The Rise of Burnout and the Shift in Responsibility
For years, workers were taught to endure stress in silence. Now, rising burnout is forcing employers and governments to confront the cost of modern work.
Hayley Hughes said yes to everything. She worked in health care at a Queensland medical centre, managing nine GPs and up to 18 staff, while overseeing a change of ownership. “I kept delivering,” she says. “It took over my life.” The increased pace of her work meant that she was never “off”. “My phone didn’t stop and I really struggled to step away from the task list,” Hayley says. Over many months of an intense workload, Hayley started to feel physically ill from the stress. She experienced brain fog, a racing heart and insomnia.
Jeffrey Smith was working as a senior lawyer for an insurance company in Sydney as the business was collapsing and then sold. Over six or seven years, he was the only person left standing as multiple executive committees he worked on were downsized and members retrenched. He investigated senior colleagues and tried to enforce governance standards. “I became the repository of all the information and shit,” he says. Jeffrey stopped sleeping, his brain fogged, and he felt electricity running through his body. Waking at 2am with his heart pounding, he understands now, was due to cortisol spikes. “You lose all the enjoyment of life. You are just existing,” he says. He lasted a year in that state before leaving the firm. “I look back and say I did a good job at great cost.”
Now 60, Jeffrey says his generation “was taught to endure. Put your head down and don’t cause trouble”. “I was always functioning,” he says. “I wasn’t falling apart.”
And anyone reading Lena Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick, would recognise that after filming back-to-back seasons of Girls, she was suffering from burnout, among other things. Dunham’s huge success with the TV series, and relentless work ethic (she was a writer, director and star) meant when it was over, she took almost a decade to physically and psychologically recover from the experience.
Lena, Jeffrey and Sylvia are part of a legion of workers whose health has been severely compromised following workplace burnout.
Understanding Burnout
The path to burnout recovery can include mental health leave, seeing a doctor, maybe receiving a diagnosis of anxiety or depression, medicating yourself, and returning to work ready to roll again. Or — like Jeffrey and Hayley — you could change roles, reduce hours or move into less senior or less stressful positions. Jeffrey took time off before accepting a contract role with less responsibility. Hayley took long service, quit her job, sold an investment property to free up cash and took a less stressful (and less well-paid) job as a medical secretary. She has since written a book: Thank You, Burnout.
While taking control of burnout can help recovery, more people are asking if the onus should be on employers. With almost half of Australian workers feeling burnt out, experts are asking how workplace culture and systems contribute to, or even cause, exhaustion, and whether systemic change might lead to a reduction in burnout overall.
What is Burnout?
Burnout has entered the cultural lexicon with a thoroughness that has outpaced its clinical definition. It is discussed in podcast episodes and performance reviews, in resignation letters and therapy sessions, on TikTok and in medical journals. Yet despite its ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, there remains no consensus on what burnout actually is and, critically, whose responsibility it is to prevent and treat it.
The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” in its latest edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), making the definition environmental. According to the ICD-11, burnout is not a medical condition but a syndrome defined by three dimensions: “exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism toward one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy.” Burnout results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
In short, it is a syndrome caused by work, that affects work performance. And yet burnout is not included in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5-TR, which is the primary clinical bible used by doctors, psychologists and insurers in Australia. This has consequences that flow directly into the individual-versus-system debate.
The Diagnostic Trap
Dr Steven Stolz from the University of Adelaide researches teacher burnout and hosts a podcast on the topic. He has suffered burnout himself. “From my experience, unless the condition is part of the psychiatric manual, it doesn’t exist. Insurers won’t recognise burnout,” he says. “What happens instead is people take their accrued leave, or [seek a diagnosis of] depression in order to get sick leave.”
This pathway comes at a cost. Depression is classified as a disorder of the individual, a medical condition located in the person’s brain, body, and history. When a burned-out worker is diagnosed as depressed, the implied cause shifts from the workplace to the worker. The worker uses their own leave, sees a doctor on their own dime, takes medication, pays for therapy and formulates individual coping strategies. When they recover, they often return to a workplace unchanged from the one where the injury occurred in the first place.
