Are you burnt out… or is your job just toxic?

In this episode of Clock In, I’m breaking down a question I hear all the time: am I actually burnt out, or is my job the problem? If you’ve been feeling exhausted, unmotivated, or disconnected from your work, it’s easy to assume burnout — but in many cases, it’s actually a misaligned role, a toxic work environment, or a job that just isn’t the right fit.

I walk through how to tell the difference between true burnout and job dissatisfaction, including the key signs to look for like chronic exhaustion, lack of motivation, and feeling stuck even when you’re doing everything “right.” I also talk about how poor management, lack of growth opportunities, and workplace culture can quietly drain your energy — even if your workload doesn’t seem overwhelming.

If you’re questioning your job, dealing with career burnout, or wondering if it’s time to quit, I share practical, no-BS advice to help you assess your situation, set better boundaries at work, and make smarter career decisions. Enjoy the transcript!

Have you ever felt just off at work? Like you're more anxious, you're less confident, you're less productive, you're making more mistakes, everything is just off. Everything is off, okay? And you start wondering, is it me? Am I burnt out? Am I experiencing that thing that people talk about online, like the big scary B word, burnout? Or is the issue this whack ass job and my whack ass boss? Who's the problem here? Is it them or is it me?

because they are two very different problems. Today's episode is dedicated to helping you figure out if this is burnout or if we should be burning a bridge with your employer. Cause this is a two lane road and you shan't be driving on both. We've got to figure out where you land, but you are listening to Clock In with Emily Durham. I hope y'all are doing well. am recording this episode from home. I've got like a nice little latte next to me. I'm not going to lie. It is officially mid April.

Why do I see snow coming out of my little window in downtown Toronto? Pretty disturbing. Pretty disturbing sight, but whatever. What are you going to do? We're going to keep today's episode hot while I am, I guess, just cold again in the city. What the hell? It's fine. It's fine. I'm very excited to talk about today's episode because it's something I've had so many questions come in about, but selfishly, it's something I've sat with a lot in my career. A lot of my peers, my friends, my clients, like it's just...

It's something a lot of us go through, especially in this working world where things move so quickly. And frankly, in a world where companies try to make us feel like we're always the problem. So we're just gonna break down exactly how to tell if it's an us thing or a them thing, and most importantly, how we're going to adjust and act accordingly. So let's clock on into it. And friendly reminder, if you want more career advice from me, I'm talking the advice that feels good, advice that's practical, quite funny if I do say so myself.

You're gonna love my debut book. It is currently on pre-order. It's called Clock In. Duh, absolutely love it. The link for that is in the description. And if you are keen to leave a rating and a review, it genuinely means the world. It's how the show grows. So if it's not too much trouble, it literally takes three seconds. You can do it right now as you're listening. In fact, I'll just patiently wait. Pre-apply my lip gloss. Okay, let's clock in.

So what is burnout? Burnout has become such a big phrase and a big term. It's become so sensationalized that to an extent it's kind of lost its meaning. But burnout is essentially a term used to describe feeling incredibly drained. Like you're constantly behind on work. It's the kind of sinking feeling that you're never going to catch up. It's an extreme degree of exhaustion. And above all, it's an exhaustion primarily caused by work.

Now this is a huge phenomenon, this isn't something that's necessarily new, but especially in light of the pandemic, god it feels like ancient talking about this, but it's still super relevant. In the pandemic, we actually started to see a massive shift of burnout culture. We started using the word burnout a lot more regularly, and this was largely because people were balancing their full-time jobs in addition to their homes, in addition to like the hellscape that was 2020, and people were incredibly

burnt out, they were exhausted, they were feeling sick. And the difference between burnout and just being tired or run down is burnout feels impossible to shake. It doesn't matter how much you're sleeping, you wake up tired. It doesn't matter how many plans you cancel, you're still going to dread the next. Like there is just this overarching sense of dread that doesn't go away. And it sticks with you a lot at work, but it follows you in every other element of your life.

You feel exhausted when you come home, you can't talk to your partner, you don't FaceTime the girls. You're exhausted, know, visiting family, everything is drained and you feel like nothing you do is going to help you get back to that place where you have full energy, where you have full health, where you're not constantly sick. So burnout isn't just a little period of exhaustion. How you can actually tell, great tell, is if it's burnout, it doesn't go away over the course of weeks. If you're tired, it should clear up in a couple of weeks with a little bit of rest.

