How to cope with emptiness and burnout at work: returning meaning You come to work, sit at your desk, open your laptop — and inside there is a void. You no longer feel anger, irritation, or even fatigue in the usual sense. You simply perform actions mechanically, which once seemed important, but now remind you of running in circles. This state is called professional burnout, but its main symptom is not fatigue, but a loss of meaning. When work stops being a part of your life, turning into an endless chain of tasks, that very emptiness sets in, from which you want to run away, but have nowhere to go. How to deal with it and can you regain the feeling that your work matters? The nature of emptiness: why work stops filling you Emptiness at work is not laziness or weakness. It is a signal that the connection between your actions and their results, between your efforts and their recognition, has been broken. Psychologists call this "the syndrome of meaninglessness." When we do not see how our work affects others, when we are not noticed, when tasks are repeated without development, the brain stops producing dopamine — the hormone of motivation. We continue to work, but we no longer enjoy it. This is especially acute in professions where the result is not obvious or delayed in time. Office staff, managers, freelancers — all those who work with information, not with material objects — are more likely to encounter this problem. Their work is invisible, it is difficult to measure, and therefore it is often devalued — both by others and by the workers themselves. Another reason for emptiness is the gap between a person's values and the values of the organization. When you work for a company that declares one thing but does another, or when your personal goals do not match those of your boss, an internal conflict arises. It may be unconscious, but it exhausts the resource and creates that very emptiness that fills the entire workplace. Burnout as a consequence: when emp ... Read more