The Gospel and Burnout
“Our Desks Were Never Meant To Be Our Altars”
Glenn Wishnew | Est. 9-10 minutes
Herbert J. Freudenberger lived an extraordinary life. He was born in Frankfurt Germany in 1926, the son of Jewish parents. When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, Freudenberger witnessed his grandmother being beaten by SS officers. At just 7 years old, he fled Germany – alone – on a long sojourn through multiple cities and countries to American shores with a false passport and a single suitcase. Once he arrived in New York, he supported himself for months before finding a relative nearby who sheltered and raised him.
Herbert’s early helplessness shaped his adult vocation. During the 1970’s, at the peak of a successful career in psychiatry, he decided to open up a pro-bono clinic for poor substance abusers in New York City. Freudenberger spent 10 to 12 hours during the day in his private practice, and then went over to the free clinic to work until midnight or later.
The long days took their toll. Freudenberger noticed that he began to see his patients as objects and not people. What began as altruistic and meaningful became cold and lifeless. And he wasn’t alone: his fellow physicians became emotionally deadened by their service in his clinic. Physically, they suffered from sleepless nights, regular headaches, stomach problems, and shortness of breath. Freudenberger, the award-winning psychiatrist, labelled their combination of psychological cynicism and physical exhaustion: burnout syndrome.
What is Burnout?
Burnout is not mere tiredness or discouragement or general malaise. According to the World Health Organization, burnout syndrome is characterized by three symptoms: physical exhaustion, a chronically negative attitude, and a perceived (or real) drop in work performance.
If you’re burned out, you feel emptied out. The extreme demands placed on your energy, strength and resources have begun to have a numbing effect. There’s not enough internal energy to meet your external demands anymore. “You’re missing deadlines, you’re frustrated, you’re maybe irritable with your colleagues,” says UNC researcher Jeannette Bennet.
Burnout is dangerous. Arthur Brooks of Harvard Business School notes that “sustained burnout can lead to systemic inflammation, immunosuppression, metabolic syndrome (and its relative obesity), cardiovascular disease, and even premature death.”
And we’re seeing it everywhere. Jennifer Moss reported in a The Harvard Business Review article that more people are burned out today than ever before. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that in November 2024, more workers were seeking new jobs than in the past 10 years (that includes years dubbed “The Great Resignation”). “Job satisfaction has fallen to its lowest level in recent years as employees feel more stuck—and frustrated—where they are, according to Gallup, whose quarterly surveys are widely viewed as a bellwether of workplace sentiment.”
The epidemic encompasses multiple industries, from patient-caring therapists to spreadsheet-making bankers. Today in America there are shortages of nurses, teachers, pharmacists and more – all attributed to post-pandemic burn out. Even employers in higher-paying professions such as finance – known for its brutal schedules and high-stress conditions – are reconfiguring their approach in light of widespread stimulant abuse, generational changes and the tragic death of Leo Leonikas, a 35 year old associate who died of a blood clot after consecutive weeks working over 100 hours.
When Goldman Sachs presses the brake pedal, you know it’s bad out there.
Causes of Burnout
The Maslach Burnout Inventory, created in 1981, remains the most respected psychological tool for measuring burnout (you can take the test online here). The leading researcher and namesake Christina Maslach identified 6 primary contributors to burnout.
Workload – In psychological terms, burnout is caused by chronic negative stress. So if your workplace brings stress and you’re there more than 60 hours a week, do the math.
Values - When employees are asked to violate their personal values, the cognitive dissonance takes its toll. Executive coach Candi Wiens once worked with an executive whose CEO pivoted away from a long-term strategy of organic growth toward a new strategy of aggressive acquisitions that often came with mass layoffs. Months of acquiring and firing burned the executive out and she looked for another job.
Reward - Human behavior runs on positive reinforcement. Before the industrial revolution, the reward for work was visible: your time spent shucking corn was rewarded by an evening spent eating it. Today, excel spreadsheets do not offer the same tangible validation, so managers fill the void with money and motivation. When the rewards don’t equal the sacrifices, people detach from work.
Control - The Stanford organizational-behavior professor Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in his book Dying for a Paycheck, “If through their actions people cannot predictably and significantly affect what happens to them, they are going to stop trying. Why expend effort when the results of that effort are uncontrollable, rendering the effort fruitless?”
Fairness - Nobody likes a boss who plays favorites even if you’re the favorite, apparently.
Community - In a recent McKinsey study, the number one cause of burnout by an overwhelming margin was “toxic workplace behavior,” which they define broadly as “anything that leads to employees feeling unvalued, belittled, or unsafe. This can include unfair or demeaning treatment; non-inclusive behavior; sabotaging; cutthroat competition; abusive management; and unethical behavior from leaders or coworkers.” In short, being a jerk comes with consequences.
