Here’s what else might be going on, and why the distinction matters more than you think.

Burnout is fast becoming one of the most overused words in our lives. 

For a big part of my career, I’ve been trying to get people to pay attention to burnout. Now, I’m watching the word lose its meaning in slow motion. Scroll through any professional forum, attend any leadership conference, or have a chat with pretty much anyone and you’ll hear the word ‘burnout’. 

Today, burnout has become the default explanation for every flavour of workplace unhappiness. Tired after a tough week? Burnout. Disengaged from your work? Burnout. Overwhelmed by the news? Burnout. 

I get the appeal. We’re living through a genuinely brutal stretch of history, from escalating conflicts, a cost-of-living squeeze, AI upending entire industries and a general sense of uncertainty and loss of purpose. When the pressure is that pervasive, a single label feels efficient. 

But here’s the problem: when a word means everything, it also means nothing. And when we misdiagnose a problem, we prescribe the wrong solution. We hand people a mindfulness app, when what they actually need is a restructured workload. We send managers to a resilience seminar when what they need is someone to notice they’ve been absorbing their team’s trauma for six years without a break. We provide mental health days when someone just wants to be recognised for the great work they’ve been producing. 

Precision is not academic pedantry. It’s the precondition for actually helping people. 

Burnout has a definition. We should use it.

The most rigorously validated framework for understanding burnout comes from Christina Maslach and her colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. Maslach and her co-researchers defined burnout as a psychological syndrome emerging from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, presenting across three distinct dimensions.

The first is exhaustion – and not the kind you fix with a long weekend. This is a deep depletion of emotional and cognitive resources. The feeling that you have nothing left to give and no pathway to replenish it. The second is cynicism – a creeping detachment from your work, your colleagues and your sense of purpose.

Work that once felt meaningful starts to feel hollow. The third is reduced professional efficacy, which is a collapse in your belief that what you do matters or that you’re even capable of doing it well. 

All three must be present. That’s important. Having a bad week doesn’t qualify, nor does feeling tired or needing a holiday.

In 2019, the World Health Organisation classified burnout not as a medical condition, but as an occupational phenomenon – a syndrome resulting specifically from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. The key word here is occupational. Not personal. Not existential. The WHO located burnout’s origins squarely in the relationship between a person and their work environment.

This matters because most organisations still treat burnout as an individual problem. They offer wellness stipends and mindfulness workshops (which are fine, but they don’t address burnout). 

Maslach and her colleague Michael Leiter identified six key domains of work-life mismatch that actually drive burnout: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values. Every single one is an organisational design problem, not a personal coping problem. 

So if what your people are experiencing is genuine burnout, the solution isn’t just a mental health day. It’s redesigning the system that broke them. 

Here’s the twist, while people may use the word, what people are experiencing right now isn’t burnout at all. There are three possible alternatives: polycrisis, languishing, and compassion fatigue. 

“When a word means everything, it also means nothing. And when we misdiagnose a problem, we prescribe the wrong solution.”

Welcome to the polycrisis

If burnout is organisational in origin, then what explains the sheer weight that employees are carrying into work each morning? This phenomenon has a name.

Philosopher Edgar Morin coined the term polycrisis in the 1990s, and economic historian Adam Tooze brought it into mainstream discourse through the 2023 World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report. 

A polycrisis isn’t just “a lot of bad things happening at once”. It’s what occurs when multiple, distinct crises overlap, interact and amplify each other. This creates a compound effect that is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Look at the current moment through that lens. Geopolitical conflicts are disrupting energy markets and supply chains, which fuels inflation, which squeezes household budgets, which reshapes how people eat, sleep and plan for the future.

Meanwhile, AI is rewriting the rules of employment with no clear roadmap for what comes next, which increases anxiety for the current and future workforce. And underneath it all, other global events such as climate anxiety is further compounding the anxiety and geopolitical conflicts. 

These crises don’t sit in separate boxes. They bleed into each other. And they follow people to work every single morning. 

There’s a useful physiological framework for understanding what this does to people. Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen called it ‘allostatic overload’ – the state in which the body and mind carry more cumulative stress than they were designed to sustain. 

His research showed that chronic, multi-source stress produces measurable wear on cardiovascular, immune and neurological systems – even without a single overwhelming event. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts, except the cuts keep coming. 

The implication for leaders is this: your people are already carrying an enormous invisible load from the world outside your walls. You didn’t cause it, and you can’t fix the polycrisis, but you have significant control over whether your workplace adds to that anxiety or provides one of the few reliable anchors of structure, meaning, and safety that people can count on. 

Dr. John Chan MAHRI

The languishing epidemic

A couple of years ago, Adam Grant wrote about the concept of languishing. It’s the term sociologist Corey Keyes introduced in 2002 to describe a state of mental health that is neither flourishing nor diagnosably ill. It’s a quiet stagnation characterised by emptiness, listlessness, and a sense that life lacks momentum or purpose (Keyes, 2002). 

What we’re seeing in people today is that languishing has become the dominant psychological condition in the global workforce and we keep misidentifying it as burnout. 

The evidence is there. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to just 21 per cent. Sixty-two percent of employees are not engaged. 

Seventeen percent are actively disengaged. The estimated cost: US$438 billion in lost productivity worldwide. Manager engagement dropped from 30 per cent to 27 per cent, which is particularly alarming given that Gallup’s own data shows roughly 70 per cent of team engagement variability is attributable to the manager. 

Seventy-nine percent of workers are, essentially, going through the motions. Showing up. Hitting enough targets to stay off the radar. But none of it means anything to them anymore. 

