Burnout Is Not a Personal Failure—It’s a Cultural Symptom
Burnout is a term we’ve all grown familiar with—whether through the headlines we scroll past on LinkedIn or the aching, persistent tug of exhaustion deep in our bodies. And yet, when burnout makes its presence known, the solutions offered are often surface-level: drink more water, set firmer boundaries, get to bed a little earlier. These short-term remedies are handed to us like gospel, masquerading as long-term solutions to problems rooted in systems far bigger than hydration or sleep hygiene.
Burnout is so often framed as a personal deficit—an issue of poor time management, weak boundaries, or not knowing how to rest. But when burnout becomes chronic across entire sectors, when it shows up team after team, especially among Black, brown, queer, and care-centered folks, we have to ask: what are we actually responding to?
My Personal Telling
Reflecting on my early career, I can name the many moments when the exhaustion—accumulated over years of subtle erasures, microaggressions, and outright mistreatment—led me to question whether I was truly cut out for the work. Despite high client retention, glowing feedback from clients and colleagues, and an ability to solve complex systemic problems with care and clarity, I still felt like I had to justify my body’s need for rest. I was praised for being high-functioning but rarely supported in being human.
When my calls for support were dismissed or delayed, something inside me began to shut down. I retreated inward as a last-ditch effort toward self-preservation. Eventually, it took a near-fatal hospitalization for me to finally make the decision to leave that job—without a plan, but with a growing sense of urgency that I could no longer override what my body was trying to tell me.
In the years that followed, I found a work environment that didn’t just tolerate me but celebrated me. That shift affirmed something I had long suspected: the problem wasn’t me. It was never me. It was the culture I was trying to survive within—one that demanded excellence without offering care in return.
Healing Doesn’t Happen Overnight
Healing from workplace trauma and the burnout that comes with it doesn’t happen overnight. There isn’t a magic pill that will undo the toll. It requires time, space, and systems of support that honor the nervous system’s need to feel safe again. For Black workers and other non-Black workers of color, the road back to equilibrium is often steeper. We are not just healing from overwork—we are also healing from years of being underprotected, overexposed, and chronically underestimated, both in professional spaces and in our personal environments.
Individual healing can begin with permission. Permission to slow down. To stop performing wellness and start honoring what your body is trying to communicate. This might look like recalibrating your relationship to urgency, redefining what “enough” means, or noticing when your nervous system is stuck in survival mode. For some, healing comes through therapy, somatic practices, or coaching. For others, it might come through community.
If you’ve internalized the idea that you have to earn your rest, healing will ask you to confront that belief. It will ask you to be gentle when you're tempted to push through. It will ask you to feel the grief beneath the grind.
Healing doesn’t mean becoming more resilient so you can keep enduring the same harm. It means reclaiming your right to exist without depletion—and beginning to imagine a life, and a world, where that’s not a radical idea.
Burnout Is a Cultural Symptom
Burnout isn’t just the result of working too hard; it’s a reflection of what we’ve come to accept as normal. We live in a culture that glorifies urgency, rewards overwork, and treats rest as a luxury rather than a necessity. People are often praised for pushing through instead of supported in slowing down. Productivity is equated with value, and those already marginalized are expected to give the most while receiving the least. In this context, burnout is not just exhaustion—it’s a signal of a deeper, systemic issue. When organizations respond with wellness webinars instead of structural change, the contradiction between what we’re told we deserve and what we actually experience settles into the body.
For Black, brown, queer, trans, and disabled workers, burnout often carries the weight of invisibility, hypervisibility, and chronic underprotection. It’s not simply being tired—it’s the slow erosion of self-worth in environments built without us in mind. Understanding burnout as a cultural symptom invites more honest questions. Rather than asking how to become more resilient, we can ask what kind of culture would make constant resilience less necessary. When we name burnout as a reflection of collective dysfunction rather than personal weakness, we begin the work of transforming the conditions that keep so many of us depleted in the first place.
What Organizations Can Do
If burnout is a cultural symptom, then addressing it requires cultural change—not just wellness perks or self-care encouragement. Organizations must be willing to look inward and examine the values, norms, and power structures that shape how people relate to work, rest, urgency, and one another. This begins by shifting the question from “How can we help individuals manage their stress?” to “What aspects of our culture are creating chronic stress in the first place?”
Organizations can start by slowing down and naming the systems at play. This includes interrogating productivity standards, reevaluating unrealistic workloads, and recognizing how expectations around professionalism, responsiveness, and emotional control disproportionately burden Black, brown, queer, and care-centered workers. It means embedding collective care into the culture—not as a side project, but as a leadership practice. This might look like redistributing labor more equitably, implementing practices for repair and accountability, creating real space for grief or transition, and centering psychological safety beyond compliance checklists. Most importantly, it requires leadership to model rest, reflection, and accountability themselves, rather than placing the burden of culture change solely on staff.
True prevention of burnout doesn’t come from helping people “bounce back.” It comes from building systems where people don’t have to burn out to begin with.
In Summary
Burnout is not a failure of the individual. It is a natural response to unnatural conditions. It is the body’s way of waving a flag when the systems we move through are unsustainable—when urgency replaces intention, when care becomes optional, and when productivity is valued more than people.
This isn’t just a personal reflection. It’s a reframing: burnout is not a weakness—it’s a cultural symptom. And like any symptom, it points to something deeper, something systemic. We cannot meditate, journal, or time-manage our way out of a culture that insists we prove our worth through depletion.
It’s time we stop pathologizing our exhaustion and start asking different questions—not about how to “bounce back,” but about what we’re being asked to bounce back into.
Keanu M. Jackson, LCSW (he/him)
Keanu is a New York–based consultant, facilitator, and licensed psychotherapist with expertise in anti-racism, organizational culture, and mental health strategy. Through his consulting practice, he partners with mission-driven teams to build more liberatory, care-centered workplaces rooted in psychological safety, equity, and accountability.
Learn more at keanumjackson.com.