But burnout is one of those things where it's like, doesn't matter how much rest you get, it just never feels like enough. It's actually become such a huge phenomenon that the World Health Organization has declared it a health emergency. It's actually such a huge phenomenon that the World Health Organization has been regularly talking about the impact of burnout. Do know how crazy that is for the World Health Organization to be concerned with work-based burnout so much so that it's becoming a

Emily Durham (04:54.862)

topic of conversation and investment. That's nuts. That is a sign of a crazy work culture, but let me stop. That's clearly another episode I need to cover. So that's burnout, okay? Burnout is internal depletion, even if it's in a healthy environment. Burnout is I can be anywhere and I feel zero out of 100, and on a good day, 10 out of 100. A toxic environment or a work environment that just isn't aligned to where you're at right now in your life.

that's external, it's conditions causing the burnout, not the actual volume of work and the overworking and the exhaustion. It's the actual environment that is causing this. The thing is burnout can happen in either of these cases. It can happen anywhere in any work environment, but a toxic environment creates burnout faster than you can typically recover from it. A great example of this is if you're burnt out in a job you love with good people.

You tell your boss, boss, I'm run down. What's the best way to treat burnout? Well, it's to take time off and to prevent it by regularly taking time off. In a healthy work environment, you're going to have a boss that says, friend, you better take your time off, even better. I had a boss like this, shout out to Reese from Intuit, you are just the bee's knees. He would come to me and be like, you haven't taken a day off in months. I'm like, I better see you take a day off. And it was never forceful, it was never like that, but he would say, you know what, you need to rest so you can actually unplug.

and he would encourage his entire team to do this so we could avoid burnout. So in a healthy environment where you're overworked and you're tired, you have the right people and the support for you to step away so it doesn't get to the extreme case that's very difficult to recover from. A toxic environment makes it almost impossible. You end up hearing things like, it's not a good time to take time off. You shouldn't be taking time off. If you just log a few more hours, what if you log in over the weekend? Like the culture doesn't make it easy.

And what a lot of people think, a lot of people think that burnout just comes from working a lot. It's from being overworked, having a lot on the go. And although that's definitely one of the core drivers, things like working overtime, thinking about work quite a bit, burnout can come from working regular hours, but having high intensity work. It can come from having a busy job, but also a very busy personal or family life. So there isn't one correct definition that means your burnout is valid.

Emily Durham (07:16.972)

If you are feeling burnt out and drained and you're listening to this episode going, my God, this is how I feel, that is valid. It doesn't need to fit into the cookie cutter, hustle culture. Everything needs to be on 10 and extreme in order for your feelings to be valid. Okay? So let's first look into the signs that it is an internal burnout. So you are burnt out as a person and it's not necessarily the job or the boss or the environment.

First things first, you are exhausted across all areas of life. It is not just work. The thought of getting dinner with the girls, you love the girls, but you don't have the energy to see them. Your mom calls, you don't have the energy to call back. You're hardly going to the gym. know, getting your meals prepped is really difficult. Every element of your life feels like a drain. Even the stuff that historically has filled your energy up. You used to love going to trivia with your friends and you're like, just can't do that. You're exhausted.

Another big sign is that your job prior to this feeling or this wave of burnout that you're experiencing, you generally described it as feeling okay. It felt aligned. Yeah, it would be stressful some days, but like nothing you were losing sleep over. You weren't incredibly stressed. Your Sundays weren't spent entirely in dread. You would have described your job prior to this wave of burnout as totally fine. It was totally fine. Another big sign is that you still feel respected and supported at work.

You know that people have your back. You know that if you told your boss you were overwhelmed, they would try to find solutions. But the big feeling you have isn't feeling disrespected. It's not feeling unsupported. It's just feeling overwhelmed. That's often a sign things are pointing to burnout, burnout that's internal. We as an individual are burnt out. You notice that many amounts of time off actually help. So you took a Thursday into Friday off, you feel a little bit better Monday. Not all the way, but you're like, okay, I kind of detached a little bit. The dread isn't there as much.

And your anxiety is more about capacity, how much you are able to get done. It's not about the people in the culture. You're stressed about the stuff you have to do, not the office you have to walk into. Your stress and anxiety is about how am going to do this and make it to this and do that and do this. It's not about, God, I can't face this person. God, I can't talk to this person. I can't handle sitting through lunch with them again. So it's more about the pace or the workload or...

