There are two kinds of burnout and they can reinforce and overlap.
The first is physical burnout. This is when your body just gives out because you don’t sleep well enough, you stop eating or exercising. The causes of this can be a poor habits, stress or being busy. It may also be because you just don’t feel like exercising.
This brings us to the second form of burnout - cognitive burnout or depression. Cognitive burnout is a result of your self concept failing. You experience set backs and obstacles which convince you that who you are right now is a failure and someone who’s actions don’t make any difference in the world. What you can achieve doesn’t seem in line with what you want to be.
This can often be because you are physically burned out. You are less effective hence reinforcing that belief. If this is the case focus first on lowering your stress levels. Stop worrying about too much of work or being fired for now. You have far more serious problems. Get your sleep exercise and diet on track.
Once you’ve done that you need to work on your self limiting beliefs. You need to understand that your failures don’t define you you can choose a new path and a new set of values. If you find that too difficult you can take the help of therapists and counselors. Reach out to your friends and discuss things with them.
Maintain a healthy lifestyle and a healthy diversity of interests and sources of self validation and meaning.
Avoid too much stress and try to have more free time for exploration.
Have friends and a community to fall back on and be open with when you have issues.
These are the ways to reduce the probability of burnout.
Also very fair point about the fact that it's larger than work.. it's social-general.
A lot of this is probably learned helplessness. When things are always randomly breaking and you're powerless to affect your solution in any other way than putting out the constant fires, that's a surefire way to burn out.
It's not just that it's a stressful situation, it's when they keep coming and there doesn't appear to be any obvious means of avoiding them or improving your situation. That's when you get fucked up.
Burnout actually overlaps partially or even entirely with depression. You can find a lot of good literature on the dynamics of stress resilience, depression induced by chronic unpredictable mild stress, and chronic social defeat stress that will illuminate the subject.
The term “burnout” is more palatable than “depression” to a lot of people due to stigmas against mental illness. Burnout also comes with a built-in explanation that you “just worked too hard” which some people see as a badge of honor, unfortunately. But it turn out that much of what people describe as burnout is more or less identical to classic depressive symptoms, and much of the same therapy helps address it.
Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
Inspired / Empowered by Marty Cagan
Build What Matters by Ben Foster
High Output Management by Andy Grove
The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Much by Cal Newport (Deep Work / A World Without Email / etc)
My small work experience has made me isolate a few ingredients:
- loosely defined tasks - improper team spirit / organizational communication
People feel bad when they feel they can't do their part and feel worthy / look ok / belong. Badly defined => badly trained => unfair blame (or the potential for it). They feel bad if they can't be open about issues and rely a bit on the group for support. They feel bad if they don't know how to get information (this links back to the first point).
A group is a strange soup and fears / doubts / tiny ego bursts can rapidly turn it into an acid bath.. but the opposite is true, most people want to be team players and care for a group and for a duty.