753: The Quiet Kind of Career Burnout: Three Forces Driving Disconnection at Work (And What to Do About Them)

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: 83% of corporate professionals report burnout right now. Among women in senior leadership, that number jumps to 43%, compared to 31% for men, a gap that has more than doubled since 2019. Crazy, right? The people behind those numbers, well, they aren't falling apart. They are performing. They're still delivering.

[00:00:23] They're still holding it all together somehow, while something inside them that used to care about this work has quietly disappeared, and most of them couldn't tell you when it happened. They look like Lisa. Lisa was overwhelmed. She wasn't breaking down, though. She just stopped feeling anything about the work at all.

[00:00:43] She didn't care anymore, and that's the version of burnout the data is actually measuring right now, the quiet kind, the kind that doesn't match the picture, the kind that keeps going because nobody around you, including you, recognizes it for what it is.

[00:00:58] I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen to Your Career, where we share real conversations and real strategies to help you design work and the life that you actually love.

[00:01:09] We've been talking to people who felt exactly what you might be feeling right now, and we've been doing this since 2012. The one thing that separates people from those who stayed burned out and the people who finally found work that fit them is that they understood what they were actually dealing with.

[00:01:27] Lisa spent seven years as a research project manager at a major university, a role that looked like a good deal on paper, was, you know, pretty low pressure, it was flexible, and she had a lot of autonomy to structure her own work, and from the outside, she was pretty successful. But underneath that narrative, Lisa's energy was quietly being drained.

[00:01:50] Turns out is because she didn't fit the traditional picture of burnout. Lisa couldn't name how she was feeling, and because she couldn't name it, she stayed in her position for years, forcing herself well beyond the point where work had stopped feeling fulfilling. You might look at this and think, "Well, maybe this is burnout."

[00:02:08] Turns out it's not. The psychological term for what Lisa was experiencing it's boreout. Boreout is a state of chronic intense boredom at work, and is caused by being severely under-challenged or underutilized, or when you lack meaningful tasks. While burnout happens when you're overstimulated and the demands of your work exceed your capacity to meet them, boreout is actually the opposite.

[00:02:32] When work is so understimulating, you disconnect from what you're actually capable of and slowly go numb. Now, here's the confusing part, because many people feel like, "Hey, I'm left exhausted and empty," and that's true of burnout as well. Boreout is almost never talked about because it doesn't look like suffering from the outside.

[00:02:52] It looks like having a good, stable job that no longer piques your interest, but the longer boreout goes unnamed, the harder it becomes to actually do anything about it. The key, of course, to understanding what to do about it is we first have to understand what's driving it, and it really comes down to three different forces, and they're quietly reshaping how work feels day to day.

[00:03:14] The first one, work stopped requiring you. For a long time, burnout was about having too much to do But for many people now, the problem is the opposite. The work no longer demands your full ability. You're not being stretched, you're not being challenged, you're managing systems, you're sitting in meetings, you're filling gaps that shouldn't exist in the first place.

[00:03:35] Instead of doing meaningful, engaging work, your time gets consumed by fragmented tasks that don't require your best thinking. And when your role stops feeling like it requires you, you slowly stop bringing your full self to it, not because you don't care, but because there's nothing there to meet you in the first place.

[00:03:52] Force number two, the meaning completely disappeared. Recognition isn't just about praise. It's about knowing what you're doing actually matters. And when that disappears, when your work feels invisible or interchangeable or disconnected from any real impact, then something really starts to shift. You kind of just stop seeing the point after a while.

[00:04:14] So even if the workload is manageable or the job looks good on paper, it starts to feel empty, and the emptiness is a very different kind of exhaustion. But let's talk about a third force and the way that this shows up, and that happens when you stay longer than you should. Bore-out doesn't push you out.

[00:04:30] It actually often keeps you in because from the outside, nothing looks wrong. The role's stable, the expectations are reasonable, you're probably working with good people. You tell yourself that you should be grateful. You tell yourself, "Yeah, you know what? This isn't that bad." And so you stay long past the point where the work actually fits you.

[00:04:48] In many ways, you've outgrown it. But the longer you stay in this space, under challenged, under engaged, and disconnected, the harder it becomes to imagine something different. This is the part where you start to disconnect from yourself. This is the part where you start to even blame yourself like, "Why do I want something different? This is a good situation."

[00:05:08] Here's the part most people don't talk about. First of all, bore-out isn't a term that's widely used yet. Hopefully, we can change that. And it doesn't just exist on its own. If left unaddressed, it can eventually turn into a form of burnout. Because when you spend enough time disconnected from your work, when you're not challenged and not growing and not fueled by meaning, it starts to eventually take the same toll as being overwhelmed constantly with overstimulation.

[00:05:33] And of course, we already acknowledged that the result is the same. You're already exhausted, you're already still depleted on a daily basis. You're still questioning everything. It's just happening for very different reasons, and this is why so many people can't really tell what they're actually experiencing.

[00:05:48] From the inside, boreout and burnout actually feel very, very similar, but underneath, they come from two very different places, two different causes, and if you don't know which one you're dealing with, you keep trying to solve the problem wrong or you don't realize that it's a problem at all. Or even worse, what happens is people will really start to blame themselves because it feels like they're in this great situation, and why are they wanting something different?

[00:06:14] We talked about the three forces that drive burnout. We talked about a couple of different kinds of burnout. We talked about the difference between burnout and boreout. I think what's important to recognize is that all this shows up in very different ways. The main driver might not even be workload anymore.

[00:06:30] It might be cognitive fragmentation. It could be disappearing recognition. It could be that you're continuing to push through, but the interesting thing is pushing through is not gonna work because the forces producing the burnout haven't changed. Nobody we've ever worked with has found the right path by accident, and nobody found it by searching harder.

[00:06:48] They found it by getting clear first. The quiet version of burnout survives by staying unnamed, and as soon as you name it, once you know which kind you're dealing with, you finally know what to do about it. If you wanna go deeper, I wrote a book about this exact set of things, this exact process. The same process, by the way, that helped Lisa and thousands of other people make the change.

[00:07:09] It's called Happen To Your Career: An Unconventional Approach to Career Change and Meaningful Work. So you can actually get it any place where books are sold. However, we have, for a limited time, the audiobook available for free. You can go and grab it at happentoyourcareer.com/audiobook, and that link is in the description in the show notes.

[00:07:28] I just want you to know that the work you're probably looking for actually exists. The question isn't whether or not it's out there. The question is whether you know what you're actually looking for.