Hayley Hughes worked in healthcare, managing GPs and staff. She took on too much and struggled to step away.

Hayley says, 'I kept delivering, but it took over my life.'

Her work pace was too fast, and she was never 'off'.

Hayley's phone didn't stop, and she struggled to step away from tasks.

Hayley felt physically ill from stress, with brain fog, a racing heart, and insomnia.

Jeffrey Smith worked as a senior lawyer during a company collapse and sale.

Jeffrey was the only one left after multiple executive committees were downsized.

Jeffrey says, 'I became the repository of all information.'

Jeffrey stopped sleeping, felt brain fog, and had a racing heart.

Jeffrey says, 'You lose all enjoyment of life, just existing.'

He lasted a year before leaving the firm, saying he did a good job at great cost.

Now 60, Jeffrey says his generation was taught to endure and not cause trouble.

Jeffrey says, 'I was always functioning, not falling apart.'

Lena Dunham's memoir, Famesick, describes her burnout after filming Girls.

Dunham took almost a decade to recover from the experience.

Lena, Jeffrey, and Sylvia are part of a legion of workers whose health was compromised by burnout.

The path to burnout recovery includes mental health leave, seeing a doctor, and maybe receiving a diagnosis.

Or, like Jeffrey and Hayley, you could change roles or reduce hours.

Jeffrey took time off before accepting a contract role with less responsibility.

Hayley took long service, quit her job, and took a less stressful job as a medical secretary.

While taking control of burnout can help recovery, more people are asking if the onus should be on employers.

Experts are asking how workplace culture contributes to exhaustion and whether systemic change can reduce burnout.

The question of who is responsible for burnout matters, determining how we treat it and where the responsibility lands.

What is burnout?

Burnout has entered the cultural lexicon, but its clinical definition is unclear.

It is discussed in various contexts, but there is no consensus on what burnout is and whose responsibility it is.

The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an 'occupational phenomenon'.

Burnout is not a medical condition but a syndrome caused by chronic workplace stress.

In short, it is a syndrome caused by work that affects work performance.

The ICD-11 defines burnout by three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy.

Burnout results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

The diagnostic trap occurs when burnout is not recognized as a legitimate condition.

Dr. Steven Stolz researches teacher burnout and has suffered burnout himself.

Unless the condition is part of the psychiatric manual, it doesn't exist, and insurers won't recognize burnout.

People take their accrued leave or seek a diagnosis of depression to get sick leave.

This pathway comes at a cost, as depression is classified as a disorder of the individual.

When a burned-out worker is diagnosed as depressed, the implied cause shifts from the workplace to the worker.

The worker uses their own leave, sees a doctor on their own dime, and pays for therapy.

When they recover, they often return to a workplace unchanged from the one where the injury occurred.

Matthew Coleshill is an expert in the mental health of professionals at Sydney's Black Dog Institute.

Coleshill has noticed that saying you have burnout often carries less stigma than depression.

The word burnout points toward the job, the conditions, the system, rather than inward toward personal pathology.

If you come up to a colleague and say 'I'm depressed', it's a whole different tone.

Yet Coleshill believes there is an important downside to including burnout as a mental health diagnosis.

When I talk to clinicians about whether burnout should be a diagnosis, they say maybe not.

It becomes an individual thing that you treat, rather than addressing a workplace environment.

This is the diagnostic trap: the system that recognizes burnout would then define it as an individual diagnosis.

Once it is classified as an individual vulnerability, the systemic causes can be overlooked.

Toxic workplaces stay toxic, and injured individuals are left to fend for themselves.

The ICD-11 addresses this by placing burnout in its workplace category.

What burnout does to the body

Understanding burnout as a physiological injury is a political act.

It shifts the question from 'why can't you cope?' to 'what was done to you?'

Burnout occurs when someone feels a level of stress and exhaustion that they can no longer recover from.

Both Hayley and Jeffrey describe their experiences as 'frogs in boiling water'.

Burnout has physiological and neurological components with measurable markers.

