Burnout Quotes

“How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.”
― anais nin

“The entire belief was insulting to many of us, but nonetheless, the term “top trained,” which would come to be regurgitated with great regularity by hospital administration and by Dr. Kowatch, would eventually evolve to become what I would describe as an unhealthy infatuation, one that I now understand represented the developing disconnect between the majority of the Heart Center team and hospital administration, which would ultimately have detrimental effects on the program, which would become visible to all in the near future.”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“They remained imprisoned in the CICU, kept alive in physicality by mechanical devices and medicinal support, inexorably suffering. I revered their resiliency, though I struggled to understand whether they were truly resilient or if this was a descriptive term I used to assure myself that what we were doing was just. Could they merely represent physical beings at this point, molecular derivatives of carbon and water, void of souls that had moved on months prior once the universe had delivered their inevitable fate, simply kept alive by us physicians, who ourselves clutched desperately to the most favored of our prehistoric binary measures of success: life?”
― DEAN MAFAKO, M.D., Burned Out

“Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”
― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

“Burnout…occurs because we’re trying to solve the same problem over and over.”
― Susan Scott

“Just because you take breaks doesn’t mean you’re broken.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“Dust sleeping on your bookshelf
and all your plants are drying out
you are too busy to save yourself
is your mind heading for burnout?
Coffee rings on your bedside table
anxiety pills under your pillowcase
working round the clock to foot the bill
is there no time for breakfast these days?
Friends haven't seen you in a while
your phone is always out of reach
you're slowly forgetting how to smile
is your silence a figure of speech?
Life can sometimes seem to be unfair
but hoping is better than you think
send the message in a bottle if you dare
is it so hard to not force yourself to sink?”
― Akash Mandal

“I sit, tired of reading. I am sick of books. I can't tell where I leave off and the books begin. I'm nobody. I'm a polluted nothing. A confessed sin, an open door, the clutterer in the clutter.”
― Katherine Dunn, Truck

“I'll always choose a teacher with enthusiasm and weak technique over one with brilliant strategies but who is just punching the clock. Why? An enthusiastic teacher can learn technique, but it is almost impossible to light a fire inside the charred heart of a burned-out teacher.”
― Dave Burgess, Teach Like a PIRATE: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator

“I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out.”
― Charles Sheffield, Brother to Dragons

“As helpers, we often feel the need to see our impact in tangible, measurable ways. We allow negative language into our head about the “broken system;” we look through a lens of “it doesn’t matter, I can’t make a difference”. These ideas are surely contributing to our burnout.”
― Jenn Bruer, Helping Effortlessly: A Book of Inspiration and Healing

“Stress also desynchronizes activation in different frontocortical regions, which impairs the ability to shift attention between tasks.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Relaxing brings weakness, when done by a muscle; but brings strength, when done by a person.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“... contemporary studies show that the worst stress-related health typically occurs in middle management, with its killer combo of high work demands but little autonomy -responsibility without control.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“If you chronically inhabit your void, burnout is a predictable consequence.”
― Karen Whitten, The 25 Mindsets: Understand Anyone, Even Yourself

“Homo Defessus – Never before in human history has so many people considered their everyday tiredness (because they are so busy and have so much to do) as a badge of honor. We are living in the era of Homo Defessus, the exhausted man. I wonder if the historians of the distant future (if there will be any) will look back to our epoch and decide to give it a name: “The Dark Ages”, because for the first time humans, not only deliberately sought exhaustion, but they were also convinced that this mentality is their pride, an indisputable token of greatness.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“It's always been implied that if you fail to succeed, you aren't passionate enough. But I no longer invest in work emotionally. It isn't worth it. I learned that every single person is expendable. None of it is fair or based on passion or merit. I don't have the bandwidth to play that game”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“Homo defessus — Never before in human history have so many people considered their everyday tiredness (because they are so busy and have so much to do) as a badge of honor. We are living in the era of Homo defessus, the exhausted man. I wonder if historians of the distant future (if there will be any) will look back at our epoch and decide to give it a name: “The Second Dark Ages,” because for the first time, humans not only deliberately sought exhaustion, but were also convinced that this mentality was their pride, an indisputable token of greatness.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Only ten months until June.”
― Gordon Korman, The Unteachables

“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” Hawk told him. “We never save the girl. The girl always saves us.”
― Dahlia West, Doc

“The Dark Cloud
Is the burnout all of us get when we can’t get through the week
Is the emotional heaviness of having a brilliant mind but being told not to speak
Is the inner strength that war victims must have to not go off the rails
Is the emphasis on silence cultural conditioning teaches females”
― Aida Mandic, The Dark Cloud

“The Dark Cloud
Is a destroyed childhood toy that sniper bullets from war broke
Is a raped woman who was forced to perform oral sex and had to choke
Is a beautiful daydream that became a dangerous nightmare
Is an intense case of burnout that wants to show that it has a cold stare”
― Aida Mandic, The Dark Cloud

“In the corporate hustle, don't let the weight of success be the anchor of your mental well-being. Seek balance, not burnout.”
― Abhysheq Shukla, Feelings Undefined: The Charm of the Unsaid

“Burnout is the combination of resentment, exhaustion, shame, and frustration that make us lose connection to pleasure and passion in the work, and instead encounter difficult feelings like avoidance, compulsion, control, and anxiety. If it were just exhaustion we could take a break and rest and go back. But people who feel burnt out often feel they cannot return to the work or that the group or work they were part of is toxic.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Many people only reevaluate their choices when the price they have been paying for them rears its ugly head. It doesn't have to be that way, though. You don't need to wait for disaster to strike to choose a different path, even if you're already halfway through your current path.”
― Daniel Voigt Godoy, You're Not Your Job: Going Above and Beyond for Yourself

“Better slow down than bog down!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets

“The Market has always focused on the creation of laborsaving devices. Ironically, this has never produced free time - quite the opposite. But what it has produced is a sedentary society, one hermetically sealed from natural exercise.”
― Paul Stiles, Is the American Dream Killing You?: How "the Market" Rules Our Lives

“If the vision is consumed in the task of completing it, I have squandered both the vision and the task.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“And it costed me everything. What could you give after everything?”
― Kailey Bright, Unity

“Research has established, however, that burnout is primarily the result of psychologically hazardous factors that occur at your workplace. (So no, it isn’t just an individual problem; it’s an organizational issue.) More specifically, burnout happens when there’s an ongoing mismatch between the conditions an employee needs to support their well-being and their best work, and what their organization actually provides. Not being given the resources or time you need to manage your workload, for example, or working in an environment where you have insufficient control and autonomy, are known burnout triggers.”
― Kandi Wiens