Boredom and burnout share many of the same symptoms and behaviors, so it’s easy to confuse the two. Thankfully, the picture is much clearer after you understand the differences, empowering you to make the changes that you need for a happier life.
Burnout, according to Psychology Today, is a “state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress.” It’s easy to burn out with life as busy as it is. Boredom can creep in, too, but it’s not as intense.
That’s why you need to be able to identify the difference so you can get it addressed. The earlier you can address it, the sooner you can get back to your old self.
So what are the signs that you’re burned out rather than just bored? Here are 8 to look out for.
1. You’ve Lost Passion For Things You Love
Burnout in one aspect of your life can dampen your passion and excitement in other areas of your life. You may find that you no longer get excited about work, hobbies, or passions that you used to love, and this reflects in your behavior. Instead of looking forward to something you used to find happiness and fulfillment from, you may feel overcome with dread or like it’s unfulfilling work.
You can still experience interest if you’re just bored, instead of dreading the activity. In that scenario, it may be that you just need to spice things up or pursue a different interest until your passion returns. It’s good to set down your consistent hobbies once in a while and come back to them later. That downtime is healthy because it helps you maintain interest, and you can come back to your passion with fresh eyes.
2. You Avoid People And Activities You Previously Enjoyed
There are different levels of avoidance behavior when it comes to people and activities. Sometimes, you just don’t want to be around people or do the things you used to like. Instead of finding them refreshing, you may feel too emotionally taxed to socialize. Even extroverts can run into this when they are feeling burnt out.
My previous partner, Cathy, went from extremely extroverted and social to being so exhausted that she avoided social interaction altogether. Always social, she rarely had any downtime between work and her family. She struggled with burnout until she took a couple of weeks off from everything to reset. From then on, she regularly had to schedule a reset into her life once a year.
If you’re just bored, you’ll still want to participate. You might just need something a little different, like meeting new people and trying new things. Some people are easily bored by things and need to spice things up more regularly. In burnout, however, you may reject socialization altogether, angrily at times.
3. You Start Feeling Physical Symptoms
Burnout is the result of an extended amount of stress. Extended stress causes your body to produce a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol puts your mind and body in a state to handle a short-term bout of stress. Short-term is the keyword. Elevated amounts of cortisol can have negative effects, the longer it’s present in your body. That’s why it’s so important to avoid unnecessary stress.
Health care experts at Kaiser Permanente inform us that cortisol can be responsible for numerous physical symptoms. For example:
– You may be sick more often because cortisol suppresses your immune system.
– You may gain weight because cortisol tells your body to store fat instead of burning it.
– Elevated blood pressure because cortisol keeps your body in fight-or-flight mode.
– An inability to get quality rest despite sleeping enough because cortisol disrupts sleep.
Boredom doesn’t cause cortisol production. It doesn’t cause you to feel constantly on edge, disrupt your sleep, or mess with your immune system. Instead, it just indicates that you need some different stimulation.
4. You Feel Constantly Exhausted Even After You’ve Rested
Burnout is a state of stress despite the difficulty of not feeling much of anything. Stress makes it hard to sleep, so what you will find is that you are not only tired, but you also experience the effects of a regular lack of sleep. That is, people who aren’t sleeping aren’t getting enough time to replenish the mood-balancing chemicals in their brain that let them function the next day.
It can feel like depression, where you are just constantly tapped out of energy and the ability to feel any emotions other than burnout and emptiness. It can feel like mental and emotional exhaustion as well as physical exhaustion. Obviously, that’s not a good mental state to be in since it can spiral into self-fulfilling behaviors.
That is, the exhaustion leads to a lack of sleep, which leads to feeling the effects of burnout, which leads to exhaustion, which leads to a lack of sleep, and around and around it goes.
5. You May Feel Like Nothing You Do Matters
For all the hurtful aspects of burnout, it’s hard to struggle through the feelings that nothing you do truly matters. You may feel like you can’t work hard enough, try hard enough, or socialize enough, and so you start to behave accordingly. It feels like you can’t feel a sense of pride or fulfillment in anything that you do, so why bother?
When you look at what you do, you can’t see anything other than how much you couldn’t get done or could have done better. It causes a deep sense of inadequacy. In comparison, boredom makes you feel lukewarm, but not necessarily bad.
Boredom doesn’t feel like worthlessness. Instead, boredom can make you feel demotivated to do things, but they don’t cause you to question your capability. You should still be able to get the activity done without issue, even if you’re less than impressed with the emotions you feel when you’re finished.
6. You Struggle To Make Decisions And Focus
Burnout overloads your brain with stress. The brain needs rest to function optimally. Discover Magazine explains that when your brain is overloaded and you’re not getting rest, your focus and ability to make decisions are going to plummet. Not only that, but it may also get worse where your mind is unable to connect thoughts together. You may feel scatter-brained about things that you used to be able to handle just fine, and this shows up in your behavior.
Boredom doesn’t stress you nearly as much as burnout does. It doesn’t affect your mental ability to the point where you are incapable of standard operation. Instead, you’ll feel a lack of desire or fulfillment in doing the activities, but you won’t be incapable of focusing on and doing them.
7. You Get Angry And Irritable Over Small Things
As mentioned, the brain replenishes a lot of the mood-balancing chemicals that it uses throughout the day during the deepest stages of sleep. So, if you’re not sleeping deeply, you can run into the issue where your mind just can’t keep up with the stresses and small annoyances of life. It may also be that you spend so much time and energy maintaining your cool during major stressful times that you don’t have the emotional cushion to handle the minor ones. And as a result, you find yourself easily angered by trivial things.
Boredom doesn’t cause you to get irritated and behave angrily to that degree. Instead, it often creates a more lethargic feeling where you just don’t care, rather than getting angry. Your brain is not stimulated properly, so you’re not getting the correct emotional responses out of the situations that you’re encountering. You may not get any reactions at all.
8. You React Strongly To Demands On Your Time
Another significant difference between burnout and boredom is a reduced ability to cope with demands.
A bored person may think in more casual terms about not wanting to do a particular thing. You may find yourself thinking, “Mm. I don’t feel like doing that. I don’t want to do that,” without much emotion behind it. It feels more like an everyday situation that you’re navigating, that is just “whatever.”
Burnout, on the other hand, is likely to elicit strong emotions and behavioral responses about not wanting to do a particular thing. Instead of the more casual feelings of boredom, it may immediately spiral into anger and resentment that you need to spend time on a particular thing. That, of course, isn’t healthy and will often explode out into your life and onto the people around you.
Final Thoughts… Burnout, Boredom, Or Depression?
Should you be a person familiar with depression, you may notice that this reads like a symptom list of depression. In fact, there are a lot of overlapping symptoms, signs, and behaviors between burnout and depression. Burnout can cause depression, and vice versa.
Boredom, on the other hand, does not cause depression. Although boredom and depression are easy to confuse.
Boredom may cause some neutral moods, but it’s not going to have the same crushing weight that burnout and depression have. If you do feel like you’re experiencing that crushing weight and it’s persisted for a long time, it would be a good idea to talk to a therapist about what you’re feeling.