Matthew Coleshill is an expert in the mental health of professionals at Sydney’s Black Dog Institute. He has noticed something interesting: saying you have burnout often carries less stigma than depression. The word burnout points toward the job, the conditions, the system, rather than inward toward personal pathology. “If you come up to a colleague and say ‘I’m depressed’, it’s a whole different tone. With burnout, people seem happy to discuss it,” he says.
Yet Coleshill believes there is an important, but unexpected, downside to including burnout as a mental health diagnosis: it risks removing responsibility from workplaces. “When I talk to clinicians about whether burnout should be a diagnosis [in the DSM], they say maybe not,” he says. “It becomes an individual thing that you treat, rather than addressing a workplace environment.” This is the diagnostic trap: the system that would officially recognise burnout in Australia, the DSM, is the same system that would then define burnout as an individual diagnosis. Once it is classified as an individual vulnerability, the systemic causes can be overlooked. Toxic workplaces stay toxic workplaces. Injured individuals are left to fend for themselves.
What Burnout Does to the Body
Understanding burnout as a physiological injury, rather than a personal weakness, is itself a political act. It shifts the question from “why can’t you cope?” to “what was done to you?” Burnout occurs when someone feels a level of stress and exhaustion that they can no longer recover from over a weekend or short holiday. It is one of those things that is easy to recognise in retrospect. Both Hayley and Jeffrey describe their experiences as “frogs in boiling water”. Burnout happened almost by stealth. By the time they sought help, they were already feeling the physical effects of stress and prolonged exhaustion.
Burnout also has physiological and neurological components with measurable structural and biochemical markers. It affects brain anatomy, hormonal systems, immune function, cardiovascular health, cellular aging and sleep architecture. Those who say they cannot think clearly, cannot feel normally, cannot recover with a weekend’s rest are not exaggerating. Their brains and bodies have been measurably changed. Burnout puts the body’s core stress response system under the hammer.
Under normal conditions, stressors trigger cortisol release, which mobilises energy and sharpens attention before returning to baseline. In chronic burnout, this system becomes dysregulated in measurable ways. Early burnout often shows elevated cortisol: a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands that regulates stress response. Advanced burnout frequently shows a flattened, blunted response, as if the system has essentially given up.
Swedish researchers have documented this dysregulation extensively in clinical burnout populations. Because cortisol regulates immune function, inflammation, blood sugar, sleep cycles and cardiovascular function, its dysregulation affects virtually every downstream system in the body. A landmark Swedish study found people with clinical burnout showed reduced grey matter density in the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s centre for executive function, decision-making, emotional regulation and working memory. The same research found the amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection centre, was enlarged in burned-out individuals, with weakened connectivity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. This led to emotional dysregulation and disproportionate reactivity. Further studies show burnout’s impact on sleep, cardiovascular disease, mood and clear thinking.
Yet without clear diagnostic criteria, diagnosing and treating burnout remains difficult.
Workplace Wellness
By framing burnout as an individual worker problem, organisations do not have to examine deeper systemic issues like toxic work cultures, unrealistic expectations, or inadequate support structures. The employee — not the employer — is paying the price.
Kirsty Macdonald, a burnout coach based in London, works with individuals and organisational leadership. She does not mince words. “Burnout is a collective problem, not an individual problem,” Macdonald says. “You don’t hear about the bonkers-ness of why this is happening.” So why is this happening? Macdonald argues society is no longer moving at “a human pace”. “Society is getting faster and faster. People in workplaces designed to make big profits, or workplaces that are poorly staffed, end up running on a treadmill. They can’t keep up because they are humans, in a human body and we are not meant to go at such an insane pace all the time.”
