My experience of burnout involved disengaging from my work (and from reality in general). I lost the energy and will to continue doing something that I wasn’t much enjoying, that was taking up almost all my time, for which I was earning less than the minimum wage, and for which I did not feel valued. It felt like a defeat or a surrender: I gave up because the constant, all-consuming to succeed in the face of long odds against success no longer seemed worth it. To have continued would have risked more damage to my mental and physical health. (That makes it sound more a conscious decision than it was: I found myself giving up, rather than made a clear decision to give up.)

There is an evolutionary explanation of depression that is also about the value of giving up when confronted by overwhelming odds against success. Why stand and fight (for status, money, sex, pleasure, or anything else desirable) when to do so almost certainly risks defeat and potentially serious damage? Depression may be the body’s way of telling someone to retreat, to accept the futility of the struggle, and to hide away so as no longer to draw attention to oneself and risk further injury. Thus, depression may, at its core, be a sensible survival strategy: it makes no sense for a weakened individual to continue fighting when defeat is almost certain and quite likely catastrophic. Knowing when to rein in and suppress desires to avoid repeated disappointment and defeat would seem to be important.

That depression may have an evolutionary purpose does not mean that it works well in practice. To retreat and accept defeat may be the sensible responses that lie at the heart of depression; but clinical depression (at least as we understand it in the modern world) invariably involves an over-response in which our stress systems go into overdrive, often resulting in the inability to perform even basic functions. Thus, depression may make some evolutionary sense as a survival strategy, but it is one that is debilitating, excessive and highly imperfect. It is often rational to accept defeat in the pursuit of a goal; it is irrational to feel totally defeated in every area of one’s life.

Be that as it may, burnout seems to me very closely related to depression—and perhaps it is a variation of it. For burnout follows (as least as I have experienced it) not simply from overwork, but from the experience that no matter how hard one works, one’s goals (of success, of being valued, of enjoying work, of finding meaning and fulfilment, of earning enough to do more than scrape by) are never attained. And if we fail or are unable to pick up on and respond to the early signs of stress, then eventually we become overloaded by stress and breakdown occurs. Similarly, depression also seems to be a failure or inability (often through no fault of the individual) to prevent our stress system from going into overdrive.

In an earlier post on burnout I noted that my burnout felt oddly pleasurable: giving up felt like a release and liberation. I ought to qualify that: it was not so much pleasure as it was a temporary and somewhat illusory reduction in immediate stress. Overall, burnout is a horrible and destructive experience (which is not to say that it cannot ultimately lead to somewhere good). Likewise, depression is a horrible experience. But even with depression there is often a welcome feeling of release. Lying in bed rather than getting up and facing a stressful world can, for example, feel oddly pleasant and necessary, for in the short term it is an escape from or an avoidance of stress. Long term, of course, this is a debilitating and self-defeating response.

I regard neither burnout nor depression in a positive way. At the same time, I refuse to accept that they are wholly irrational and negative responses to a difficult situation. It may be right to consider them as illnesses; but perhaps our experience of them amounts to our endurance of our body and mind dealing with an underlying problem that needs addressing (much as the sickness we feel during a common cold derives from our body’s efforts to defeat the virus).

Above all, I am seeking to make sense of my burnout. And if burnout is a close cousin of, or even just a type of depression, then it would likely be something I can understand better and, more importantly, something that I can respond to more effectively.