Patrick McKendry

Tom Brady retired from professional football this week, ending what could arguably be the most successful NFL career of all time. Brady won seven championships, more than any other player or franchise. The sheer quantity of accolades and success throughout his career place Brady in the debate for greatest athlete of all time. Yet, one of the more remarkable aspects of Brady’s career has been his longevity. In his final Super Bowl in 2020, he became the oldest quarterback in Super Bowl history to start, play, win, and receive the MVP award - at the age of 43. Brady went on to play two more seasons after that championship-winning year before retiring at the age of 45.¹ For reference, the average NFL career ends at the age of 27² with the typical quarterback retiring in their early to mid 30s.³

Football is brutal and has a physical toll that few of us can truly understand. However, a more relatable struggle is the mental strain required to operate at a world-class level for an entire game, an entire season, or across years of a career. That strain is familiar to most of us in our own professional careers. Whether we’re a quarterback or an accountant, burnout is a career threat. In his final seasons, even Brady showcased some of the classic signs of burnout as his motivation swung wildly. One moment he was committing to playing until he turned 50. The next, he was retiring. 40 days later, he unretired and was ready to play again.⁴

Undoubtedly, Brady is a fierce competitor and he was famous throughout his career for that unbridled competitive spirit. For those of us struggling with burnout, there is a lot we can learn from Brady’s example. Here, let’s review burnout’s loose definition, highlight its many often-overlooked causes, and look at what the GOAT can teach us about how to prevent burnout or resolve it in our own careers.

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Burnout is an imprecise term

First, we should be clear that burnout is not a recognized medical diagnosis. Burnout was originally defined in 1974⁵ and captured public interest and favor almost immediately.⁶ Burnout is considered to be a type of work-related stress, involving exhaustion and a sense of reduced accomplishment or loss of personal identity.⁷ However, to this day it has never been included in the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the American Psychiatric Association's classification of mental conditions used by health professionals.⁶ The condition is also not recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO).⁵

In some cases, what appears to be burnout may actually be a symptom of a more serious condition like depression.⁷ That can be dangerous when we try to solve for burnout directly and focus our attention on the work environment, rather than potentially unrelated causes that influence our well-being outside of work. Our job is a significant part of our day and our motivation at work can be a useful barometer for overall mental well-being. However, if you are feeling uninspired at work it may be worth first reviewing your general wellness behaviors like diet, exercise, and sleep habits.⁸ And it is always reasonable to seek professional help because, while we are making progress over time, mental health is complicated and nuanced.⁹ I will also note here that I am absolutely not a trained therapist and none of this should be considered as professional health advice.

Still, when we look specifically at cases of job-related burnout the definition does not become much more useful. Burnout is fairly easily identified, fortunately. Many of us at some point - or at many frequent points - in our careers will see it for ourselves. We may have a manager or mentor highlight it for us to start the discussion. The difficulty occurs as we try to next identify which cause is at play. The effect of being burned out can result from a multitude of causes, ranging from low social support at work, to operating with unclear job expectations, to having extremely chaotic or monotonous job activity. This many-to-one cause-to-outcome relationship is problematic when we try to solve for burnout.

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There may even be multiple factors at play with differing degrees of impact. Additionally, burnout is not a binary state. It has degrees of severity with impacts ranging from lowered productivity at work to a complete loss of joy outside of work.

This is the first reason I hate the term “burnout” - it does not tell us anything. This would be like an NFL trainer telling a player “You’re injured”. That analysis is true, probably obvious, and not in the least bit helpful. There is no indication of whether the player is going to be sidelined for a week or for the rest of the season. Additionally, it would be useful to know whether it is a muscle strain or joint injury. All of these details would influence the proposed treatment plan.

Similarly, when we want to diagnose our own injury and define our own treatment plan, we have to understand that identifying burnout is only the start of the conversation. We have to analyze our environment more precisely and articulate the factors that go into our specific version of burnout. The Mayo Clinic offers the factors in the diagram above as a starting point.⁷ As an example, many people experiencing burnout have good work-life balance, a tremendous amount of social support both at home and in their workplace, but may see extreme highs and lows of activity through time and the occasional unclear expectations. Their treatment plan will look very different from someone struggling with low social support at work. As you try and diagnose the factors driving your burnout, you should feel encouraged to add your own drivers to the list.

Tactically, a number of different tools can be helpful here. If you have a trusted mentor, it can help to talk through the various factors and how you interpret their impact. Be sure to take notes so your insights are not forgotten. Similarly, a journaling practice can help get your thoughts down on paper. I would recommend a daily review after your workday while the present stressors are top of mind. Do this for a few weeks to identify trends of which issues occur most frequently. A lighter version of journaling could be a daily report card, where you grade each factor from 1 to 10, with 10 representing everything involving that factor being perfect and a 1 representing the worst case of that factor.