Noting the crossover of symptoms between burnout and depression, Macdonald wonders if some are prescribed antidepressants when their primary problem is less a chemical imbalance and instead a broken work environment. “So many people are taking medications to try to fit in with a workplace that is broken,” Macdonald says. “They are not broken, it’s the workplace.” The medication critique is not about rejecting treatment for people who are genuinely depressed. Antidepressants can be lifesaving. It is questioning whether medicalising a systemic problem shifts both the treatment and the cost onto the individual, while leaving the conditions that caused the harm intact.
South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argued in his influential 2010 book The Burnout Society that burnout was not a malfunction of the individual psyche but the logical endpoint of a society that had replaced the external prohibitions of the old disciplinary order with an internal compulsion to perform. The 21st century produces workers who tell themselves there is nothing they cannot achieve. Han argues this is not liberation, but a sophisticated form of oppression. The whip is now held by the self. In a drive for self-optimisation, excessive positivity and a perfectionist attitude lead to us being both “master and slave”.
The exhausted, burned-out worker has not failed to cope with modernity, they have succeeded at it completely, internalising its achievement imperative so thoroughly that they have nothing left to give. “We owe the cultural achievements of humanity — which include philosophy — to deep, contemplative attention,” Han writes. “Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention.”
The Lesson from Teachers
The clearest example in Australia of what happens when governments and institutions accept burnout is their problem to solve is in education. Teacher burnout in Australia is not new. But it has reached a point where its consequences are too visible and too costly to keep attributing to individual teacher inadequacy.
Post-pandemic, we have seen widespread teacher shortages, student underachievement and institutional knowledge walking out the door. “It’s not an individual thing,” says Professor Rebecca Collie, from the UNSW School of Education, who has studied burnout in 2,500 Australian teachers. “Teacher burnout is a system thing that needs to be addressed,” she says. Her research maps the three dimensions of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism (loss of belief in one’s ability to make change), and reduced professional efficacy. She found 30–40 per cent of teachers across her samples had been experiencing burnout since prior to the well-documented pressure of teaching during COVID-19 lockdowns.
The numbers are starting to come down but they are still elevated. The reason, she argues, is not because teachers have become more resilient. It is because governments have started to act. “What’s been pleasing is that burnout is going down a little bit because of government efforts to address the teacher shortage and workload,” Collie says. “There has been some attention to this issue that wasn’t there before. It did reach a point where there was a consequence — teacher shortages — and there has been wider recognition that this is not just an individual problem.”
Something had to give. The National Teacher Workforce Action Plan is a federal government attempt to address burnout on a systemic level. It seeks to do this by reducing workloads, improving retention and increasing teacher support. According to the plan, the key strategies focus on relieving administrative burdens, expanding mentorship and providing financial incentives. The plan is in its early days, but experts are hopeful it will address some of the conditions that cause teacher burnout.
The Limits of Individual Solutions
None of this means individual action is pointless. Stolz identifies perfectionism, where self-worth is entirely tied to professional performance, as an internal risk factor that no amount of workplace reform will address alone. “It’s not one over the other [perfectionism and workplace culture],” he says. “They are both contributing factors.” But he says that individual coping strategies have a ceiling. “Mindfulness, taking time off: these can keep burnout at bay. But if you are working in a toxic workplace, you need to address that,” he says. “Leaving one toxic workplace for another will not help.”
Hayley Hughes, who said yes to everything, believes her burnout was a type of anxiety: “My burnout was on me. Nobody is at fault, it’s because of me. For many years I was a perfectionist, a people-pleaser.” Since restructuring her relationship to work by refusing to let it define her sense of self and reducing her hours, Hayley says she has learned to read her own warning signs. “It forced me to disconnect my identity from my job,” she says.
Jeffrey, years after his crisis, has built personal practices that he credits with preventing a recurrence: no alcohol, time in nature, careful attention to sleep. “I’m much better able to recognise and act,” he says. But both acknowledge their recoveries depended on having something most burned-out workers do not — the economic cushion to make those choices. Hayley sold an investment. Jeffrey was able to switch roles and take time off in between. The cleanest individual solutions to burnout — leave the job, take months off, downshift — are available only to those with financial security. For everyone else, the question of systemic change is not a luxury. It’s the only real option.
