Why it is the most responsible and reliable people who burn out

“If you don’t know, ask Maja. Maja knows everything.”

The sentence was dropped in a meeting, in passing, as a compliment. Maja smiled and nodded. She really was the one who knew everything: where the latest version of the contract was, who had promised what to whom, how to fix the printer that jammed on Fridays. In eight years she had not taken a single day of sick leave. When new people joined the department, she was the one who showed them the ropes. When someone left, she took over their work. Nobody asked her to stay late — she stayed of her own accord, because otherwise things would not get done.

Six months after that meeting she got into her car one morning, started the engine and could not pull away. She sat there for twenty minutes, hands on the wheel, crying without knowing why. She did not go to work that day. Nor the following week.

Maja is invented, but her story is not unusual. Anyone who has looked into burnout knows the paradox: it is not the people who don’t care who burn out. It is the people everyone relies on. In this post I will try to explain why that is — what dedication, perfectionism, the inability to say no and a role you may have been given in your family, long before you knew what a job was, have in common.

To burn out, you first have to burn

When the psychiatrist Herbert Freudenberger first described burnout in 1974, he was not observing tired office clerks. He was observing volunteers at a free clinic in New York — people who worked out of conviction, long hours and without pay. And he noticed that the most dedicated among them were, after a year or two, exhausted, irritable and cynical towards the very people they had once been glad to help. Among them, as he later admitted, was he himself.

The Israeli psychologist Ayala Pines later condensed this into an idea that has stuck in the field: to burn out, you first have to be on fire. Burnout, in her view, is not an illness of the indifferent but of those who look for meaning in their work. When work no longer brings meaning — because there is too much of it, because it has no effect, because nobody notices — the fire does not go out all at once. It slowly consumes the person who lit it.

Today we know that burnout is not rare. When Gallup in the United States asked nearly 7,500 full-time employees in 2018, 23 per cent said they felt burned out at work very often or always, and a further 44 per cent sometimes. But the figure alone does not tell us who among them is most vulnerable. For that we need to look at what goes on inside the people who burn out — and in the environment that unwittingly encourages it. I wrote in more detail about how burnout shows itself in Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break.

Dedication that knows no end

Dedication is a virtue. I need to say this at the outset, because this post is not a call to stop caring. People who care make the world better: the teacher who notices the child in the back row, the nurse who comes back to check, the colleague who corrects a mistake before anyone is harmed.

The problem is not dedication but the fact that it has no limit. For most people, caring about work stops somewhere — at the end of the working day, at what is still reasonable, at what is genuinely their job. For people who burn out, it often does not stop. Every unfinished task stays open into the evening. Every problem of someone else’s becomes a little bit theirs too. Every “I’ll do it” seems a matter of course.

The German sociologist Johannes Siegrist described a concept for this which he called overcommitment: an inner need to put more into work than it requires, together with difficulty switching off from it. In his effort–reward imbalance model, this inner attitude is one of the factors that raise the risk of stress and related problems — especially when the effort invested is not met with appropriate recognition.

Perfectionism: not high standards, but fear

The second trait that keeps recurring in burnout research is perfectionism. But we need to be precise here, because perfectionism is not one single thing.

In a 2016 meta-analysis, the psychologists Andrew Hill and Thomas Curran brought together research on the link between perfectionism and burnout and separated two sides of it. The first is perfectionistic strivings: high standards, the wish to do something really well. The second is perfectionistic concerns: fear of making mistakes, a sense that it is never enough, the belief that others will reject you if you are not flawless. It was the second side — the concerns — that was clearly linked to burnout. The strivings were linked to it much more weakly, in places hardly at all.

This is an important distinction. Wanting to do good work is not dangerous. It becomes dangerous when good work is no longer a choice but a condition — when a mistake is experienced as proof that you are not all right. Then you cannot stop, because every pause carries the risk that someone will notice a crack. I wrote about how perfectionism intertwines with endless rumination in Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear, and you will also find a short explanation in the knowledge base under perfectionism.

