How to Tell the Difference Between Lazy and Burnt Out
When you designed your Saturday earlier in the week, your plan seemed like a good idea. The plan was something like: answer a few emails, go to the store, and do that thing you have been putting off for a few months. The plan was solid, but when you woke up and looked at the list, you hadn't done any of it. You did some version of doomscrolling and lost track of time. Then you felt terrible about scrolling, which didn’t make you get up or stop; you just kept rotting. By Sunday night, you have made the assumption that you are lazy, which is something you have probably been thinking about yourself for a long time.
Sound familiar? I want to argue with the label a bit, because it usually isn’t the full story when I hear about it in session. The lazy label is a stable, global judgment of who you are as a person, not a reflection of a day when you were ’t productive. If what you are actually dealing with is depletion, then you are just bullying yourself and taking away even more energy. I say this as much for myself as I do for you so listen up: rest is not worthless. Rest actually is a tool to use.
What laziness would look like
Laziness is something different; it’s when the capacity is there, but you won’t do it. In other words, you could do it, but you just don’t want to. Here is the part people miss: if that were true of you, you would not be so upset about it. It also wouldn’t be ruining your sleep as you run through the checklist of things you have to do that keeps getting longer and longer.
The reaction gives us so much information about what is happening. People who are indifferent do not lose sleep over what they missed. Feeling awful about the incomplete list shows you really care, which is the opposite of being lazy. Just in case you were wondering. Which you probably were.
What burnout looks like
Burnout has a defined shape and is recognized by the World Health Organization. Burnout, by definition, is characterized as a syndrome (not a clinical diagnosis) resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. I want to reiterate that this is not a clinical diagnosis. Burnout has three key features: energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance and cynicism about your job, and reduced professional efficacy (World Health Organization, 2019).
That third criterion is what makes the lazy gain traction in your mind. You notice your output has dropped, you can see it, and your brain jumps to the conclusion that something is wrong with who you are as a person. What is more likely is that you have been running on high for too long on a depleted system, long enough that your system just couldn’t keep up. So it tries to force you to rest, but you keep making the problem worse by feeling guilty about the rest, which makes it less effective. The cycle of depletion is called General Adaptation Syndrome, described by Hans Selye, and it isn’t just related to work. It’s the idea that we cannot continue in our body’s fight-or-flight response mode for long periods of time. At a certain point, no matter how hard we fight it, the body will break down. As I said before, burnout is ’t a clinical diagnosis; it’s more of an occupational phenomenon, but we can work with it.
Inadequate rest feeds the cycle and often creates the problem in the first place. And the way we typically deal with it can make it persist even longer. Most high-achievers I work with are not resting, even if they think they are. They are collapsing, which is different than rest. Collapsing is running on empty, crashing on the couch for six hours, feeling guilty the whole time, and still not feeling refreshed even though you technically had time off. The research on work recovery says something similar: what predicts feeling better is actually disengaging mentally from work, not just being physically away from it (Wendsche & Lohmann-Haislah, 2017). If you feel guilty the whole time you are resting, you're not only not being productive on the tasks you need to get done. To say it bluntly, you are failing at the job you are trying to do with that rest time.
No checklist here
You may have noticed I have not offered you a quiz to sort yourself into burnout or depression. That’s purposeful because the two overlap enough that researchers still argue about whether the line between them is real at all (Bianchi et al., 2015). If they cannot draw it cleanly, a blog post is not going to help you draw it about yourself while you are awake trying to fit yourself into a box to let your mind rest. Spoiler: the label won’t be the thing that helps.
The useful thing to do is not really to self-diagnose anyway. You are very capable, but this isn’t really your area, and knowing your expertise is also pretty important. The best thing is to know which questions to bring to an expert. Does the flatness follow work, or does it show up everywhere? Has anything still felt good this month? How long has this been happening? We want you to be able to describe how you are feeling, and then an expert will put the puzzle pieces together.
What most people do
The first thing people do is tighten their grip on the reins. They try to figure out why the system isn’t working and decide they need a whole new system, a stricter morning routine, an earlier alarm, an app. This approach views depletion as a discipline problem, so it asks you to spend more of the energy you don’t have at the moment. It usually gives you a few days or so where you can grit your teeth and focus on the newness of the system and will yourself out of this “laziness” problem you think you have.
The second is to wait for motivation to come back on its own. The thing is, motivation actually comes after action, not the other way around. It is not going to fall out of the sky and hit you over the head. It doesn’t follow a schedule you can plan around, because you wait for a symptom to resolve while you are still doing what causes it. Motivation is a whole other topic I hope to cover soon, because that’s a big one and most people waste a lot of time with the way they think about it.
What tends to help
Start with offloading rather than increasing intensity. I know that probably made you cringe, and it feels like it’s the opposite of what you need. Almost everyone feeling this way is trying to work harder in a way that isn’t sustainable, at least if we are using an accurate assessment. The honest question is not, "How do I push through this?" It is what comes off the list, and what steps you take to make that happen.
Next, look at whether you have any real disengagement from work in your week. I am not talking about hours off and technically not working; I am talking about hours off when you aren’t thinking about work either. If you cannot get there, that usually reflects your workload, and it isn’t that you are a failure. Heavy demands are exactly what makes it hard to leave work at work and actually rest when you are off the clock. Our society has also made this harder to do because there is an unhealthy expectation of connectivity.
Finally, watch how you talk about yourself. This one sounds a little silly, but a lot of how we feel can be worked on through the words we use because they carry specific meaning. I am not telling you to look in the mirror and tell yourself how pretty you are. Although if that’s your deal, go for it, I guess. If you narrate every unproductive hour as proof that you are lazy, you add shame, and that’s baked into your negative view of who you are as a whole person. That’s exhausting; stop doing that, because you cannot bully yourself out of burnout.
If this is you
Burnout in driven people is one of the most common things I see, and it responds well to treatment. We look at what you are carrying, what it would look like to step away from this feeling, and what you have been telling yourself about whatever shortcoming you are describing. If what is going on looks more like depression than burnout, we find that out, and we work on some of the same skills at the same time.
You are not lazy, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have lazy moments. You have been running on empty and blaming yourself for not being able to simply snap out of it or work harder.
Remember when I said to find an expert to help instead of self-diagnosing? Hi, expert right here. It is so nice to meet you!
References:
Bianchi, R., Schonfeld, I. S., & Laurent, E. (2015). Burnout–depression overlap: A review. Clinical Psychology Review, 36, 28–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2015.01.004
Wendsche, J., & Lohmann-Haislah, A. (2017). A meta-analysis on antecedents and outcomes of detachment from work. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 2072. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02072
World Health Organization. (2019, May 28). Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases