I Asked A GP How To Recover From Burnout If You Can't Leave Your Job

About a quarter of UK workers say they feel unable to handle work stress, while 63% of us seem to show signs of burnout. 

But sometimes, it feels like the advice for those going through it ― especially considering some think burnout can take years to recover from ― is incompatible with the realities of people’s lives. 

Speaking to HuffPost UK, NHS GP Dr Helen Wall said: “I do get a little bit irritated when people talk about self-care and, you know, just relax and do some exercise and do some mindfulness and all of this carry on because actually there’s more to it with burnout than that.” 

Though she does think there’s a case to be made for taking time off when work stress becomes exhausting, she added, “burnout doesn’t resolve just through rest”.

Here, she explained why burnout can feel like such a trap, and shared her tips for handling it if leaving your role doesn’t feel like an immediately viable option.

Work burnout can create a vicious cycle

Dr Wall said that taking time off “doesn’t fix the causes of burnout, which are often linked to the amount of workload, lack of control around the workload, or... feeling that their values are conflicted” at work, she told us.

In fact, a phenomenon called “moral injury” is common in healthcare, “where you feel like what you should be doing for a patient is not what you’re able to do. That can happen in all kinds of work.” 

Chronic understaffing is yet another issue contributing to burnout, she added. And she doesn’t think time off alone will solve that.

That’s why “if I’m signing somebody off work because of... burnout, I like to encourage them to share that with work, whether that’s on the sick note or whether that’s them asking for an occupational health review or speaking to a line manager.” 

Without these structural changes, she added, burnout will return. And if people feel they have no choice but to stay put due to mortgages, childcare costs, and/or housing expenses, “they become shamed and fearful and isolated,” may worry about redundancy, “and all of those things can worsen that burnout”.

Unhelpfully, burnout can leave people “in a really dark place [where they] can’t think outside of what they need to do or what will help them” to leave. 

How can I handle burnout without quitting? 

Dr Hall referred to something called the Maslach model, which says that at least one of the following six levers needs to be moving for a person to begin to recover from burnout: 

1) Workload 

“It might not just be about reducing your hours, but the cognitive load of what you’re doing when you’re actually working or the emotional load of what you’re being asked to do while you’re working,” said Dr Hall. 

2) Control 

“Having that autonomy over how and when work is done and feeling that you’ve got some control over that, things are not being done to you.

“Everybody likes a pay rise, what with the cost of living crisis etc, but actually there’s a lot of studies being done to show that reward in your job and feeling personal satisfaction and value actually lasts longer in terms of how you feel.” 

3) Community 

This, the GP said, involves “feeling psychologically safe within the workplace, feeling that you’ve got a good team and the people you work with can have your back and support you”. 

4) Fairness 

Percieved injustices can fuel burnout, the doctor explained. “Feeling that things are not fair and not equitable and people are not playing by the rules or handling situations right, that can really chip away at somebody’s happiness at work.”

5) Values 

This is a little like Dr Hall’s former point about moral injury. It happens, she said, “when people feel like they can’t work in line with their values”. 

Luckily, she added, “There’s some evidence to show that even just moving one of these in the right direction can ease burnout and improve burnout.

“I always encourage people to try to have a chat with their line manager... or whoever they can trust at work to try and look at changing some of these things.” 

If this feels completely impossible, however, unfortunately “it’s about thinking, what else can you do? Is there another option? Is there another job you can apply for? Is there another route of career or something that you can work towards?”