It affects brain anatomy, hormonal systems, immune function, cardiovascular health, and sleep architecture.

Those who say they cannot think clearly are not exaggerating; their brains and bodies have been measurably changed.

Burnout puts the body's core stress response system under the hammer.

Under normal conditions, stressors trigger cortisol release, which mobilizes energy and sharpens attention.

In chronic burnout, this system becomes dysregulated in measurable ways.

Early burnout often shows elevated cortisol, while advanced burnout shows a flattened response.

Swedish researchers have documented this dysregulation extensively in clinical burnout populations.

Cortisol regulates immune function, inflammation, blood sugar, sleep cycles, and cardiovascular function.

A landmark Swedish study found people with clinical burnout showed reduced grey matter density in the prefrontal cortex.

The same research found the amygdala was enlarged in burned-out individuals, with weakened connectivity.

Further studies show burnout's impact on sleep, cardiovascular disease, mood, and clear thinking.

Yet without clear diagnostic criteria, diagnosing and treating burnout remains difficult.

Valerie left her public service job due to burnout after a period of increased work pressure.

She couldn't cope and went to her boss, saying she couldn't keep doing it.

Valerie left, undertook an external secondment, and returned to her original workplace as COVID-19 hit.

After a COVID-19 infection and working alone at home, Valerie was crying every day.

She was starting to wake up in the middle of the night, obsessing about work.

Valerie quit her public service job and found a position in the private sector, but the stress continued.

She suffered brain fog, forgot instructions, and resorted to writing everything into notes on her phone.

Valerie was being a perfectionist, felt like she barely had time to breathe, and was sweating and awake all hours.

Her symptoms were physical, too: chronically low vitamin D, sky-high levels of bodily inflammation, and skin conditions.

After helping to organize a conference, Valerie was reprimanded by her boss for appearing disengaged.

Valerie spiralled further, and her boss suggested time off.

Valerie took early retirement but remains unclear what caused her high levels of stress and illness.

Was it burnout or something else? She wonders if her perfectionist personality meant she was the cause.

Research shows that Valerie is right to suspect her perfectionism makes her more at risk of burnout.

Longitudinal studies suggest certain personality traits can increase the risk of burnout.

But the data is also clear that, over the long term, personality makes a relatively small impact.

Workplace culture and expectations are far more significant in determining who burns out.

Workplace wellness

By framing burnout as an individual worker problem, organizations do not have to examine deeper systemic issues.

The employee, not the employer, is paying the price.

Kirsty Macdonald, a burnout coach, works with individuals and organizational leadership.

She says, 'Burnout is a collective problem, not an individual problem.'

Macdonald argues society is no longer moving at a 'human pace'.

People in workplaces designed to make big profits or poorly staffed end up running on a treadmill.

They can't keep up because they are humans, in a human body, and we are not meant to go at such an insane pace.

Noting the crossover of symptoms between burnout and depression, Macdonald wonders if some are prescribed antidepressants when their primary problem is a broken work environment.

So many people are taking medications to try to fit in with a workplace that is broken.

The medication critique is not about rejecting treatment for people who are genuinely depressed.

Antidepressants can be lifesaving, but medicalizing a systemic problem shifts the treatment and cost onto the individual.

South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argued that burnout is not a malfunction of the individual psyche.

It is the logical endpoint of a society that had replaced external prohibitions with an internal compulsion to perform.

The 21st century produces workers who tell themselves there is nothing they cannot achieve.

Han argues this is not liberation but a sophisticated form of oppression.

The exhausted, burned-out worker has not failed to cope with modernity; they have succeeded at it completely.

We owe cultural achievements to deep, contemplative attention, which is being displaced by hyperattention.

'Potato brain'

Jill experienced burnout working at a not-for-profit in Melbourne where she was the only paid staff member.

She describes the experience as 'potato brain', showing up but nothing useful.

Jill left the organization but took 18 months to feel recovered.

In any service work, if you are deeply connected to the cause, you are more at risk of burnout.

