Why Are You Burned Out? Zero In on the Exact Reason

Experiencing burnout? An internal medicine doctor who’s a leading burnout expert reveals five questions to pinpoint the biggest energy drains in your life…and what to do from there.

The pandemic might be over, but burnout is clearly not. According to December 2022 poll results from the research firm Future Forum, more than 40% of us are experiencing burnout—with women and those under age 30 feeling the burn the most.

Yet while the World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational syndrome and ties this fatigue to our work, the path to burnout is often more complicated than that, explains Neha Sangwan, MD, an internal medicine doctor, burnout expert and author of the September 2023 book Powered By Me: From Burned Out to Fully Charged at Work and in Life.

Dr. Sangwan suggests the simplest way to understand how burnout is impacting you is to gauge whether you have a net drain of energy across different areas of your life: “Healing burnout comes down to identifying and correcting those underlying patterns,” she says.

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