Emily Durham (09:36.749)

how busy your personal life and your work life has gotten at the same time. Because lord, when it rains, pours. It's never like a quiet season of work where your personal life is like, what if you had six weddings to attend? By the way, it's $500 each. Look, it's how it always goes. So if it's the workload or the pace that is the issue and not necessarily the environment, that's typically a sign that you are experiencing burnout just from life. It doesn't mean this job is horrible. It doesn't mean this job is untenable.

It just means that there's a combination of things happening right now that are making you feel drained and that's okay and we'll get to how to handle that in just a second. But first, I want to talk about the signs that it's your work environment because how you fix the problem, this big feeling that you have is different based on if this is internal burnout or your external work environment. If it is your work environment, you feel on edge, either around everyone or specific people. It might be your boss, it might be a team member, whoever.

You've noticed that your confidence has noticeably dropped on this team. It's no longer just, I'm overwhelmed. It's, actually don't even know if I'm capable. This person thinks I'm stupid. I feel stupid. You start questioning your worth. So it's not capacity, it's worth questioning. You overthink everything. Your Slack messages, you know, did you spend too much time in the washroom this morning? Are you talking too much in a meeting? Did I say this? You're overthinking everything. You're also noticing that it doesn't matter what you do.

it feels like you can't win. Even if you do something great at work on Tuesday, you're convinced that the shoe was going to drop and something horrible is going to happen Wednesday. So that high from Tuesday doesn't stick. Whereas if it was internal burnout, that high from Tuesday would probably linger a day or two. You also notice that there's a lot of inconsistency, which is triggering this anxiety. Expectations of your job change regularly. Feedback is really vague. Like feels like every day is a different day.

Every day is your first day on this job. You're like, what the hell? Yesterday we were doing this, today we're doing that. Everything is up in the air all the time and you are constantly like clutching the sides of your seat wondering, what kind of boss do I have today? Am I a great employee or a piece of shit loser today? And it is a constant battle between the two. Burnout makes you tired, but a bad environment makes you question yourself.

Emily Durham (12:07.086)

So really sit with yourself for a second and think, where do I reasonably fall in? Before I quit my corporate job, I was having some very, very serious burnout. I talk about this a bit in the book and it just, it ragdolled my mental health. I was really going through it. I was crying every day. I was calling my dad, freaking out. It was just bad news bears. But when I sat with myself, I was aware it was very much internal burnout. I was trying to write a book.

work a corporate job, my dog has special care needs, I was as a person really drained and depleted. So I knew because it was a me thing, I had to look at all elements of my life. I started asking my friends for support. Hey, could you dog sit for me? Hey, I don't have the energy to go out for dinner, but I know socializing makes me feel better. Can you just come over and we watch Real Housewives of New York? Like, is that an option?

I started to evaluate all the different elements of my life that would eventually feed in to my overall sense of burnout. But the big thing obviously was work. Now, did I eventually quit my job? Sure did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I made it work for seven or eight months while experiencing burnout. The first thing I did is I took a week and a half off work, logged off, didn't check my emails because every single time you check your emails when you are not working, your brain goes back into work mode.

You're not fully unplugged. And although it feels like a small 30 second exercise where you're just like, I'm just quickly checking. No, you don't realize your brain switches from relax mode to activated. And it takes a long time to get out of that head space. And if you're doing that every single day, you are never truly unplugging and re-regulating your nervous system. So I started with doing that. I went to my boss. I said, I'm experiencing a bit of overwhelm right now.

I'm working probably like 60 hours a week. I need to figure this out. We ended up reallocating some projects. I got some administrative support. My workload became a lot more manageable. I also adjusted my working hours. I knew I felt a bit less overwhelmed for some reason, working from seven to three. I don't know, nine to five stressed me out. Seven to three was just better to me. So I started finding these different things to reduce the amount of burnout, but the big thing was,

getting some work off my plate, getting some support in my work life. So having, you know, a couple of people help me out with my actual day to day and getting that support in my personal life while actually relaxing and stepping away, it did mitigate my burnout quite a bit. I was able to sustain it for a little bit, but slowly it started to creep back up. And that's where you get to make the decision, is this sustainable? And for me, it wasn't. So I made the difficult decision to say, I can't do both. I can't do it all.