Jill scoffs at resilience training, mindfulness, wellness programs, and apps as a satisfactory measure to fix burnout.

The whole idea of someone being resilient is ridiculous, she says.

Jill sees restorative justice as a model for treating burnout, exploring new ways of working that may alter the workplace.

The lesson from teachers

The clearest example in Australia of what happens when governments and institutions accept burnout is in education.

Teacher burnout in Australia is not new, but it has reached a point where its consequences are too visible and costly.

Post-pandemic, we have seen widespread teacher shortages, student underachievement, and institutional knowledge walking out the door.

It's not an individual thing, says Professor Rebecca Collie, who has studied burnout in 2,500 Australian teachers.

Teacher burnout is a system thing that needs to be addressed.

Her research maps the three dimensions of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy.

The numbers are starting to come down, but they are still elevated.

The reason is not that teachers have become more resilient, but that governments have started to act.

What's been pleasing is that burnout is going down a little bit because of government efforts.

There has been some attention to this issue that wasn't there before.

Something had to give.

The National Teacher Workforce Action Plan is a federal government attempt to address burnout on a systemic level.

The plan seeks to reduce workloads, improve retention, and increase teacher support.

According to the plan, the key strategies focus on relieving administrative burdens, expanding mentorship, and providing financial incentives.

The plan is in its early days, but experts are hopeful it will address some of the conditions that cause teacher burnout.

Dr. Ben Arnold says teachers have higher levels of meaning in their work, but it comes at a cost.

They have higher workload, higher pace, higher cognitive demands, and very high emotional demands.

These include communication with parents, a greater amount of admin, and external testing.

Teachers often describe earlier decades in Australian education as a period of greater professional autonomy and public trust.

Increasing emphasis on performance measurement, accountability, external testing, and compliance has introduced additional pressures.

A strong sense of public service and commitment to students is often what keeps school systems functioning under pressure.

But it can also make teachers particularly vulnerable to burnout when workloads and expectations become unsustainable.

The lesson from education is not to wait until staffing crises become impossible to ignore.

It is that when institutions accept responsibility, when they stop treating burnout as a problem with employees and start treating it as a problem of working conditions, the numbers move.

We see there's a link between teacher burnout and student achievement.

It is a system thing.

A policy landscape catching up

Australia has begun to build a legal framework that places some of the burden of prevention back on employers.

The right to disconnect, enacted in August 2024, protects workers who refuse to respond to work communications outside working hours.

The legislation was criticized by some, but a 2022 Australia Institute survey found only 9% of respondents believed it would not positively affect their lives.

More significant are the reforms to Work Health and Safety Regulations requiring employers to proactively manage psychosocial risk.

In 2023, Court Services Victoria was prosecuted and fined for failing to manage psychological wellbeing risks.

Ben Arnold notes these legislative developments are meaningful but incomplete.

The sticking point now is: what are employers actually doing about it?

Workers' compensation schemes complicate the picture further.

All of the state compensation schemes have blown out, and it should be that the schemes are funded by employers.

But there's not yet a definitive risk assessment of what constitutes a workplace where burnout is likely to occur.

Psychological injury claims have increased significantly, and those claims are often complex and costly.

The limits of individual solutions

None of this means individual action is pointless.

Stolz identifies perfectionism as an internal risk factor that no amount of workplace reform will address alone.

It's not one over the other; perfectionism and workplace culture are both contributing factors.

Individual coping strategies have a ceiling.

Mindfulness, taking time off: these can keep burnout at bay, but if you are working in a toxic workplace, you need to address that.

Hayley Hughes believes her burnout was a type of anxiety: 'My burnout was on me.'

Since restructuring her relationship to work, Hayley says she has learned to read her own warning signs.

Jeffrey, years after his crisis, has built personal practices that he credits with preventing a recurrence.

But both acknowledge their recoveries depended on having something most burned-out workers do not: the economic cushion to make those choices.

The cleanest individual solutions to burnout are available only to those with financial security.

For everyone else, the question of systemic change is not a luxury; it's the only real option.