just feel nice, it measurably softens the impact of stress on the body and mind, and predicts lower rates of burnout across a wide range of professions and life circumstances.
So if you are burned out, go tell someone. Admit that you can’t fulfill the cultural imperative for greatness, for achievement. That you cannot do everything you put your mind to. That you don’t want to dream so big. Admit that what you’ve been doing just isn’t working anymore.
In doing so, you can remind yourself that while burnout appears to isolate us, it actually unites us. It’s a core shared experience.
Or, if you don’t have the energy for that, maybe just go out and be with others. Let yourself be a nameless face in a crowd. A witness to the humanity around you. Remind yourself just how many of us there are, how many of us there are to hold the weight of the world — together.
