When Burnout Gets to You, Here's How to Turn the Heat Back On

As much as people wish to express their authentic selves, adult life often demands exactly the opposite. You may feel that you’re just going through the motions from dawn to dusk (or later), and as the days go by, wonder if you can recapture the zest that used to energize you. Life is full of routines and obligations, but worse, situations in which you have to put on a false front. You smile when you’re feeling miserable at either your coworkers or friends because you don’t want anyone to guess what’s going on inside of you.

Making things worse, you may be in a job that requires you to be cheerful, friendly, and polite, even when people don’t treat you all that kindly. Anyone who has to maintain an interface with the public can relate to this unpleasant and stressful set of feelings.

Emotional Labor and Burnout

In an ideal social situation, you can behave naturally, adapting your expression of emotions in a way consistent with how you’re feeling and what’s happening around you. Most social situations don’t operate that way, however. You have to adapt some sort of set of expectations. Those jobs involving a public posture are particularly high in these demands. Much of the time, you can at least be a bit relaxed, knowing that your ordinary social skills will be enough to allow you to maintain a balance between what you’re feeling and how you’re supposed to act. When these are in conflict, that’s when problems can arise.

A new study by Universität Innsbruck’s Bettina Lampert and Severin Hornung (2025) examines this dilemma in the context of emotional labor at work. The product of “surface acting” (putting on a fake front of friendliness), emotional labor is particularly likely to occur in jobs within the health and social sectors (e.g., teaching, nursing, counseling). “Client interactions,” they point out, “can be characterized as complex, individualized and emotionally demanding…" requiring “effective regulation of feelings and emotional expression.” Not only do you have to be “nice” in these jobs, but you also have to ensure that your emotions don’t leak out and create unintended negative consequences. Imagine if a teacher screamed at a student who passed notes in class. That teacher would not last long in the position, and for good reason.

If emotional labor is endemic to these occupational fields, is there anything people can do to find an end run around it? In some ways, you could argue that these jobs may carry a certain burden with them, but they also permit a certain degree of autonomy. You can usually operate within a range of latitude (minus the screaming), particularly since jobs in this sector call on your own unique skill set. Could this help reduce emotional labor?

Testing a Resource Theory of Burnout

A useful theory that can inform the study of burnout is that of conservation of resources (COR), which views emotional exhaustion as the absence or loss of resources. Two in particular, according to Lambert and Hornung, are job autonomy and intrapersonal detachment. Having some control over what you do at work is a key resource because it allows you to behave the way you want to and not how someone tells you to. Intrapersonal detachment may seem to be a paradoxical resource, but it can help people cope with burnout by giving them a sense of professional distance. You can look at a touchy situation with whoever you’re helping not as a personal attack on you, but as an interaction with a “client.”

Although prior research has suggested the importance of both of these sets of resources, there are few or no studies using anything other than a correlational approach. The Austrian author team suggests that it’s only through a longitudinal study, in which these proposed relationships are studied over time, that greater confidence can be placed in the findings.

With a sample that included online and paper-and-pencil participants, the authors collected data from 220 human service workers (average age = 38 years), including teachers, psychologists, physicians, social workers, speech therapists, and nurses or related professions. The participants completed three surveys over two months.

Here is an idea of what questions were included in the measures:

• Job autonomy: “My work offers discretion on how to do my work.”
• Intrapersonal detachment scale: “I manage to set personal boundaries between myself and my clients at work.”
• Surface acting: “I pretend to have emotions that I don’t really have.”
• Emotional exhaustion: “I feel emotionally drained from my work.”

After subjecting the data to a complex, “lagged” (across time) analysis, the authors found support for COR’s predictions. Specifically, participants reporting higher levels of job autonomy were less likely to experience emotional exhaustion due to a reduction in their reported levels of surface acting. As the authors concluded, “high autonomy may directly and indirectly prevent a chain of resource losses, in terms of a progressive depletion of personal well-being.”

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Interpersonal detachment also played a role, in accordance with predictions, in reducing emotional exhaustion. However, support for this burnout-reducing factor only showed up on the second follow-up, six weeks into the study. The authors attribute this result to the idea that it might take time for this strategy to reduce exhaustion risk. Over this time, there could be variations that were missed with the study design, in which some days were higher in emotional burden/surface acting than others.

How to Turn the Heat Back Up When Burnout Threatens

Whether at work or in your personal life, the need to put on a false front can thwart your desire to show your true self. The Innsbruck U. study suggests that maybe the trick is to think about how to find a balance. To get started, you can see if there are ways to adapt what you’re doing so that you’re not merely following someone else’s orders. Is there wiggle room to express more autonomy and control?

Next, adopt the mindset that, even if the people you are supposed to help or serve are rude to you, this isn’t a personal attack. Maintaining your distance can allow you to feel less “got at.”

The ultimate resource, however, may have to do with your own expression of emotions. Sometimes, giving yourself a break from a situation can be all that it takes.

To sum up, emotional exhaustion doesn’t have to accompany every situation in which you can’t act “like yourself.” Understanding that a false front can be draining can help you set your own path to the fulfillment of expressing the self that lies behind the mask.