Solutions to Burnout
So far, we’ve trafficked in areas of consensus. Burnout is a real thing, its presence is widespread, and there are identifiable causes to it. The question of how to solve the problem is the dividing line in the conversation. There’s two camps.
Camp 1 believes that burnout is a problem for individual employees to solve.
Find a job that offers the optimal amount of stress, a midpoint between boredom and burnout, where you are “calm, yet engaged, relaxed, yet fully alert.” Ask yourself what can you “delegate, de-emphasize, or discontinue” to reduce your workload? Your schedule should reserve space between your life and your job so that they don’t drag each other down. When work infringes upon your most intimate relationships or your most basic needs, build some boundaries: take vacation, maintain a regular sleeping pattern, eat 3 meals a day, and for god sakes – silence your phone while you’re at the dinner table. These behaviors reinforce a “diversified identity portfolio” where work isn’t the only thing worth living for. As Derek Thompson says, “Our desks were never meant to be our altars.”
If camp 1 believes the responsibility to solve burnout lies with individual employees, camp 2 focuses its attention on the culture surrounding work and the policies that could change it.
According to Amelia Nagalski, the author of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, “Burnout begins with unceasing demands and unmeetable goals—the kinds that employers thrive on as they squeeze their employees not just for their time and labor, but for their obedience, their humanity, and their souls.”
Employers will continue to squeeze like ferocious anacondas unless legislators prevent them by establishing “rational and fair labor practices.” For this camp, the material and the political are more important than the psychological. Olga Khazan writes “Yoga hour is great…but child-care credits and flexible or reduced working hours would be even better.” If Washington refuses to get involved, Nagalski admonishes workers to detach from work, to “quiet quit,”and adopt more life-giving outlets to meet their existential needs.
“For folks who got their sense of meaning and purpose from work, quiet quitting might come with a sense of disillusionment, loss, and grief. But the good news is that all of us can get a sense of meaning from a variety of activities, even though capitalism and grind culture tell us that we’re lazy if we don’t commit our whole selves to our work.”
Let’s state the obvious: both camps offer valid points and they aren’t mutually exclusive. Individuals get burnt out because they place work at the very center of their lives, above other things which bring more satisfaction than a paycheck can deliver. That distorted workaholism is fueled by a society that equates social status with professional success and by companies that prefer bottom lines to human beings. The burnt out individuals, the dominant culture, and the profit-hungry organizations all work together, like an infection running through an immunocompromised population whose leaders haven’t recommended basic hygiene to their citizens.
Addressing the problem holistically then requires going beyond individual decisions, cultural narratives and collective policies to the realm of purpose – the region of motivation. What is work for? What should motivate us as we pull into the parking lot on a cloudy and cold January morning?
The Purpose of Work
The theologian Martin Luther said that your work exists to bring glory to God and love to your neighbor.
The natural response is to ask what’s in it for me?
Answer: The lens for identifying a toxic job, the freedom to leave it, and the motivation to persevere through a difficult one.
Working for God’s glory offers a clear purpose, which brings clear vision. If God’s glory is your purpose, then a job that threatens your marriage is not one you are called to. God is the Lord of your marriage, your work, your mind and your health. He is the integrative thread holding it all together. Remembering that your health, mind, relationships, work and faith are all woven together in Him offers clear boundaries and safe guardrails for self-examination. You now possess a lens to identify when a job has become toxic.
Many of the burnt out know these things intuitively but they refuse to change because they’re work-aholics. They return to the source of the problem to remedy the problem itself. Their career is the basis of their self-worth, which leaves them feeling worthless because a career cannot hold that kind of weight. So they work more, aching to feel worthy again. Rinse and repeat.
If they believe the gospel with their whole heart, the good news that their sense of worth is vouchsafed in God, that His eyes are the only eyes in the universe that truly matter and He sees them as worthy of His son’s life, they’ll have the freedom to break those chains. They’ll no longer work from a place of inner exhaustion, but from a place of deep rest. The gospel-filled Christian is no longer fighting for her worth, but serving from her fullness. Regardless of how the performance review goes, God sees her to the depths and loves her to the skies.
The deeper that message gets into the core of who you are, the more you gladly place work under God’s lordship and service to others. Your Monday-Friday won’t be either meaningless labor for a paycheck or exhausting slavery for a resume. Instead, you’ll work hard “as unto the Lord,” and you’ll be content living like Jesus, “looking not into your own interests but into the interests of others.”
At the very least, you’ll have less headaches and more sleep, less pressure and more laughter, less objectifying your colleagues and more loving your neighbors. You’ll make the Lord of the Universe and Herbert Freudenberger very proud.
