Today, Explained - How to fight burnout

Episode Date: April 19, 2026

We've been stuck in cycles of burnout for decades. Have Gen Z workers found a way out? This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen and Danielle Hewitt, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Empty battery. Photo Illustration by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images. You can take a version of the burnout test here. If you have a question, give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email [e-mail]. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Explain It to Me comes from Starbucks, vibing to the hook of your favorite song, stepping outside and immediately feeling the sun on your face, sipping a refreshing drink. Those are the moments that energize us. And if that third one sounds particularly enticing, you might be due for a new energy refresher from Starbucks. It's the flavors you know and love,

and now with a boost of energy. Try the all-new energy refreshers at Starbucks. Burnout kind of comes from a place of just like numbness or not feeling and lack of motivation. Tense pain, angst in my chest that then just spread slowly across to my shoulders. We're stuck in this hard place of I don't want to get up this job, but I don't really find enjoying it anymore. Jonathan Malesc landed his dream job teaching out a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania. From about age 20 or so, I wanted to be a college religion or theology professor. And I got it.

I got exactly my dream. He was publishing papers, earning tenure. He was really happy until he wasn't. So about eight or nine years into the career, I found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I started having weird, inexplicable pains in my torso in particular. I was constantly exhausted. I dreaded going to work. Everyone at the college had to take theology.

Very few wanted to. So my class was, you know, somewhat resented by the students. The college itself was under a lot of stress. There was a budget crisis along the way. People were let go. There was just a lot of worry at the college. Jonathan wasn't himself. I had a very short temper.

I would find myself blowing up in meetings over very minor things. I was constantly frustrated. I felt sort of useless. I would find myself lying in bed in the mornings for hours, like watching over and over the video for Peter Gabriel's song, Don't Give Up. I also love Kate Bush, and that song's a duet. Don't give up. You still have friends, you know. In the video, Gabriel and Bush are just, like, in this embrace for six straight minutes with this, like, eclipsing sun behind them. It's extremely

dramatic. I just needed to hear that over and over and over again. I'm fundamentally a nerd. So I solve problems in my life very often with research. And somewhere along the line I had encountered this term burnout. I wasn't just a failure. I wasn't just bad at my job. I wasn't just tired. That something happened that research

identify as a real phenomenon. I'm John Glyn Hill, and this week on Explanit to Me from Vox, we get into the reality of burnout and what to do if you just don't have any more to give. Jonathan decided that he needed to quit that dream job. And as he started to think about what to do next, he wanted to understand what derailed his career. As I read more and more articles about burnout,

A name came up over and over again, and it was Christina Maslack, who is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She's the sort of godmother of burnout research. You know, I read many of her early articles. As their emotional resources are depleted, workers feel they're no longer able to give of themselves at a psychological level. I've read one of her books called Burnout, The Cost of Care. Burnout. The word evokes images of a final flickering flame of a charred and empty shell of dying embers and cold gray ashes. And I just couldn't get enough. Why did you think what happened to you was burnout and not just like, ooh, this job, not a good fit?

One thing was that I took the Maslack of burnout inventory, which is the standard research instrument. for, you know, measuring and classifying burnout. It's a 22-question survey asks, you know, how often do these following kind of bad experiences apply to you? I feel emotionally drained by my work. Working with people all day long requires a great deal of effort. I have the impression that my team slash colleagues make me responsible for some of their problem. I'm at the end of my patient.

I feel full of energy. I've become more insensitive to people in the workplace. And I scored in the 98th percentile for exhaustion. I was so proud of myself, you know? You're like, look at me. That's right. That's right. I won.

Exactly. You know, it's like I aced this one. Of course, there's a big difference between fatigue and boredom and actual burnout, but I'd love for you to explain the difference from a scientific perspective. What makes burnout burnout? So there are three dimensions to burnout. So the first and the one that probably everyone is familiar with is exhaustion, sometimes called emotional exhaustion.

And exhaustion is something that it has to be chronic. You can't be burned out for a week or probably even a month. It's a kind of exhaustion that does not improve with rest. The last time I was burnt out, It got to a point where I was struggling with cognitive abilities. I couldn't use my critical thinking skills without very quickly hitting what felt like a wall in my brain. The second dimension is called cynicism or sometimes depersonalization. So you treat people as not full persons that can manifest itself in anger, in gossip, a lot of frustration and so on.

constantly exhausted, irritable, mentally checked out, and I'm never able to rest without guilt. The third dimension is a sense of ineffectiveness, a feeling that your work is not accomplishing anything. Never feeling like I'm caught up at work, no longer finding joy in my job. And I think it's almost inescapable these days. In American society, we value work so highly. We put so much of our identity and self-worth into work. And exhaustion can be a kind of point of pride. Even cynicism can be a little bit of a point of pride, too.

