Emotional Burnout in Relationships: Causes, Signs, and How to Recover Together
written by Micah Brown
There is a difference between stress and burnout. Stress can lead to burnout, and burnout can lead to more stress. They live together in destructive harmony, where stress leads you onto the path of burnout. It’s important to note that not all stress leads to burnout. We encounter daily stresses that don’t pile onto us and wash down the drain at the end of the day. But some stresses don’t simply go away at the end of the day and that build up day over day until one day, you find yourself in a state of burnout, barely making it through your days, exhausted all the time, and feeling as though your entire world is falling apart like a sandcastle being washed away by the ocean.
And that’s how burnout can feel. You’re the sandcastle, and the stresses that surround you are the ocean. They eat away at your base until you simply topple into the surf to be washed away. Other people have described it as “emotional drowning” or even “emotional death.”
What is Burnout?
The stereotypical view of burnout is the person who has thrown in the towel and has nothing left to get through their days. You may picture these individuals locked in their rooms, sitting in a corner, or staring blankly at nothing. While this can be the result of burnout, it more often looks like somebody who goes to work, but is struggling more than they used to. A person who does not show up for family dinners, who may spend their time alone between responsibilities and move more slowly.
There is a huge crossover between burnout and depression, but they are separate things. Burnout may create a depressive episode, but depression isn’t the cause of burnout.
How many did you check? If 3 or more feel true regularly, it’s time to pause and care for yourself.
What Causes Burnout?
The primary cause of burnout is extended exposure to stressors. This doesn’t mean getting mad at the red light on your way to the office or feeling stressed about being late because the subway broke down. Consistent stress can be working in an environment where your boss is constantly hounding you; being in a relationship where you are constantly picked apart with verbal abuse; pushing yourself too hard in your job either because of a desire to make a good impression or because you’re being tasked with that extra work; and doing any or all of the above at the detriment of your ability to care for yourself, get the rest you need, and find time to relax.
There are times when burnout can feel as though it has come on suddenly, but that is not the case. Let’s say you’ve been working extra hard for the last three months to put money away so that you can make a downpayment on your first house. It’s taken a toll on your family, you’re tired all the time, and your boss is constantly hounding you about where you are with your various projects. It’s tough, but you’re doing it because you know that after these three months, you can ease up and stop working as much and spend more time with your family in your new house.
Right before those three months have concluded, right when you’re seeing that bright light of completion just ahead, you’re called into your boss's office and laid off. Now all that extra money you were putting away is going to go toward paying bills while you look for a new job. All that hard work feels like it was for nothing, and all your past successes over those months now feel hollow. You go from flying high to feeling as though the floor dropped out from under you, and now you’re drowning.
While that is a more extreme example to discuss sudden burnout, most of the time it moves more slowly. According to PsychCentral, the most common positions to suffer from burnout are:
Teachers
Doctors
Nurses
Social Workers
Elite Athletes
Parents of Chronically Ill Children
Considering the long hours and low pay that teachers receive for their efforts, this isn’t surprising to see. What people don’t seem to know is that most doctors aren’t going to be driving high-end cars and pulling in six or seven figures. Emergency Room Doctors make about the same as teachers, for example. Nurses are currently short-staffed (in the U.S. but not exclusively) and working 12 to 24 hour shifts with short sleep breaks in between so that patients can receive the care they need.
How Does Burnout Affect Relationships?
How burnout affects a relationship will depend, in part, on the reasons behind the burnout. For example, burnout caused by factors at work may have a bit of a different presentation than burnout caused by something happening within the relationship. We need to take a moment and point out that burnout within a relationship does not always mean that there is trouble in the relationship. There are many stressful situations that could cause somebody to become burned out within the relationship that is not any kind of abuse.
When you’re dealing with persistent stress at work that’s caused burnout, there will be effects seen at home: lack of energy when arriving home from work; difficulty waking up in the morning; unusually short fuse around loved ones; loss of appetite or increase of food intake; talk of constant exhaustion; lack of desire for the things they used to enjoy; and a general decay in communication skills overall.
If there’s something within the relationship that’s caused burnout, the symptoms may look similar to all burnout, but there may be key differences when dealing with the loved ones around them. Somebody in burnout from this type of stress may try to tiptoe around the source of the stress, be extra careful around the topic of the stress (i.e. cancer, mental health, etc.), while at the same time withdrawing from the rest of their world and friend groups. This kind of burnout is exceptionally difficult because the cause of the burnout is often constantly around the individual in some form and forcing them to often put on a façade that causes the inner feelings of burnout to only become worse.
Parents of children who are fatally ill suffer incredible amounts of stress and burnout, often to the point of the marriage dissolving after the death of a child. The amount of energy they have to put into being there for their child and showing a strong face in front of them may cause their burnout to manifest as anger toward each other, which will lead to resentment, and eventually the marriage falling apart without intervention of some kind.
Even burnout from work can eventually cause a relationship to shatter when the person suffering the burnout is no longer able to rally enough to be there for their partner. The amount of anger and resentment that can arise from the neglect can be a significant problem that requires a professional to help sort through.
How Do We Handle Burnout?
The funny thing about burnout is that we often don’t notice when we’re in the midst of it until we do. We may wake up one morning and realize just how exhausted we’ve been feeling for weeks or months. It can be a moment when we look at our partner and realize that they may feel like strangers to us and that we’ve lost track of who we both are, individually and as a relationship.
We say this quite a bit in these articles, but the first step is communication. Keeping open lines of communication when you’re feeling burnt out is going to be very important to those in your life. Maybe you talk to your partner, maybe you need to talk to a family member, but always consult a professional to help guide you through the worst of it.
The best way to handle burnout is to get out of the situation that is causing it. This is often easier said than done. If work is the cause of burnout, jobs are needed to pay bills, keep a roof over our heads, and care for our loved ones. Simply walking away from a job that has caused burnout isn’t always possible. The same can be said for relationships, especially in situations where there is a marriage or jointly owned property or children involved, simply walking away isn’t going to be the answer.
So, when we are in these situations we can’t get out of that are constantly causing stress, what can we do? For work, it might be time for some days of and to start looking for another job. The simple answer here is to start a job-hunt. While this may sound like it could cause more stress, even applying for one job a day may make the idea of leaving reduce the stress that surrounds your current occupation.
If you’re caring for a sick partner or child, finding ways to distribute that care between yourself and other family members is going to be incredibly important so that you can have a break to feel your feelings, let the stress bleed out of you a little, and try to find some small pieces of enjoyment to help reduce the overall stress.
If your burnout is being caused by the state of the world right now, that’s also valid. Things are changing quickly and there is no consistency in how it’s all changing. This is a whole new type of burnout that’s occurring. While similar to what was seen during the COVID years, this is being caused by a much more systemic change in how the world itself functions, and the amount of stress that is being placed on the world as a whole is something that hasn’t been experienced in years.
Finding ways to pitch in can be helpful, but also finding small moments of joy and beauty in the world is also important.
And a therapist. We cannot stress enough that we are not professionals and that the best person to talk to about your burnout will be a professional therapist.
Burn it Out
Even after you’ve found a way out of the burnout, it can take years to fully heal from it. Being as gentle with yourself as possible during that time will be vitally important.
Burnout doesn’t care about your politics or your religion or anything else. Anybody can find themselves in burnout after prolonged stress and getting out of the situation will always be the best way reverse the burnout and allow yourself to heal, though that’s not always possible and we frequently find that we must find ways to reduce the burnout by finding small moments of joy and beauty.
Even if you can find just one minute a day to stop and appreciate the world, it can help keep the burnout significantly reduced.