What’s causing it? From outside the organisation: the polycrisis makes it profoundly difficult to find a sense of meaning. The big picture feels bleak (e.g., even if I work hard, I can’t afford to buy a home), and that bleakness colours everything. 

From inside the organisation: many employers are responding to uncertainty with precisely the wrong moves – frozen promotions, headcount that isn’t being backfilled, shelved innovation, restructuring without a compelling vision. They’re stripping away the very conditions that sustain meaning. 

Here’s the key distinction: people can endure difficulty when they believe it’s leading somewhere. Languishing sets in when the difficulty feels pointless. 

And if you’re not careful, you’ll confuse it with burnout. The surface symptoms overlap. In both, you see exhaustion, cynicism and declining performance. But the engines underneath are completely different. 

If you treat languishing with burnout solutions such as reducing workload, you may make things worse. People who are languishing don’t need less to do. They need more clarity and meaning in what they’re doing.

“People can endure difficulty when they believe it’s leading somewhere. Languishing sets in when the difficulty feels pointless.”

Your best managers are drowning and burnout is not the cause

There’s a third condition spreading through organisations right now, and it’s one I find particularly concerning because it’s hitting the people you can least afford to lose. 

Psychologist Charles Figley first defined compassion fatigue in 1995 as “the cost of caring” – a decline in the capacity or interest in bearing the suffering of others that occurs after repeated, prolonged exposure to other people’s pain and trauma (Figley, 1995). For decades, it was considered a condition of healthcare workers and first responders. That boundary has collapsed.

Think about what we’ve asked of managers since 2020. Absorb your team’s pandemic anxiety while managing your own. Navigate redundancies with empathy, then do it again six months later. Support people through cost-of-living stress, AI uncertainty and geopolitical dread – on top of meeting your performance targets. Be emotionally intelligent, psychologically safe and endlessly available. 

Research now estimates that roughly 40 per cent of leaders are experiencing compassion fatigue. Nearly two-thirds of managers say their role has become simultaneously more important and more difficult since 2020, while feeling ill-equipped to provide the mental health support their teams now expect. 

Gallup’s 2025 report confirms the toll: manager wellbeing has been declining since its 2022 peak, with young managers and female managers experiencing the steepest drops. 

Here’s what makes this different from burnout: a manager can have a perfectly sustainable workload, genuine autonomy and a supportive culture – and still develop compassion fatigue. Because it’s not driven by organisational conditions. It’s driven by empathic exposure. The person’s emotional bandwidth has been drained by chronically absorbing other people’s distress. 

The managers most vulnerable to compassion fatigue are your best ones. The ones who listen. The ones who absorb. The ones whose teams trust them enough to bring them everything. 

You can’t just tell these people to “set better boundaries”. You need to redesign the system so that emotional support is more distributed and that your most empathetic leaders aren’t the single point of failure in your entire wellbeing support architecture. 

“We hand people a mindfulness app, when what they actually need is a restructured workload. We send managers to a resilience seminar when what they need is someone to notice they’ve been absorbing their team’s trauma for six years without a break. We provide mental health days when someone just wants to be recognised for the great work they’ve been producing.”

Getting the diagnosis right

Having spent years studying how to mitigate burnout, what I’ve found, again and again, is that the biggest obstacle to solving this problem isn’t a lack of solutions. It’s a lack of accurate diagnosis. 

That’s exactly where most organisations are stuck right now. They’re throwing burnout solutions at problems that aren’t burnout and wondering why nothing improves. 

So here’s the reframe I’d like to offer. 

If it’s burnout, the solution is systemic reform. Audit workloads. Restore autonomy. Rebuild recognition systems. Address toxic leadership. Build trust that the organisation will make real reform and not just band-aid solutions. 

If it’s languishing, the solution is meaning. Communicate a purpose that connects daily work to something larger. Create visible pathways for growth, even in constrained environments.

Foster genuine human connection. When the external world feels chaotic, the workplace has to offer structure and forward motion. Again, build trust that there is a direction and they are a part of the future. 

If it’s compassion fatigue, the solution is distributed support. Invest in proper training for emotionally demanding leadership. Build peer support networks for managers. Position professional mental health resources as the first line of support, not the manager’s personal empathy reserves. Build in genuine recovery time. And build trust that there are others in the organisation/organisational resources that can support them beyond their manager. 

Three different conditions. Three different causes. Three different solutions. Get the diagnosis wrong, and you’ll keep pouring resources into interventions that never reach the root. 

The leadership imperative

The stressors outside your office walls are real, and they’re walking in through the front door every morning. You can’t control the polycrisis. You can’t shield your people from geopolitical instability or the cost-of-living squeeze or AI anxiety. 

For leaders, the challenge of 2026 is not simply to acknowledge that your people are struggling. It’s to develop the organisational intelligence to understand why they are struggling – and to match your response to the actual diagnosis. A resilience workshop will not fix a workload problem. A workload reduction will not restore lost purpose. A boundaries conversation will not support a manager who has been absorbing trauma for six years without respite. 

You have control over what happens inside your organisation. And right now, that matters more than it ever has. Psychological safety, workload equity, inclusion and genuine recognition are not perks in this environment. They’re preventive medicine. 

The organisations that get this right will be the ones that resist the seductive simplicity of a single label. They’ll invest in the diagnostic precision to listen and understand what’s actually happening to their people and match their response to the real problem. 

Dr John Chan MAHRI is an industrial/organisational psychologist, the Managing Director of Infinite Potential and recipient of the 2025 AHRI Scholarship, which is supporting his work in mitigating loneliness in the workplace.