So if you're falling into the true burnout category, the first thing that you absolutely non-negotiable need to do is look at your capacity. Is there literally too much on your plate? If the answer is yes, go to your boss, communicate, hey, in order for me to accomplish all of this, this is how many hours a week I'm going to need to work. Is there any way we can re-prioritize some of this to make sure I get everything done? A good boss is gonna say, of course, I'll take this project off your plate, I'll give it to Suzy.

If you're totally stuck and for whatever like obscure reason, they cannot change your workload, maybe they can change the deadlines. You maybe this project isn't urgent. You can take some more time with it. There's always a solution when you frame it as let's re-prioritize. Let's make sure we get our priorities in check. That is like a huge, huge game changer. You don't say, it's too much. I can't handle it. You say it's a lot. How are we going to re-prioritize? That's how your boss is actually going to respond positively.

Next, once you get your actual workload settled a little bit, take time off. And I'm not talking one day, I'm talking minimum of three. If you have vacation days, use them. I want you rotting. I want you doing something that fills your cup up. I want day one, you to be on your couch, watching your favorite show. Day two, go do, I don't know, a little activity you love, get your nails done, go visit a friend, do stuff that isn't admin. Like do not, I don't wanna hear you.

going, don't know, to run errands. I want you to do stuff that fills your cup up and actually unplug. So when you get back to work, it's manageable, it's feasible, it's in the realm of possibility for you to actually recover a little bit. But the reality is the best way to avoid burnout and the best way to treat it is to prevent it. Regularly use your vacation or your sick days, Sick, fake it, who cares? Who's going to clock you? No one's going to check. Use that sick day once every few months. you've a migraine.

Mmm, cramps. Not time in a month, gotta go. I don't care what it is. Take a little bit of time to avoid burnout. All it is is little teeny weeny decisions that avoid this accumulative burnout. Now, if the issue is your work environment, you can treat the burnout, that's still important, but it's not gonna matter. If you treat burnout in a toxic work environment, the toxic work environment will always catch up to you faster.

I want you to document every single micro thing that is happening that is creating the toxic space. Is it nasty comments from certain people? Is it changing expectations? Is it insane workload? Or did you go to your boss and say, I'm overworked and they said, suck it up? That's a toxic work environment. Start documenting things because we often as people, especially people who listen to like career and personal development shows are very, very self-critical. So you're probably gaslighting yourself. you know, it's not that bad.

They didn't mean this. It's really not that difficult. You know, I can make it work. Document and write things down so you cannot talk yourself out of it or tell yourself that you should be okay with this. After a week, I want you to document for a week. Look back with fresh eyes on a Saturday, on a day you're not working, so you're not clouded, and really look at what's in front of you. Now, maybe what you're looking at isn't toxic. Maybe you're just having a rough week. Refer back to advice for option one, which is personal burnout.

But if you're reading this and you're like, ooh, this is kind of fucked up. Friend, we got to do something about this. What you're going to do is if you feel safe and you have the kind of boss that will be receptive, go to your boss and say, hey, I wanted to chat with you a bit about workflow. I've been feeling like I'm getting close to the point of burnout. I don't want to reduce my workload. I want to keep leaning into this team, but I've noticed and then insert the things you've noticed. Some expectations keep changing.

There's been some commentary from people on the team that have been harmful or, you know, that have given some mixed signals. Like ask about the specific situation from the frame of process. And I'll give you an example. Let's say you've got a teammate who's always changing expectations and it's ruining your life. So you sit down with your boss and you say, I just wanted to connect because I've been noticing some patterns and workflow that I really wanted to optimize. To be honest, to make sure that all of the work and all of our work lives are sustainable.

I've noticed when I work on the project team, some of the changes that are being made are happening last minute without documentation, which often leaves me working overtime and has been really difficult to sustain. I wanted to get your feedback on if there's anything I can change or if there's anything you recommend I do so that we can land in a more manageable workflow. What that is so politely saying is this isn't working. How can you help me make it work? A decent boss is going to say, yeah, that's not cool. Let's go talk to that team. Maybe you need more resourcing.