Why you can’t say no

If you ask people who have burned out why they didn’t turn down one more task, you rarely hear that they didn’t know it was too much. They knew. What you hear is something like: “Who else would do it?” “It wasn’t that much.” “I felt awkward.” “Then I’d be a bad colleague.”

Behind each of these sentences is a feeling that “no” carries a price that is too high. That someone will be disappointed or angry, that the relationship will cool, that you will lose the place you had in other people’s eyes. For people who learned this early, “no” is not a simple word. It is an act that threatens belonging.

Often this attitude begins at home. A child who was not allowed to be angry, who sensed that their displeasure distressed their parents, learns to push their own will aside. As an adult they then know very well what others need and very poorly what they need themselves. This is the subject of How a child who wasn’t allowed to be angry becomes an adult who can’t say no. How boundaries are set in practice I described in Setting boundaries: why it feels selfish even though healthy relationships depend on it.

With burnout, the inability to say no is especially insidious because it is rewarded. A person who always says yes is well liked. They get praise, trust, promotions — and with them even more tasks. The environment does not see the cost, because it is hidden: it is paid in the evenings, at weekends, in the body.

When work becomes identity

The third thread is the quietest. For many people who burn out, work is not just something they do. It is what they are.

Asked “Who are you?”, they answer with their profession. Asked “What do you enjoy?”, they think for a long time. When things are going well at work, they are fine too. When something goes wrong at work, everything wobbles. Psychologists call this contingent self-worth: a sense of your own value that depends on one area — in this case, on achievement.

An identity like this is fragile for a simple reason: it does not allow rest. If you are worth something only when you work, rest is a loss of worth. Holidays become a time of anxiety, sick leave a time of shame, retirement a threat. And when burnout forces a person to stop, they lose not only their strength but also their sense of who they are. That is why recovering from burnout is often more than rest. It is also the question of who you are when you are not the one who copes.

The hero of the family

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we always look back as well — not to find someone to blame, but to understand where a pattern comes from. And with people who burn out, a familiar role often appears in the family story: the role of the hero.

The American therapist Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse described children’s roles in families where one parent drank. She noticed that children in such families unconsciously take on roles that help the family survive. The hero is the one who is good, responsible and successful. Through their achievements they bring the family pride and proof that “everything is fine at our house”. They look after the younger ones, notice when mum is tired, know when it is better to stay quiet. I wrote about this and other roles in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?

The hero role is not reserved for families with alcohol. It arises wherever a child felt they had to carry something in place of the adults — a parent’s illness, a divorce, poverty, a mother’s sadness, a father’s absence. When a child takes over responsibility for a parent’s feelings or tasks, we call it parentification. In the process the child learns something very valuable: responsibility, precision, a feel for others. And something very costly: that their own needs come last — or never.

A conversation illustrating how this sounds in adulthood might go something like this (composite, not a real person):

“When did you last complain to someone that things were hard for you?”
“Complain? I don’t know… Never, I think. We didn’t complain at home.”
“And who at home was the one who knew what needed doing?”
“Me. Mum was in hospital a lot. Dad worked. Somebody had to.”
“And at work?”
“…The same. Only now I get paid for it.”

That last sentence says a great deal. The workplace often becomes a stage on which an old family role is played out again — with the difference that it is no longer carried by a child but by an adult who could choose differently, yet does not know they can.

Why the environment is happy to go along with it

It would be unfair to load the whole story onto the individual. People with the hero role do not end up in a vacuum. They end up in jobs that need them.

Every organisation has a few people who hold things together. Their work is often invisible while they are doing it — and painfully visible when they stop. Managers rely on them because they can. Colleagues leave them the harder cases because they will sort them out. Nobody is being malicious. The system simply flows to where there is least resistance, and the least resistance is found in the person who cannot say no.

