Feeling Burned Out? Here’s What to Do.

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Updated at 9:00 a.m. ET on September 21, 2023

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, the novel’s central protagonist, asks his father for permission to join a monastery, where he seeks to purify his soul and sanctify his work. Cynical and half-drunk, Alyosha’s father makes a prediction about what monastic life will do to the saintly youngster: “You will burn and you will burn out.”

Not until nearly a century after the novel’s 1880 appearance did social science come up with a definition of what that phrase, burn out, meant. In 1974, the German American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger supplied a of the noun as the state of being “exhausted by making extreme demands on energy, strength, or resources” from one’s job, which would cause one to become ineffective in achieving “all intents and purposes.”