Maybe the technology's not working. Okay, I'll talk to this person. I've done this a thousand times. And when you frame it as a process question, typically you're cool. There's no issues, there's no concerns. However, if your boss is the problem, you can't frame it as easily. You can't say, hey, I'm working with this person and this is the issue. I need your opinion, even though that's the best way to do it when it's someone else. When it's your boss, fuck it's so much harder. It's so much harder because your boss gate keeps your whole relationship.

with the company. You need them in your corner so you can't go to them and say like, hey, you're kind of a dick, dude. It just is not going to work. So what I recommend doing is if your boss is the problem and you have to be so friggin' delicate with this, frame it and process again. You always want to frame it as like workflow, sustainability, growth. You never make it personal. You make it process based. You go to your boss, you set up a dedicated 20 minute meeting, say, hey, I just wanted to get your feedback.

I noticed when we've been working together, we've had quite a few requests come through after hours, which to be honest has been difficult for me to maintain and I just want to make sure I'm always delivering while making sure I don't burn out. What are your thoughts on my workflows or anything I can be doing better? You're basically clocking their shit in the nicest way possible. Again, a normal boss will take the hint, apologize, make it work. If they're like, no, you're doing great, which is the worst case scenario, because what do you mean? That's where you double down and you say,

That's really good to hear. I appreciate that. To be totally transparent, the workflow right now has been hard for me to manage and maintain just because a lot's happening after hours or you insert your reasoning. Is there anything we can do to get closer to like a more sustainable flow here? And that's the way you can actually co-build a solution. Come to this conversation with potential solutions. If they're like constantly emailing you after hours, maybe say at three o'clock, is it good for us to have a 15 minute standup meeting together where I run things by you?

it prevents them from sending the panic email at 5 p.m. Like these are just some of the things, but if you have examples of what a potential solution could look like, and you go into that conversation leading with asking for feedback, chances are you're going to be able to co-create something that doesn't feel argumentative or aggressive or disrupt your relationship, but preserves that work-life balance that you have. If you're still on the fence listening to this, the best way...

to navigate and figure out what's going on is to keep a tracker and do that for a minimum one week and then spent an unbiased day reviewing what is on that tracker of behavior. Every single time you have a moment of, I feel like shit, I feel dread, feel burnt out, I don't feel like myself, write down what's happening. If you're noticing that your tracker is totally like, there's no pattern. It's before you go see your girlfriends, it's random points throughout the workday, it's just a constant sense of exhaustion.

That's probably internal burnout that needs to be treated with you time self care and better work life balance habits overall. If you're noticing it's triggered by specific things, it's Sunday night, you're thinking about work, you just had a meeting with that one coworker, you're walking by this one person, right down every single time this feeling pops up. If the trigger is external, it's probably your work environment. And if it's internal, it's something we just need to create better boundaries around.

This whole episode was actually inspired by this incredible listener question. Shout out to a question being so incredible, it had to get a whole episode, not just a what would Emily do, but it was, how do you know whether you're just burnt out and anxious in a challenging role or whether your work environment has become unhealthy enough that it's affecting your performance and confidence? If you're asking yourself that question, please, please, please lean into that tracker, look at the data.

Data is very unbiased, right? And if you're feeling really, really stuck, talk to a friend, be like, hey, this is what's happening. Does this ever happen for you? And you might notice like, okay, this is just the industry I chose. For example, for me, working in investment banking would be toxic. It would be. If I were an investment banker, my experience of that industry would be toxic. People regularly raise voices. They get a bit aggressive. It's just a different world. To me, yeah.

That's really toxic. I can't handle that. I'm a crybaby. But to someone else, it's not. So there's also the reality that sometimes the industry we select is a mismatch for our needs and personality. I am best equipped for like a tech, a more corporate space of finance. Like I just know my personality. So sometimes we look at the pattern and maybe it's normal for the industry, but we've learned that's also not the industry we want to rock with. And there's nothing wrong with that.

My beautiful friends, thank you so much for listening and thank you to everyone who submits questions, especially to the fabulous listener who submitted this one. If you have questions you want me to answer on the show, don't be shy, please get in there. I always leave a link to do that in the description of this episode or of every episode. I actually redid my website and she looks so thinking cute. So the link now to do that is in the website. It's adorable. It's a very retro pink. don't know, the woman I hired to do this was so freaking good. She just got the vibe.

But thank you so much for listening. I so appreciate you and I will talk to you in the next episode.