Ahead of graduation season, University of Pennsylvania stress expert, Dr. Kandi Wiens, has a warning for college grads on the job hunt: Beware the “churn and burn culture.”
It is well documented that many companies overwork their employees. According to a 2024 Gitnux MarketData Report, 44% of U.S. employees say they are overworked, and half of them say that large workloads add to their work-related stress. The New York Times reports two-decades of over 200 studies that found grueling work hours have diminishing returns in the form of serious health problems, injury on the job and lower productivity. Case in point. Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, was accused of corporate slavery, treating employees like collateral damage when praising Tesla China workers for “burning the three-a.m. oil.”
Workweeks of 60, 80, even 100 hours are commonplace in major corporations, Wiens notes. MarketWatch, for example, reports that Elon Musk logs in as much as 120 hours a week, Google’s Marissa Mayer clocks up to 130 weekly hours and Tim Cook at Apple sends emails at 4:30 a.m. Unfortunately, most of the science has focused on the burnout aftereffects of such brutal hours with far too little emphasis on burnout risk detection or burnout immunity before it becomes intractable.
How To Determine Your Burnout Risk Level
When overworking chains you to the desk, it can destroy your career, fracture your family ties and it can kill you. You can recover from stress with certain management techniques, but burnout results from cumulative and unmanaged stress, and once you contract it, there’s no quick fix.
Overworked employees often think PTO or a vacation will remedy the condition, but that’s a myth. You can’t cure burnout by slowing down, taking a long vacation or working fewer hours.
The key symptom of burnout is exhaustion in the form of a deep fatigue that isn’t curable by rest or time off. Your best recourse is burnout immunity through early detection of burnout risk, which allows you to take preemptive self-care action (shown here) before you hit the wall.
The World Health Organization classifies burnout as a medical diagnosis and defines it as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Burnout is diagnosed by three symptoms:
- Feelings of energy depletion, exhaustion and fatigue
- Increased mental distance from your job, along with feelings of negativism or cynicism related to your job
- Reduced professional efficacy
The first step to immunize yourself against burnout is to determine your risk level early on before it’s intractable, according to Wiens, a specialist in emotional intelligence and author of Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal Your Relationship with Work. She suggests asking yourself these questions: What’s your current degree of workplace stress? Are you stressed-out, in danger of burning out, at high risk for burnout or already burned-out?
You can also take her Burnout Risk Quiz here to determine your risk. She advises that you learn what makes you vulnerable to burning out—not your boss, not your competitor, not your seemingly indefatigable coworker—and then take measures to protect yourself from the career killer that’s been called “an equal-opportunity international crisis.”
Triggers That Put You On The Fast Track To Burnout
Wiens points out that, when triggered, the logical brain—the area responsible for problem-solving, decision-making, and rational thinking—shuts down. Emotions take over, and we’re flooded with adrenaline and cortisol—a state in which we can’t see clearly or make sound decisions, and we stay in that mode until the trigger has dissipated.
“This is why it’s vitally important that each of us becomes aware of our unique triggers,” she advises. “Sometimes triggers are obvious, either because they’re vivid and undeniable—your boss yells at you or someone makes a last-minute change to your schedule—or it’s a trigger you’ve lived with for a long time. Other triggers are subtler and require more focused attention to identify; still others are entirely unknown to us.”
It’s possible to identify triggers by working backward from the result of the trigger, she points out, adding the trick is to pinpoint the events that trigger workplace stress.
- What makes your stomach lurch?
- What is something you absolutely cannot tolerate?
- What’s something your coworker or boss does that makes you want to scream?
- What makes you feel unfocused, like your brain is “offline?”
- What makes you feel out of control?
- What makes your self-confidence plummet?
She recommends thinking back over the last few weeks and looking for any occasion that caused an immediate emotional or physical reaction—an abrupt change in your thinking or mental state or a sudden shift in behavior.
“Maybe you suddenly felt sad, irritable, frustrated, numb or overwhelmed,” she says. “Or maybe you experienced nausea, muscle tension, shakiness or pain. Maybe you were overtaken by negativity or an impulse to withdraw. Perhaps you lashed out at someone, became passive- aggressive or cried. Any of these automatic reactions is an indication that you’ve been triggered. Once you identify your triggered state, work backward until you can pinpoint what set you off.”
Burnout Immunity From Exploitative Organizations
Churn-and-burn cultures take advantage of competitive achievers who habitually overwork and overextend themselves, according to Wiens.
“Churn-and-burn cultures have characteristically low employee engagement metrics, high levels of absenteeism and turnover and high rates of burnout,” she explains. “When word gets out that these organizations are burning people out left and right, leaders struggle to recruit and retain top talent, which reinforces the vicious cycle within the churn-and-burn culture. In churn-and-burn cultures, we often hear about leaders and employees who are highly cynical, resistant to change, quitting quietly and/or actively looking to leave their organization. These attitudes and behaviors perpetuate and sometimes even add fuel to the burnout fire.”
According to MarketWatch, the average worker puts in four hours of unpaid overtime a week and spends another four hours just thinking about work. A large body of research reports mounting employee burnout, plus data showing that 41% of employed Americans currently experience post-time-off burnout and 14% making mistakes due to exhaustion.
Although Wiens recognizes that new grads are eager and ready to get to work, she cautions them.
“Too many organizations exploit high achievers and prey on their enthusiasm. While it’s tempting to accept a job offer, especially from a reputable employer, it’s important to protect your mental health at the start of your career.”
Wiens has found that people with burnout immunity are able to use emotional intelligence skills to regulate and stay in control of their emotions, even in the midst of high-stress situations. “The power to determine your best response to stress is in your control, and it depends on nothing more than how you choose to view your ability to manage it,” she insists.
How To Inoculate Yourself From Stress And Burnout
Wiens argues that the further you stray from you, the greater your vulnerability to burnout. The risk of burning out rises in direct proportion to the degree that your work culture is out of alignment with the conditions you need to thrive and perform your best. She offers seven tips that provide burnout immunity:
- Make sure you choose a work environment that aligns with your temperament and personality, making you less vulnerable to burnout.
- If you’re becoming a casualty of a churn-and-burn culture, remind yourself that it’s not you, it’s your job burning you out. No amount of perfectionism or overwork on your part is going to change the culture in a positive direction.
- Look closely at the cultural and environmental conditions causing you to feel depleted, cynical and exhausted instead of blaming yourself for not being able to keep up with the culture.
- Find ways to create some physical and mental space from your job—such as a vacation or sabbatical—so you can regain your perspective and reconnect with what’s really most important to you.
- Consider recognizing and be willing to accept short term sacrifices to achieve your longer-term goals if staying with the organization is your best option.
- Learn to shift from a threat response to a challenge response, even if you’ve lived with an overactive amygdala your whole life. With this mindset, you view your stress as a helpful resource, rather than a harmful threat.
- Don’t become a part of the problem that’s contributing to the churn-and-burn cultural conditions. Ask yourself, “What am I doing in response to my experience here? And what is my response doing to me, and to others?”