Here two stories meet. The person brings a pattern from their family; the environment confirms and rewards it. And so the loop closes: more reliability brings more work, more work brings more recognition, more recognition reinforces the belief that worth lies in being reliable. Until the body says no on the person’s behalf.

That is why, in recovery, it is not enough for a person to rest and return to the same circumstances with the same attitude. Something has to change in both — in how they carry responsibility, and in how much the environment expects of them.

What can change

If you recognise yourself in this post, the aim is not for you to become less reliable. The aim is for reliability to become a choice rather than an obligation you cannot put down. A few directions that help:

• Separate responsibility from guilt. You are responsible for what is genuinely your task. You are not to blame for everything that might go wrong if you don’t step in.
• Allow yourself “good enough”. Not with everything — with the things where the difference between excellent and good harms nobody. There are more of them than you think.
• Practise small noes. Don’t start with the biggest refusal of the year. Start with a deadline you extend, a meeting you don’t take on, the question “Which of these should I drop so that I can do this?”
• Build a life outside work. Relationships, your body, play, something you don’t do for the result. Not as a reward after work, but as part of who you are.
• Look at where the role comes from. Once you understand why the “hero” was once necessary, you can respect it — and relieve it at the same time.

If you would like to check where you are right now, the burnout self-check in the knowledge base may help. It does not replace a conversation with a professional, but it can help you put into words what is happening.

Exercise: an inventory of your yeses

This exercise takes fifteen minutes and a sheet of paper. You can do it this evening.

1. Write down everything you have said “yes” to in the last two weeks — at work and at home. Small things too: “I’ll take a look”, “no problem”, “I can do it”.
2. Next to each item, mark whether it was really your task. Not whether you could manage it — whether it was yours.
3. For those that were not yours, write down what you felt in the moment before the “yes”. Guilt? Fear of disappointing someone? Impatience, because someone else would be slower?
4. Ask yourself who taught you this. With whom did you first feel this way? Don’t look for someone to blame; look for the source.
5. Choose one item that you will hand back or decline next time. Just one. Write down the sentence you will use to say it, and read it aloud.

The first time you do this, discomfort will probably make itself felt. That is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is a sign that you are touching a pattern that was taken for granted for a long time.

Where this explanation does not apply

I want to be clear: this post describes why some people are more vulnerable to burnout. It does not claim that burnout is their fault or that their character causes it.

Burnout is above all a consequence of work. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, who have been researching burnout for decades, described six areas in which work and the person drift apart: workload, lack of control, insufficient reward, breakdown of community, unfairness and a mismatch of values. In the Gallup survey, too, employees named unfair treatment, an unmanageable workload, unclear roles, lack of support from their manager and unreasonable time pressure as the main causes of burnout — all features of the working environment, not of personality. A person without a hero role and without perfectionism can burn out in a workplace where there is work for three. Where individual responsibility ends and the system’s begins is the subject of The system or the individual: who is responsible for burnout.

Not every exhaustion is burnout. Tiredness that does not pass can also be a sign of depression, anaemia, thyroid problems or other physical conditions. If you have been exhausted for some time, see your GP first to rule out physical causes. If you also feel hopeless or have thoughts that it would be better if you weren’t here, seek help straight away — in Slovenia you can call the Klic v duševni stiski helpline on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112.

The hero role is not a diagnosis. Descriptions of family roles are an aid to reflection, not boxes that everyone has to be sorted into. Many people are responsible and reliable simply because it suits them — and do not burn out, because they have enough support, control and recognition. Responsibility itself is not the problem. The problem is when you cannot put it down.

What to remember

• Burnout most often affects the dedicated and reliable — those who give their work more than it asks.
• With perfectionism, the danger is not the wish for quality but the fear of mistakes and the sense that it is never enough.
• The inability to say no is often rewarded at work, which makes it hard to spot until it is too late.
• The family hero role can carry on in the workplace — understanding it means you can set it down.
• Burnout is above all a consequence of working conditions; personal traits tell us who is more vulnerable, not who is to blame.