We're living in the age of exhaustion. Who pays the price of burnout?

Link copiedShareShare articleFor 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. 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. The question of who is responsible for burnout matters. Whether we define burnout as an individual failing or a systemic one determines how we treat it. And, in turn, determines where the responsibility, and the cost, lands. 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. 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 le

We're living in the age of exhaustion. Who pays the price of burnout?

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