# The current state of burnout in 2025

- **Episode:** [185](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/185.md) (2025-04-03)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** burnout, 2025, workplace
- **Time:** 4:04–7:58 (start 244s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/185?t=244](https://truthliesandwork.com/185?t=244)

---

[4:04] Cait Donovan: I don't know that I'm famous, but my name is Cait Donovan. I'm a burnout expert. My history is in Chinese medicine crossed with Western medicine. So I have a degree in biobehavioral health and a master's degree in Chinese medicine, which gives me a a kind of a different view than most people on most things, if we're honest. My work is in podcasting, keynote speaking, authoring books, et cetera. And I really have a very deep goal, mission, and purpose for being. And I feel like my job is to end burnout culture, and which puts me out of a job, which is totally fine
[4:39] Leanne Elliott: I want to ask you about burnout specifically in the current times and climate. I'd imagine most of our listeners would be aware of burnout, heard of burnout. How has burnout changed in the last 6 to 12 months, and what does it look like as we're moving into 2025?
[4:55] Cait Donovan: So, the last 6 to 12 months, what we're seeing is higher levels of burnout, lower levels of engagement, higher levels of disengagement in the workplace. All, every single person that studies this, the Gallup polls, the Harvard Business Reviews, the Wellbeing at Work reviews, the McKinsey reports, all of them. are like, burnout is worse, and we're not sure why. What I think is happening, what I see happening outside of all the political shifts and outside of all the changes in the workplace that we're not sure what to do with yet, outside of that, I think we are still reacting to the pandemic. And it has been just long enough now that people feel like we should be in a the new normal that we all kept talking about way back then. And like, we're not. It seems like we're just going backwards and doing the same stuff that we used to do. So now you want me to go back to work? And now it's like we didn't learn anything from the lesson, but people's values shifted and the world's values, the world's values didn't shift with them
[6:05] Leanne Elliott: How have we seen burnout levels change over the the course of, say, 2020 to 2025? Has there been any peaks and troughs, or has it just steadily got higher?
[6:13] Cait Donovan: It has steadily gotten higher. And the— we have, I think the end of 2024, the measures for disengagement specifically, which is part of burnout, the measures for disengagement were worse than at the peak of the pandemic. When it comes to burnout, I think the biggest missed opportunity is this constant focus On burnout prevention. Instead of looking at the fact that depending on what study you read, anywhere from 37 to 88% of us are experiencing burnout, which means we are too late for prevention. Burnout prevention measures are stress management measures. They're the same thing. There's no difference. But burnout recovery requires something different, and we keep talking about burnout prevention? Like, it already happened. That's like saying, if you don't want to get food poisoning, don't eat food, like bad food, but you ate the bad food 3 days ago. That's not helpful right now. And I do believe, as a general rule, as someone who has studied health promotion and sort of like public health measures, I do believe that we at some point need to go, way back and start fixing things much further upstream. But right now we are in a crisis of people who are already burnt out and we need to help them recover
[7:39] Leanne Elliott: This conversation sparked from an exchange we had over LinkedIn when I was looking for some hot spicy takes for our, our Tuesday episodes. And it was, it was, it really did stop me. I messaged you immediately and I was like, Cait, we need to talk about this at length. You said burnout is not the fault of companies. Not individuals