Whatever approach you take, just keep in mind that your goal is to add precision.

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Burnout has almost nothing to do with working time

The second reason I hate the term “burnout” is that most managers are mistrained on how to treat burnout. The far-and-away most common association with burnout is “work-life imbalance”. In the majority of cases, managers start and stop with this factor. This leads to well-intentioned but misguided advice about burnout. Rebalancing our work and life focus may be needed, but this blanket recommendation can misdirect our focus in the many cases where another cause is at fault. Frankly, there is far too much weight placed far too carelessly on work-life balance as a salve for motivation problems.

For example, we need not look further than the very psychologist who coined the name burnout. Herbert Freudenberger was a German-American psychologist, Holocaust survivor, and in the 1970s was practicing in New York City. Freudenberger would work 12 hour days at his professional practice before volunteering until 2 a.m. at the drug addiction clinic he opened. According to his family the work began to stress and fatigue him.⁶ Then Freudenberger turned his clinical efforts inwards, recording himself talking through his experiences before spending hours analyzing his own thoughts. Freudenberger published a paper on burnout in 1974⁵ and the concept was quickly adopted by the public with Freudenberger speaking to the concept on NPR, Oprah, and other shows.⁶ Here is the interesting point. Per Freudenberger’s family, after burnout captured society’s attention, he did better enjoy his life outside of work. However, he did not work any less. He still worked his 12 hour days. He continued to volunteer at the addiction clinic. Per his daughter, the recognition of his work made the difference.⁶

Freudenberger’s story highlights the problem with how we commonly think about work-life balance. It is a clear example that the standard recommendation to limit our time spent at work is incomplete. Far more important than simple platitudes or ratios is how we spend that time. For Freudenberger, his time allocations did not change but he focused on being more intentional with how he spent those hours outside of his work in order to find greater joy and satisfaction in those moments. When managers focus simply on time spent working they often give incomplete solutions to burnout and leave employees continuing to struggle with motivation and stress.

Further, most managers look at time working as the sole predictor of burnout and proactively coach employees to work more standard hours when they see someone putting in extra time. This is well-intentioned, however, we must note that trying to proactively solve for burnout by forcing time requirements can be damaging. Speaking from personal experience, I enthusiastically worked eleven and twelve hour days for years and first experienced burnout after I followed my manager’s recommendation to work less. This is where the multi-faceted nature of burnout comes into play. When we proactively push ourselves to work less, other organizational inadequacies are highlighted. For example, longer hours may establish a greater sense of control over projects and priorities or overcome issues of unclear expectations through brute force. When we solve for working time in isolation, those other issues can flare up. Time spent logged in can be quickly and directly toggled but these other highlighted causes can be more difficult to disentangle and fix. In cases like this, we have prevented burnout caused by imbalance but have created burnout as a result of the other causal factors.

That is not to say we should not try and create balance between our work and broader life. We should. Better establishing ourselves across the many facets of our lives helps us live in a way that is more rewarding, healthy, and resilient. In fact, we can also look at Brady here and some of the recent struggles in his personal life that have been on very public display after years of living an improperly balanced life. Still, we should make these adjustments thoughtfully and with eyes wide open to downstream effects.

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Burnout and the influence of success

From Freudenberger’s story, we get a glimpse of a potential factor that is worth adding to our explanatory set for burnout. In Tom Brady’s story, we get confirmation of the importance of this factor. Success and recognition solves a lot of problems.

Brady’s nearly full-time obsession with football has stretched over decades.¹⁰ At Michigan, he sat on the bench for three years before fighting to barely earn the starting spot. The constant grind would have been hard. He entered the NFL as the 199th draft pick of his class. Brady has talked about how much it hurt to fall to the 6th round and how he needed to stop watching on multiple occasions throughout the draft in order to stay composed.¹¹ When he arrived in New England he was the 4th quarterback on a bad team, working hard to memorize the playbook and improve his fundamentals. The Patriots ended that season 5-11. I have to imagine at some point Brady would have wondered whether all of that preparation had been worth it just to become a back-up on a losing team.

In Brady’s second season, the Patriot’s starter was taken out for multiple weeks with an injury. Brady stepped in and the rest is history. The underdog Patriots went on to win the Super Bowl that year. In that moment for Brady, all of the long hours would have paid off as the championship turned the work from a mentally draining activity to a wise investment into career success. That level of focus, the long hours of training, and the rigorous diet remained the norm throughout Brady’s career and has been described as “insane” and “on a whole different level”.¹² With each successive championship added to his resume, Brady likely moved further and further from burnout despite the long-running work-life imbalance.

