Are you over 30, and finding yourself in burnout cycles that seem to keep coming, no matter how hard you work at the ‘work-life balance’? Millennial burnout is becoming more and more common, so let’s look at what might be causing it in your life, and what you can do about it.

I want you to know that you’re not fated to be stuck like this forever, and there are definitely steps you can take to get out of this burnout loop. 

You might be seeing cycles of burnout where you push really hard and then feel like all that push has gone. You might be driven to achieve a promotion at work, manage your team, organise your family holiday, manage the household, the kids and the redecorating. But you slip into high anxiety, low mood, lack of energy, and slip between the two, high push, big fallout. 

You’re not on your own – loads of millennials are struggling. Mental Health UK published The Burnout Report last year (2025), with 9 in 10 adults experiencing high pressure or stress, with figures showing an increase in millennials needing time off work due to poor mental health. (Orpwood, 2025) This isn’t something you can ignore anymore – it’s causing noticeable issues and interrupting your ability to do life!

If you’re deep in burnout, you know this isn’t the same as being stressed. It’s not that you’re just a bit tired or overdoing it slightly. You’re struggling to connect with anything, and you’re feeling detached and demotivated. The constant pressure from work or life responsibilities as a caregiver, parent, or even living with a chronic illness can pile up. Burnout often happens when the demands exceed your resources. 

You didn’t choose to feel burnt out. It’s not something you’ve done – often, there’s a pattern at play, and patterns have origins. 

What is causing millennial burnout?

Despite being a generation with staggeringly good self-awareness, millennials like you are also facing rollercoasters in all areas of life! Things like unstable economies, job markets, and let’s not even think about housing. The extreme ups and downs of your millennial life, along with sky-high expectations as offspring and spouses like never before, it makes sense that it might all feel a bit too much. 

Burnout can feel like you’re completely depleted. You might not notice it creeping on; it can arrive slowly, feeling a little more tired than usual. You might feel like no matter how much sleep you get, it’s still not quite enough. You might know ‘all of the things’ you ‘should be doing’ to feel good and still work at your peak performance level, but nothing feels like it’s working? You might have even started to bargain with yourself that if you ‘just’ work a little longer, later or more efficiently, that it’ll all be okay. But it’s not okay, is it? 

There are lots of different theoretical approaches you could explore, but if you consider the way you think, feel, behave as being affected by our unconscious/subconscious thoughts – like software…

How does burnout develop?

Burnout is often only thought of something from a work environment – too much work, too much pressure, not enough time out, but it can be a combination of work pressures, along with life responsibilities, caring or parental stress all adding up with little time to relax, release stress or internal feeling as though there isn’t any break away from the stress.

In millennials, you may well have been primed to work hard from childhood. The children of Gen-X and baby boomers alike, you grew up hearing phrases like: 

• “You just need to apply yourself”

• “You just need to save”

• “You just need to work hard” 

• “Get a good job”

But you might find that when the successful, happy life you envisioned potentially doesn’t feel as easy as imagined, the pressure piles up. The subconscious and unconscious beliefs that you “should” just be able to do all of the things that the generations before you managed to do in a very different world can add to a level of shame and stress. 

You aren’t alone, Anne Helen Peterson writes about the idea that you’ve become a “work robot” in her book “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” (Anne Helen Petersen, 2022) and Dr Amy Shah’s “I’m So Effing Tired” addresses the nutritional pains of millennials trying to beat burnout (Shah, 2021). 

These subconscious and unconscious belief systems can add to the core beliefs and drivers that are propelling you forward through life – whether they are helpful or unhelpful beliefs, they’re in there, as part of your hard-wiring or software, if you will! 

When that stress is getting higher and higher, and you don’t have the resources to be able to put that fire out, burnout can take hold. This is where the ‘software’ and underlying thinking and belief patterns could be causing burnout. 

Signs of burnout in adults

You might find that you are:

• Losing interest in everyday activities that you’d normally enjoy

• Consistently and constantly tired

• Lacking motivation to show up for life/work/responsibilities

• Can’t find enjoyment in everyday life, everything feels harder

• Struggle to look forward to anything – even things you’d normally be excited about

• Feeling anxious more often than not – this might come out as being irritable, snappy, unable to switch off

You might feel like life has been put on ‘hard mode’, even doing things that you’d normally breeze through. Interactions feel like wading through mud; time seems to have either slowed down or dramatically sped up. There’s no ability to get back in gear despite repeated attempts.

It could be that you normally love a family day out and spending time together, but a sign of burnout creeping in could be that you feel yourself pulling back. You might feel like, suddenly, you can’t imagine doing that. You might struggle to feel connected to the people you love the most. 

How does burnout affect relationships?

Burnout can be tempting to ignore, and you might even hear people joking that they’ve ‘just got a bit of burnout’, or they feel like they’re ‘burning out again’ – but if left unattended, burnout can be recurrent and take longer and longer to recover from. 

Relationships can become strained when one person is experiencing difficulties like going through burnout. It can increase tension with feelings of high stress, irritability, or a lack of connection. If you find yourself struggling to manage your usual responsibilities, it’s important to reach out to a partner or family member for support. These dynamics can significantly affect your relationships.

Withdrawing from people and being more isolated will naturally impact your relationships, along with procrastinating and feeling alone in the world – all symptoms of burnout. You might also find that you start to take your frustrations out on the people around you. 

If you’re reading this and thinking Woaah! There is hope. 

Can burnout be dealt with?

Burnout is a collection of symptoms; it’s not who you are. The symptoms have underlying causes or triggers, which means that they can often be solved with a few steps. 

Sometimes this can take a little bit of time to evaluate what is leading you to burnout, and how you have found yourself where you are. You can look at what you can do to alleviate the worst of your symptoms and start to feel better. That’s often the simplest part. 

What takes a little more time is uncovering the software that isn’t helpful – how has that got there, and how can you ‘rewrite the coding’ that will enable you to have a healthier, happier future that doesn’t result in you having a full ‘system crash’ every 6 months or so! 

That could look like having continued support, mapping out new habits that enable you to manage your stress or workload more efficiently – whether that’s at a job or at home in your family life. You might realise that you’re lacking social connection and feeling really alone is impacting how you feel about carrying all of your responsibilities alone, and that with having more connection, you feel less isolated in general. There are so many different things that may be unique to you and your situation, but talking it through could be really helpful. 

Taking steps to address burnout could mean that you spot the signs quicker. You can take action in future to ensure it doesn’t reach such a bad point again. Everyone is different, and you may face feeling burnout again, but developing a set of tools and solutions that you can put in place can prevent it and reduce the impact.

If, as you read this, you feel like you were nodding your head along with the software analogy, you might also want to read this post about childhood. 

Or you can download this free guide on childhood emotional neglect here if you’re wondering if your burnout might be linked to that. 

If you’re at the end of this blog post and nodding your head, you’re not alone. Burnout can feel like it’s thrown around like a badge of honour; a sort of masochistic “Look how hard I work”. If you aren’t feeling good about it, or are worried you’re heading in that direction and want to talk about it, book a free discovery call, just click on the button below. 

Author bio: Hannah Campbell is a psychotherapist based in Southend-on-Sea, working online and in person. She specialises in trauma and childhood emotional neglect.

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