What is Burnout? Fish, Dumbledore, and the Fish Bowl

From my time as a consultant and throughout many years studying psychology at university, there was one term I seemed to hear everywhere:

"I'm so burnt out."

Whether it was colleagues, clients, managers, students, friends, or the latest workplace wellbeing article, the term appeared constantly.

Burnout. Burnout. Burnout.

Everybody seems to be using the word, but what does it actually mean?

In this article, I wanted to share a perspective from an Organisational Psychology Registrar on why it is important to understand not only the symptoms of burnout, but also the factors that cause it.

Much of the advice surrounding burnout focuses on helping individuals manage the symptoms: reducing stress, taking leave, improving sleep, exercising more, setting boundaries, or practicing self-care.

Whilst these strategies can certainly be helpful, they often don’t address the underlying causes of burnout itself.

This article is designed to bridge this gap.

Firstly, What is Burnout?

​Burnout consists of three different aspects:

i) Feeling emotionally exhausted or fatigued:

Often clients describe feeling a type of tired that no amount of sleep seems to fix. They wake up fatigued, they go to bed fatigued, as though their battery is never fully recharged. Others describe feeling emotionally depleted.

ii) Increased cynicism towards work, or emotional distancing or detachment:

Put simply, we may not care about work the way one used to. Previous projects that felt meaningful begin to feel pointless. You might notice a decline in your motivation to do things. Often clients describe feeling increasingly frustrated, irritable, or emotionally withdrawn or disconnected from their work and colleagues.

iii) A feeling of reduced professional effectiveness:

Burnout often leads to people feeling less confident or effective in their roles. Tasks that were once easy begin to feel like a challenge, we may feel unsure about doing things 'right'. Productivity may suffer. There can be a growing sense that no matter how much effort is invested, it is never enough. Many describe feeling as though they are constantly falling behind, despite working harder than ever.​

In other words, burnout can feel like running on empty.

We are not robots. Our personal lives will affect our work, and our work stressors will affect our personal life. In the case of burnout, it is rare that I see burnout stay at work or within the office.

The energy that once went towards relationships, exercise, hobbies, or simply enjoying your evenings can become consumed by recovering from the workday.

You might notice becoming less patient with loved ones. We may be more snappy, more grumpy. Withdrawing from friends and family is common. We may lose interest in hobbies or feel too tired to exercise, cook, go on walks, or even complete everyday tasks.

Over time, life can begin to revolve around getting through work rather than living beyond it.

Burnout Is Not Something That Happens Overnight

Burnout builds slowly over time. Typically over the course of months, sometimes years.

As projects pile up, we at first might try to 'white-knuckle' things for a while. We stay back a little longer, skip breaks, work through lunch, answer emails on weekends, or work after hours. This is sustainable for a time, and our intention is understandable. We're trying to catch up or get back on top of things.

When done for months on end, this often creates a vicious cycle. The more exhausted we become, the more energy it takes to achieve the same amount of work. To compensate for this, we invest even more time and effort into work. Often clients, particuarly in the early stages of burnout, will 'double down' and work longer and harder hours to meet the demands of work.

We dont give ourselves time to recover. Every day, week to week, month to month, the pressure slowly builds up. At some point, the shift in weight begins to affect us.

You Are Not Burnt Out Because You Are Not Strong Enough: Burnout Is Rarely An Individual Problem

It's really common people see themselves as the problem when they are burnt out. It comes up in sessions in the form of questions like “Why am I not resilient enough?” or statements like “I should have managed my time better”, “I should be able to work those hours", "I should be able to handle that workload," or my personal favourite “Everyone else seems to be coping fine, so it must be me."

I often see this assumption that we are the problem. That we are experience burnout because we didnt take enough care care of ourselves outside of work. We should have gone to gym more, more jogging, more morning walks. We should have spent less time in our phones and spent more time investing in ourselves.

I hate to break it to you, but if you are experiencing burnout, the research tends to suggest it is not a failure in you that is the problem. It is not that you are not enough, or not doing enough. For the perfectionists reading, please be kinder to yourself.

To demonstrate what I mean, you'll need to forgive me for a moment. I want to speak about wizards and fish.

Bear with me :)

Burnout, Dumbledore, Fish, and the Fishbowl

During the final years of my master's degree, I had a supervisor who reminded me a lot of Dumbledore. He was a professor, he'd been around forever, knew everything, and he was old. He retired in my final year of uni.

There was one lesson he shared that has stayed with me.

It was about fish and fishbowls.

He posed a simple question: If your fish keep becoming unwell or dying, is the problem with the fish, or is it with the fishbowl? I want us to imagine our work if our fishbowl, the environment we are in for many days of our lives, and that we are fish.

We Are More Like Fish Than We Think: Burnout As a FishBowl Problem

Burnout is an outcome of the interaction between an individual and their workplace environment.

In english?

  Burnout happens when work asks more of us than we have to give for too long.

In terms of fish: why would I blame the fish for not thriving if there is something wrong with the fishbowl?

For The Nerds Reading, Here Is Some Burnout Research Cue the Job-Demands Resources Model (AKA the “JD-R”)

The Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) Model is one of the leading frameworks for understanding why people either thrive or burnout at work.

In our jobs, we're trying to balance two things.

i) Job Demands: the physical, psychological, social, or organisational aspects of work that require sustained effort or energy.

ii) Job Resources: The physical, psychological, social, or organisational factors that help us meet those demands, achieve our work goals, learn, grow, and recover.

The definitions are deliberately broad, as they need to be. The things that affect people at work vary wildly from person to person, and workplace to workplace.

In essence, at work we are constantly trying to strike a balance between the two for us to feel like work is sustainable.

