When Every Struggle Gets a Label

No time to read? Click play to listen

If you’ve been following me here for a while, you’ll know I’ve been deep in the research on burnout.

I’m close to sharing a comprehensive report, probably in my next newsletter, because the business case for tackling burnout is now too strong to ignore. We’ve reached the point where it is both cheaper and more effective to address it properly than to let it linger. Quite apart from psychosocial obligations and compliance, it simply makes good business sense.

What has become clear is that burnout does not look the same across an organisation. Senior leaders, middle managers, and frontline team members tend to experience very different pressures and pathways into it. It is not a one-size-fits-all problem.

But something else has stood out to me as well.

Burnout has become a catch-all term.
In fact, lots of words have.

We seem to be living in a time where every difficult feeling, every uncomfortable personality, and every event of overwhelm gets wrapped in a psychological or cultural label.

Burnout would technically mean chronic workplace exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced effectiveness. But sometimes the term is used and means, quite simply, I’m not coping.

Anxiety may be a clinical condition. Or it may be someone saying, life feels too much right now.

Depression is not the same as feeling low for a day. Bullying is not every uncomfortable interaction or feedback conversation. Not every self-centred person is a narcissist. Not every preference, quirk, or difficulty means neurodivergence.

I’m not saying people are making it up. Far from it.

It means that even when the label is inaccurate, the distress underneath it may be very real.

And that is the part we must not miss.

When someone says they are burnt out, anxious, bullied, depressed, traumatised, or overwhelmed, our first job is not to police the language. Our first job is to hear what sits underneath it:

I’m struggling.
I’m not okay.
Something about this is not working.

For leaders, this matters. We do not need to become counsellors or chaplains, but we do need to get better at listening beneath the label. Better at separating pathology from pressure, diagnosis from distress, and identity from immediate need.

Because the word might be wrong, but the pain may still be real.

I’ll be sharing more of my burnout research with you very soon, including why this has become such an urgent leadership, performance, and retention issue.