The person who's highly competent but kind of a jerk. is also a cultural hero to us. The, you know, brilliant but, you know, extremely cynical doctor, you know, House would be the classic example. I was waiting two hours out there. Fascinating. You considered a career as a memoir. And this is why I think that you've got to have all three dimensions to really understand burnout.

People will brag about how exhausted they are. People sometimes brag about how cynical they are. No one brags about how they feel their work isn't accomplishing anything. Yeah. So that's the, that I think, is the key dimension. Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people can get some of these feelings from work. I think of the movie Office Space.

It's not that I'm lazy. It's that I just don't care. I'm curious when it goes from just like, uh, work to like, oh, no, I'm burnt out. Yeah, I think it probably has to do with frequency. If you only feel like Peter in office space, just don't care, once or twice a month, things probably aren't all that bad. If it's every day,

just don't care, just don't care, just don't care. There's a bigger problem. Burnout is the result of a long-term mismatch between our ideals for work and the reality of our jobs, including this kind of sense that, you know, work will fulfill us, or, you know, work is a way of proving our worth. And along with that can be, you know, we have expectations for salary and benefits and schedule and so on. So all those count as ideals or expectations.

And then there's the reality, which is the day-to-day and structural kind of, well, reality of, well, reality of. of the jobs that we actually do. What is our caseload? What are our hours? What are our actual salary and benefits? Who are our customers, clients, and so on? And when those things get out of alignment, then you kind of stretch between them.

You're trying to stretch across this gap. And that feeling of trying to stretch across that gap is burnout. Our metaphor for burnout is burning, like you have a tank of fuel and you burn through it. The experience is really more like stretching, I think, because you're trying to fill this gap with a self that's not quite big enough to do it. Coming up, how that mismatch of ideals went mainstream. Support for Explore.

to me comes from Starbucks. There's a palpable energy to storytelling, and it's an energy we harness to bring you a special series like this one. With that in mind, it's worth remembering the little things we do in community to energize ourselves, like sharing a cool, brightly flavored drink over conversation under the afternoon sun. It's a refreshing ritual that could be perfectly captured by the Starbucks new energy refresher. It comes in great flavors. Mango dragon fruit, strawberry assayi, mango strawberry, plus a handful of tasty variations with lemonade or coconut milk like the pink energy drink. The point is, nobody is immune to a little slump in energy, especially in the afternoon. The science is clear on that. The key is remembering there's always

a path forward to feeling renewed and re-energize. Try the all-new energy refreshers at Starbucks. It's explained it to me. I'm JQ. Jonathan Molesic left academia. But he wasn't done with burnout. Because he's an overachiever, he wrote a whole book about it called The End of Burnout, Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. He says the idea of burnout, as we know it, first showed up in 1974. Picture it. Flower Power powers out, discos in, Nixon resigns. And Bob Dylan records a song about searching for salvation. It's called Shelter from the Storm. From exhaustion, buried in the hail. Burned out from exhaustion.

And an ambulance blues, Neil Young also uses the term burnout. Burnout stuck their toes on a garbage trail. That song was recorded, I think, also in 1974. At the exact same time that the first papers on burnout were appearing in psychological journals. When a staff member in an alternative institution burns out for whatever reasons and becomes inoperative to all intents and purposes, the burnout manifests itself in many different symptomatic ways. Burnout was just kind of like in the air.

Was there ever a crossover between these artists and these scientists, or they just happened to sort of be catching the same vibe that is going down in the country? I think they're just catching the same vibe. They're just, you know, finding it on different frequencies. Jonathan says this was a... massive shift. Just a generation earlier, Americans were feeling pretty optimistic about work. The years after World War II in particular, unions had a lot of power. It was a marvelous tribute to the people, the way they showed this company that they could stick

together when the company pushed them to the wall. The United Steelworkers of America and Canada with the union came dignity and recognition. The American economy was very strong across many, many sectors. And this kind of implicit social contract is like, your wages are going to keep increasing. Your hours even may keep decreasing. Conditions are going to keep getting better so long as you don't go on strike, as long as you don't cause trouble, basically. And, you know, coming out of the sort of idealism of the 60s, our expectations for work were pretty high. You know, President Johnson. Declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

People believe we can do this. So there was a greater expectation that our work could, number one, solve huge societal problems and fulfill us. So the ideals had grown. At the same time, in 1973, 74, the conditions of employment started getting worse. Well, unemployment in the United States now, is at its highest level in 13 years.

Our normal expectations of getting ahead are being reduced to hopes of holding on. The average worker will continue to lose spending power for some time to come. Terms like stagflation, where prices go up, wages don't. Well, yeah. That's right. Good thing that's safely in the 1970s. Safely in the past. The conditions of work started to erode.

