Written By Dr. Teralyn Sell, PhD | Brain Health & Cognitive Performance
In September 2021, I contributed to a Forbes article about workplace burnout, particularly among healthcare professionals. Five years later, my work in burnout and brain health has reinforced something I said then: knowing your limits matters. But I’ve also become increasingly interested in how perception, personal expectations, and the attitudes of people around us influence our experience of work.
But there’s another part of the burnout conversation I think deserves more attention: the difference between what’s happening in our environment, how we interpret what’s happening, and how much of that interpretation is influenced by the people around us.
We’ve become very comfortable talking about burnout as a workplace problem. Sometimes it absolutely is. Poor leadership, unrealistic expectations, inadequate staffing, and excessive demands can create conditions that are difficult to sustain.
But I don’t believe every experience of workplace burnout can be explained entirely by the employer.
And I think we’re missing something important when we assume it can.
Knowing Your Limits Is Still Your Responsibility
One of the recommendations I discussed in the original Forbes article was recognizing personal limits.
That advice hasn’t changed.
We all have limits on our time, attention, energy, and cognitive capacity. Those limits aren’t identical from person to person, and they aren’t necessarily consistent from one period of life to another.
Someone managing significant responsibilities outside of work may have less capacity available for professional demands. Another person may be comfortable with a workload that someone else finds exhausting.
Neither experience automatically tells us whether the workplace itself is unreasonable.
It tells us that human capacity varies.
The difficulty begins when we assume that because something feels overwhelming, the demands themselves must be objectively excessive.
Sometimes they are.
Other times, the problem may involve how we’ve allocated our capacity, the expectations we’ve placed on ourselves, or our willingness to acknowledge that we’ve reached a limit.
Knowing your limits requires more than recognizing exhaustion. It requires examining the decisions and expectations that contributed to it.
How Much of Your Workplace Experience Is Actually Yours?
Here’s something I’ve become increasingly interested in: how much our perception of an environment is shaped by the people around us.
Think about a workplace where one employee is consistently dissatisfied.
Every new policy is a problem. Every decision by management is interpreted negatively. Even relatively ordinary inconveniences become evidence that the organization doesn’t care about its employees.
Now imagine spending eight hours a day listening to that interpretation.
Does it eventually influence what you notice?
Do you begin looking for the same problems?
Does an otherwise manageable inconvenience start to feel like another example of everything that’s wrong?
Psychology gives us several ways to examine this, including social influence, emotional contagion, selective attention, and cognitive appraisal.
Our experiences don’t occur independently of the people around us. The interpretations we hear repeatedly can influence how we evaluate our own circumstances.
That doesn’t mean the complaints are necessarily wrong.
It means repetition and agreement are not the same as evidence.
A workplace can develop a culture of dissatisfaction even when employees are responding to different circumstances. And a genuinely dysfunctional workplace can also have employees who interpret or tolerate those conditions differently.
Both possibilities deserve examination.
Perception Matters. So Does Reality.
I think we need to be careful here.
Acknowledging the role of perception is not the same as suggesting that people can simply think their way out of unreasonable working conditions.
Some workplaces really are poorly managed. Some expectations are unrealistic. Some organizations place demands on employees that cannot be sustained without consequences.
Those conditions should not be dismissed as attitude problems.
But the opposite assumption deserves scrutiny, too.
Feeling dissatisfied does not automatically establish that an employer is responsible for that dissatisfaction.
Our interpretation of an experience matters because it influences what we pay attention to, how we evaluate our options, and the decisions we make next.
When we assign responsibility too quickly, we may overlook information that would lead to a better conclusion.
Burnout and the Limits of Cognitive Capacity
My work today places greater emphasis on brain health, cognitive performance, and human capacity.
That has added another dimension to how I think about burnout.
The brain is not an unlimited resource. Sustained demands on attention, decision-making, and cognitive effort can affect performance, particularly when adequate recovery is missing.
But workload is only part of the picture.
Sleep, nutrition, physical health, responsibilities outside of work, individual expectations, and workplace relationships can all influence how someone functions under pressure.
This is why I hesitate to reduce burnout to a single explanation.
Two people may work in the same environment and experience it very differently. That difference is worth understanding rather than immediately interpreting it as evidence that one person is stronger or that the other has been treated unfairly.
The better question is what accounts for the difference.
And we should be willing to examine more than one possibility.
What I Would Add to My Forbes Advice Today
I still believe in recognizing your limits. I still believe in paying attention to nutrition, recovery, and the demands we place on ourselves.
But I would add a stronger emphasis on examining our interpretations before reaching conclusions.
When work becomes frustrating or exhausting, there are several questions worth separating.
What is actually being asked of me?
Are those expectations reasonable?
Have my own expectations or boundaries contributed to the problem?
Am I responding to my direct experience, or have I adopted someone else’s interpretation of what’s happening?
And what evidence would cause me to reconsider my conclusion?
These questions don’t excuse employers from responsibility.
They prevent us from assuming we already know where responsibility belongs.
The Question Worth Asking
Burnout is commonly discussed as though the central task is identifying who or what is to blame.
I think that can become a distraction from understanding the problem accurately.
A demanding workplace is not necessarily a dysfunctional workplace. And a dysfunctional workplace does not affect every employee in exactly the same way.
Our limits matter. Our environment matters. Our interpretations matter.
So does our ability to distinguish among them.
Before concluding that work is the problem, I think it’s worth asking a more difficult question:
Am I evaluating what’s actually happening, or what I’ve come to believe is happening?
The distinction can change how we understand the problem—and the decisions that follow.
About the Original Forbes Interview
This commentary revisits my contribution to Bryan Robinson’s September 23, 2021 Forbes article, 4 Tips for Addressing Burnout in the Workplace and Health Care Settings.
Read the original Forbes article.
About the Author
Dr. Teralyn Sell, PhD, works at the intersection of psychology, brain health, and cognitive performance. Her commentary examines human capacity, psychiatric medication decision-making, informed consent, and the role of evidence and interpretation in judgment under uncertainty.
Learn more at DrTeralyn.com.