However, when our Job Demands consistently outweigh the Job Resources available to us to meet them, people begin to burn out.

Common Types of Job Demands

High Workload: Simply put, there's too much work and not enough time, energy, or people to get it done. The hours are too long, there is too much to keep track of, too many meetings. Too many excel spreadsheets.

Time Pressure: Urgency and time pressure are physically and emotionally draining. Tight deadlines, frequent interruptions, and the feeling that you're always racing against the clock make it difficult to ever switch off. I heard the term "marathon sprint" thrown around during my time consulting.

Emotional Demands: Some jobs require us to absorb a lot emotionally. Think emergency response services. People who deal with trauma as part of their work. This can also be supporting distressed clients, dealing with conflict, managing difficult conversations.

Workplace Conflict: Ongoing tension, bullying, poor communication, difficult colleagues, or toxic leadership can make even a manageable workload feel exhausting.​

Low Autonomy: Feeling like you are being micromanaged or have little control over how you do your job. When every decision is made for you, work becomes more stressful, or we can't participate in the decision-making process.

Role Ambiguity: Not knowing exactly what's expected of you, what success looks like, or where your responsibilities begin and end creates uncertainty and unnecessary stress.

Role Conflict: Being pulled in different directions by competing priorities or receiving mixed messages from different people. It can feel like no matter what you do, someone is going to be unhappy.

Job Insecurity: Not knowing whether your job, income, or role is secure can create a constant background level of stress that's difficult to escape.​​

Common Types of Job Resources

Autonomy: The opposite of being micro managed. Having a reasonable amount of choice and control over how you do your work. Feeling trusted to make decisions. To be able to 'buy in' to the work. This often helps make work feel more manageable.

Supportive Leadership: Having a manager who has your back. Someone who listens, communicates clearly, provides support when it's needed, and genuinely cares about your wellbeing.

Role Clarity: Knowing what's expected of you, what your priorities are, and what success actually looks like removes a huge amount of unnecessary stress.

Supportive Colleagues: Working alongside people who are willing to help, share the load, and support one another makes difficult days much easier to get through.

Constructive Feedback: Receiving feedback that helps you learn and improve, rather than only hearing from someone when something has gone wrong.

Recognition: People want to know that what they do matters. Feeling recognised and appreciated often goes a long way towards maintaining motivation and wellbeing.

Learning and Development Opportunities: Having opportunities to develop new skills, take on meaningful challenges, and continue growing in your career helps people stay engaged.

Meaningful Work: Feeling like your work has purpose. That we aren't just shoveling paper from one pile to another. Even demanding jobs can be more sustainable when we believe what we're doing genuinely matters.

Feeling Informed and Included in Decision-Making: Feeling heard. When employees are involved in decisions that affect their work, they're more likely to feel engaged, respected, and invested in the organisation. No one enjoys being told of a massive top-down restructure that they have not even heard of nor allowed to give feedback for.

Psychological Safety: Feeling safe enough to be human at work. It's knowing you can ask for help, admit when you've made a mistake, challenge an idea, or say "I don't know" without worrying about being criticised or punished.

Burnout Recovery Is More Complex Than We Think

I just want to quickly remind ourselves again, we need to think of ourselves as fish. Dumbledore knows all. Burnout recovery is more complex than we think. If burnout was simply a matter of being tired, the solution would be straightforward.

Sleep. Take a holiday. Rest for a few weeks. Here's the problem. Taking a holiday will help temporarily reduce stress. But the effects of taking a holiday tend to fade after 3 days of returning to work (de Bloom, 2018). Thinking in terms of fish, we have taken the fish out of the fishbowl for a time, only to put it back in the same fishbowl a couple weeks later. What do we expect to happen to the fish?

The fish becomes unwell again.

Now compare that with the growing research on four-day work weeks. Reducing our working days is associated with sustained improvements in burnout, stress, wellbeing, and job satisfaction (4 Day Week Global et al., 2023).

That extra day, allows us to build a more sustainable life. We have the time to recover. To engage in the self care we need, to get around to all the things that have been building up that we have been putting off. To reach out to friends and family. To have an extra day to sleep in.

We have time to clean the fishtank.

Burnout recovery is about building a life that feels sustainable, both inside and outside of work.

For effective burnout recovery, temporary relief isn’t enough.

We need to clean the fishbowl. At work, we need to identify and address the work-related factors that contributed to the burnout in the first place.

Not every strategy will apply to every person, but recovery frequently involves things like:

• Setting healthier boundaries around work.

• Learning to say "no" without guilt.

• Having honest conversations about workload.

• Clarifying expectations and responsibilities.

• Delegating where possible.

• Building greater psychological safety within teams.

• Increasing autonomy and control over your work.

• Developing more sustainable ways of working.

• Improving recovery outside work (sleep, exercise, relationships, hobbies).

• Reconnecting with values and meaning in work.

• Addressing perfectionism or people-pleasing that keeps us overextending ourselves.

• Working with managers to redesign aspects of the role where possible.

• Sometimes... recognising that the healthiest option is changing jobs altogether.

Every one of those changes either reduces demands or increases our available resources.

That's not a coincidence.

Burnout recovery is complex because it isn't just about taking a holiday, practicing mindfulness, or doing more yoga. It often involves changing systems, habits, relationships, leadership, boundaries, and workplace design.

The goal isn't to become someone who can tolerate an unsustainable job indefinitely. The goal is to create a way of working that is sustainable in the first place.

References:

de Bloom, J. (2018). All I want for Christmas is… recovery – Changes in employee affective well-being before and after vacation. Work & Stress, 32(4), 313–333.

4 Day Week Global, Autonomy, and researchers from the University of Cambridge and Boston College (2023). UK Four-Day Week Pilot Programme Results.