The power of unions had started to. to erode. So there's the gap, culturally speaking, between our ideals and reality, meant that, well, the conditions were ripe for high levels of burnout, for workers to start to name their situation. Does that lead to any actual change in the workplace? Like, I don't know, are people like, all right, let's make this better? Oh, definitely not. No. Dang. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, it was at the end of that decade that President Jimmy Carter gave his so-called malaise speech. It is a crisis of confidence.

Carter kind of diagnosed the country with an exhaustion, with a sense of ineffectiveness, a sense that we were no longer attaining our national ideals. He kind of diagnosed the whole country. with a collective case of burnout. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America. Carter lost the election in 1980, and one of Ronald Reagan's first acts

as president in his first year was to break a strike of air traffic controllers. This morning at 7 a.m., The union representing those who man America's air traffic control facilities called a strike. President Reagan told the air traffic controllers to be back in the towers Wednesday morning, or they'd be fired and faced prosecution. One of their first listed grievances was the problem of consistent burnout on the job. In this profession, they say you're burned out at 35, that the hypertension and stress of the job becomes too hot to handle.

So hot to handle, you either quit or end up talking to a shrink. Reagan's response to this was to fire the air traffic controllers. They're terminated. And, you know, that was, of course, a huge blow to organize labor, you know, across the country. Burnout was kind of at the core of that. You write that burnout kind of fades as a buzzword after the 70s and 80s, but then it comes kind of roaring back in the late 20 teens with this one viral article. Right.

What is that article and what happened? It's a BuzzFeed News article by Anne Helen Peterson about millennial burnout. The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout, is that there's no solution to it. You can't optimize it to make it end faster. You can't see it coming like a cold and start taking the burnout prevention version of airborne. The best way to treat it is to first acknowledge it for what it is. Not a passing ailment, but a chronic disease. The article did go extremely viral.

I related to it a lot as a millennial myself. People are saying I'm burnt out, I'm exhausted, I've got nothing left. Like, it us. It named this kind of experience that had somewhat been forgotten in the intervening decades. Not necessarily not felt, but, for whatever reason, particularly these millennial workers, the, you know, a generation that had high ideals for work that was told that it could accomplish great things. And now that they kind of hit their 30s were encountering kind of like the harsh reality often of American working life.

So millennials are finding themselves stuck in that same old cycle of burnout. But the newest generation of workers may have found a way out. That's next. This is advertiser content from Starbucks. John Clen, I think of you as the queen of answering questions. Oh my gosh, thank you. What question do you have for me today? Okay, talk to me about energy levels.

Why is it that it's sometimes I feel total ways of exhaustion? So, like, you can't focus, you're falling asleep, that kind of thing? Exactly. And then at some points I'm just totally fine. Why is that happening? And is there anything I can do to help it? Yeah, so the peaks and slumps throughout the day. We have all been there. So that's mostly because of our circadian rhythm. It's basically the cycle our body goes through in a 24-hour time period. And it controls things like metabolism, hormones, and energy. So that's like the reason I feel tired before bed and well rested in the morning. It's our circadian rhythm. It's a totally natural biological response.

So when I want to just close my eyes and put my head down on my desk, what can I do about that? According to my research, one of the best things you can do is get up and walk around, get your blood flowing, maybe call up a friend and grab a coffee or a tea. That sounds really nice right now. You want to go do it? Yeah. Yeah. Long story short, we all need moments throughout the day to refresh and Starbucks has you covered with their new energy refreshers. Your go-to lift to help you stay energized throughout the day.

Try the all-new energy refreshers at Starbucks. I recently graduated from college a few years ago. I think with the state of the world, it can get a little bit, I guess, depressing because it feels like AI is taking all the jobs and like you do get this job. You're so thankful to have it. But then you're kind of overworked and undervalued. And it can, yeah, lead to feelings of burnout because you just commit to like you're stuck in this hard place of I don't want to get up this job. But I don't really find joy in it anymore. We're back with more Explain It to me.

I'm JQ. Danielle Roberts also knows burnout firsthand. After a layoff during the pandemic, she started to look for balance, and she found it. Now she helps other people find it too, as a career coach, or as she likes to say,

an anti-career coach. I think we're at a point where dream jobs don't exist, and we have to start questioning the systems and the structures that are causing burnout in the first place rather than making it a personal problem or a professional weakness.

