Burnout

I work at a consulting firm. My colleagues and I put in grueling long hours — trying to meet all of our deadlines and produce the highest quality of work to keep our clients satisfied. While having lunch with a colleague early last week, we noticed a pattern: within a year of working with the firm, many of our colleagues were showing signs of burnout. Many had entered their new job with strong dedication, long hours, and a drive to produce quality work. But a few months in, they ended up taking more breaks and working fewer hours.

But what was an even more interesting pattern was that there were also many colleagues who weren't getting burnt out. So we had to know why that was the case and what they were doing differently.

The first and obvious thing we looked at was whether they were working fewer hours to begin with and taking on less work. But we noticed that most of these people were taking on at least as many tasks as anyone else — and in many cases, more than an average colleague.

So it seemed like it wasn't something within the working hours that was helping them, but most likely something beyond work — especially because:

1. We did not find significant differences in their working relationships with colleagues compared to the rest.
2. We also did not find much of a difference in the type or quality of work they were taking up either.

This does not mean that factors like work environment, nature of work, and working hours have no impact on burnout rates. But it was interesting to note that despite having most of these factors consistent, there were still differences in whether people were getting burnt out. So we had to understand what those avoiding burnout were doing differently beyond work.

We looked at our colleagues who were burnt out to get a direction about where to look for possible explanations. Eventually, we found one obvious pattern — most of the people who weren't burnt out also seemed to have great personal lives and relationships. I looked deeper into it and found a consistent thread: people who had better social lives, both inside and outside of work, were far less likely to experience burnout.

What the evidence shows

This was an interesting pattern, and I had to dig deeper. I began looking at what the evidence shows — and there were multiple studies backing up this hypothesis:

1. Extroverted workers were four times less likely to face burnout than their peers with more introverted personalities. The reason appears to be two-fold. First, many workplaces are designed to favour more extroverted behaviour. But a bigger reason is that extroverts are constantly meeting more people, going out, and making plans — and there seems to be something inherent about these interpersonal interactions that helps manage stress.
2. A separate study on school teachers found that there is a strong relationship between marital happiness and burnout rates. Teachers with greater marital happiness were much less likely to experience burnout.

It appears that having strong social and personal relationships helps you detach from work after hours and forces you to think about other things. Beyond that, studies also show that people with strong, trustworthy relationships have more resilience when faced with tough situations. People who believe they have family and friends they can rely on — people who would support them through difficult times — are more likely to navigate those challenges with less chronic stress. Over time, this aggregates to significantly better long-term wellbeing.

The age factor

There is another pattern worth noting: lower levels of burnout with age. This could be a function of many things — experience, familiarity with the work, less intense learning curves. But this pattern perfectly aligns with a different statistic: more people tend to find better quality relationships as they grow older. Separate meta-analyses across 73 studies found the same result — a significant negative correlation between age and burnout rates.

As people grow older, most become better settled, find their community, are more likely to have met their partners, gotten married, or had children. All of these factors appear to have a protective effect against burnout — and perhaps surprisingly, this seems to hold even for more introverted people, suggesting that the depth of connection matters as much as the breadth of one's social life.