For comparison, we can analyze other NFL greats who opted out of the straining career path. Andrew Luck was tremendously successful in college and through his first three NFL seasons as quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts. Over the next three seasons, Luck fought injuries and his teams struggled. In his final season, Luck was healthy and recorded the best overall full-season quarterback rating of his career but was eliminated early from the playoffs. He retired abruptly that off-season at the age of 29. Despite some success, Luck and his teams never played in a Super Bowl.¹³ Calvin Johnson, wide receiver for the Detroit Lions, was even more explicit in citing the team’s lack of success as a primary driver of his retirement at a time when he was still considered to be in the prime of his career.¹⁴ From a young age, most football players dream of winning a Super Bowl. Would Luck and Johnson have played longer if they had been more competitive? And, would Brady have retired sooner if he had had less success?

In the world of office jobs and knowledge work, success as a factor in burnout also appears to play a central role. We see CEOs working constantly on their business because the income returns outweigh other burnout factors of work-life imbalance or a lack of social support. Inversely, when top performers fade we can see cases of decreased impact and success leading to burnout as these team members take their foot off the gas.

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An update to the burnout model

With further review, it makes intuitive sense that there is more at play in burnout than simply avoiding negative outcomes. Providing a carrot can also help people to cope with stress. In the model above, we highlighted burnout as being the result of increasing levels of bad environmental stressors. However, we should include how decreasing levels of good environmental rewards can diminish willpower. Said differently, proper rewards can help develop willpower.¹⁵ That willpower can be useful as we try to stay resilient under tough work loads. To me, the model of factors contributing to burnout should look more like this.

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We know that improper work-life balance, unclear expectations, and low social support contribute to burnout. We know that as those stressors increase burnout can get worse. But for NFL players and for us, these are not the only predictors. Brady, Luck, and Johnson all faced some lack of control over their careers based on personnel moves decided by General Managers. All had extremes of activity and inactivity between the season and offseason. Each of them saw varying degrees of workplace dysfunction and social support based on who was on their team and how the team was doing at any given time. All had some degree of work-life imbalance, and arguably the one with the greatest imbalance suffered the least from burnout. By adding in the other side of the equation we can start to explain their individual burnout outcomes. After his third season, Luck’s growth rate, task enjoyment, impact, and rate of success plummeted.¹³ He burned out hard and fast. Johnson showed consistent growth and impact through much of his career, with his top reception and yardage season coming in the 6th year of his career.¹⁴ However, the constant low rate of team success and his win prospects and task enjoyment eventually burned him out. For his part, Brady had positive rewards helping prevent burnout through most of his career. And he likely scored off the charts in task enjoyment based on his love of the game. But in his final two seasons, while his individual growth stayed strong, dysfunction suddenly increased¹⁶ and Brady’s win prospects dropped as the team earned the only losing season of Brady’s career as a starter.¹

For us, I think this is also a useful model because it significantly increases our opportunities to fight against burnout. We cannot always account for a manager who is bad at setting clear expectations. We cannot create a less dysfunctional and more supportive team without tremendous individual and collective effort. However, we can have direct influence on the measurability of our work and make adjustments to clearly highlight our impact to the business. Similarly, we can use cognitive reframing to our advantage and turn workplace challenges into development opportunities and use undesirable tasks as a playground for new processes or technologies.

Managers can also do their part in leveraging this broader set of tools. While macroeconomic factors may slow the business down and be out of our control, managers can still do their part to clarify career growth opportunities in any environment and focus on making the workplace pleasant even when times are tough. Additionally, leaders play an important role in establishing and building team momentum. Even in the face of headwinds, good managers can identify multiple ways to win and work with their teams to build a chain of successes that can help stave off the threat of burnout in the face of adversity.

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Over the past few decades few things have been as inevitable as taxes, workplace burnout, and Tom Brady captaining a competitive team. Looking back over his career, we can start to piece together how Brady’s success was not only an outcome of his work ethic, but also, how it was a factor behind his ability to give tremendous effort year after year after year. While most jobs do not have the same scheduled evaluations and measurability that professional sports offers, we can still learn from Brady’s example about how to stave off burnout in our daily life. It is not so simple as having work-life balance. Where possible, we need to avoid negative stressors like unclear expectations and solve for dysfunctional team behaviors. And in all cases, we have to find ways to measure impact, find paths to growth, and build our own win streak.

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References

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Tom Brady & An Updated Model of Burnout