She says, burnout isn't just something millennials feel. I grew up in a very blue-collar family. I'm one of five kids, and my dad did tile and marble for a living. For 40 years, he just retired. And what he got for a lifetime of hard work was a broken body and a pin to say thank you for your service. Our older generations, our family, their burnout often looked more physical. Gen X, their burnout often looks more mental. And then millennials and Gen Z, our burnout often looks more emotional and existential because we were taught that our work equals our worth and to pour so much of ourselves into it. So I think it's not that one generation is more burnout than the other. It's just that it manifests

differently based on the world in which we grew up. I'm curious, what do you notice about how Gen Z is approaching burnout differently? We can learn so much from Gen Z and what they are teaching us about modeling the boundaries that would have prevented all of us from burning out in the first place. They are incredibly wise. We hear often that they're lazy and entitled and that nobody wants to work anymore. But think about what they witnessed growing up. They saw their parents or their friends' parents be loyal to companies that laid them off. They saw millennials put themselves through college and get a tremendous amount of student debt just to be laid off or have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet and label it like the gig economy and have it be this super fancy term of,

oh, this is just we need to work multiple jobs without benefits to survive. So I think they are looking at everything that other generations have done and saying, no, thank you. It's really important for Gen Z to have clarity going into the workforce, not just what do I want to do, what jobs do I want to apply for, but how do I want to feel and how do I want to operate in the workplace? It all starts in the interview process and being mindful of what to look out for the language that your team uses. So if people are describing their company like we're like a family here, run. That is a red flag because I don't know about anybody else's family, but mine is full of dysfunction and you're expected to give a lot always and not get a ton of return all the time. And then when you are in the onboarding process, start talking about what you know. need early on. There's something called a working styles worksheet and it includes questions like

when I'm stressed, what I need most from my coworkers is blank. The best way I receive feedback is blank. My meeting participation style is blank and that will give you a lot of agency and autonomy in how you show up in your work and how you allow other people to treat you. We teach other people how to treat us. You know, these days, it's just hard to get a job in the first place, you know, on top of the cost of housing and health care and so many things that are just constantly going up. And that makes leaving a job or even having boundaries at the job you have now really, really hard. If you can't afford to quit your job, are there steps you can take to sort of prevent or stop that burnout? Yes, that's a great question. I just want to validate that.

the world is a dumpster fire right now. And the job market is trash. That said, you do still have agency within your days. There's also something called an energy management audit where for a week, if you were to track your time from the moment you woke up to the moment you go to bed and you figured out what your energy patterns were, what can you do to either redesign your time or change up your environment to sustain your energy levels. So in a workplace, that could look like, I'm going to take a meeting with my camera off, or I'm going to take it on a walk. Or if I know I have a particularly draining meeting at 12 p.m. every single day, I'm going to take a five-minute block, and I'm going to get up and just like shake out my nervous system, do some jumping jacks, put on my favorite song,

and just like close my eyes and give myself that rest for 30 seconds. I can set a remote, on my phone to do a breathing exercise just to get back into our bodies a little bit more. Is there anything you'd recommend not doing? Maybe something that feels good now, but ultimately in the long run is going to make it harder. Pushing when you have no more capacity or resources to push and thinking that you need to do it all by yourself. We live in a highly individualistic society, and, I mean, especially women, we take on so much emotional labor on top of just the day to day. So I would say if you are feeling stuck on a problem at work or you're feeling super stressed, the solution is not to push through and put in more hours.

That is going to be not only a disservice to the work itself, it's going to be a disservice to you. We can't self-help our way out of systems of oppression or burnout. out. And I think sometimes we really just need to let some of the plates fall and break. Because if we continue to take on everything and our employers see like, oh, you know, Danielle's got it, she can keep doing all of this and it's fine, then they're just going to continue to expect that out of me. But if I say I'm letting these two things fall and break and it's the company's responsibility to fix them, then maybe I will actually finally get some help. That's it for this week. We have an episode coming up about weddings. Getting married can get super expensive. Did you ball out or did you keep it small?

If you have a wedding coming up, what's the price tag? Tell us about it at 1-800-61845 or email us at askvox.com. If you want to support this podcast and all the work we do at Vox, consider becoming a Vox member. Vox members get access to things like our Patreon, where there's bonus content from your favorite Vox reporters and hosts. Check out Vox.com slash members to learn more. This episode was produced by Peter Balinon Rosen and Danielle Hewitt.

It was edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by Patrick Boyd. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. I'm your host, John Glenn Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye!

Support for Explained It to Me comes from Starbucks. Burnout can happen to anyone, but there's always a way to get your flow back. Take your afternoon slump, for instance. It's a phenomenon we all know too well. Sometimes all it takes is a reassuring word from a friend or a sip of a refreshing drink. So the next time you're looking to refocus and re-energize, you can hit up a friend and grab a Starbucks new energy refresher together. Try the all-new energy refreshers at Starbucks.