Humans are not machines. If you pull the exact same lever the exact same way for months, you will get a repetitive stress injury in your arm and shoulder. The same is also true of your brain. You don’t eat exactly the same thing for breakfast every day. You don’t wear the same shirt every day or watch the same movie every weekend. Sometimes – just sometimes – you take a different route home just to see the view. The little choices we make are what define us – and what keeps us interested in life. So, when you lack autonomy and the ability to choose what you do every day at work, you experience burnout and limited autonomy.

The Connection Between Burnout and Autonomy
  • Repetition
  • Micromanagement
  • Tunnel-vision

Lack of autonomy means that you do not have the ability to make choices about your own actions. This most often happens in a person’s job, but it can also happen with a demanding home life. Autonomy is what we are teaching children when we model how to make good decisions and encourage them to complete projects on their own. This builds self-esteem and a sense of self-empowerment.

When your ability to make decisions and affect the world around you is denied through a restrictive job and the demands of others, you lose that sense of self-empowerment and – with it – your ability to care about the world you can’t change. Burnout is the grayed-out state you enter where nothing matters, and your life begins to deteriorate as a result.

Lack of autonomy can cause this kind of burnout in three very distinct and recognizable ways: repetition, micromanagement, and tunnel vision.

Repetition: Burnout Comes From a Lack of Growth

Burnout is when you are so tired of your job that it starts to affect other aspects of your life. For example, it affects your mental health or work performance. You might say, “Hey, everyone is bored of working”, but that’s not actually true.

People are very much capable of being interested, engaged, and even excited about their jobs every day. This happens when you are doing work you care about, using skills as you develop them, and working toward a goal all at the same time. Your job may have started that way, but far too many roles are the mental equivalent of lever-pulling. Fill out X form, enter X data, send X emails, rinse, repeat.

It’s no wonder if your eyes start to cross. If your feet start to drag on your way to the car. If your active, evolving mind wonders when you’re doing the same-old rinse repeat – that means you’re human! Not a robot, not a lever, not a data-entering machine, phone answering, or inventory stocking machine.

Micromanagement: Your Boss Crushes Self-Empowerment

When your boss crushes your process and steals your thunder at every turn, you get burnout. A person feels motivated by their job when they use their skills to make decisions and can be proud of the result. But if there’s someone at your elbow saying “place that” and “Change that title” and “Tell the client exactly this” or “I see your mouse stopped moving for 5 minutes, what were you doing?”

This kind of management isn’t just rude. It doesn’t just make you want to scream. It actively crushes your ability to thrive, grow, or experience any self-empowerment whatsoever. Micro-managing bosses often take credit because they micro-edit your work after you do the meat of the work. These bosses subtly accuse their team members of wasting time and inefficiency. Then, suggest they lack the competence not to be micro-managed.

Frustration and inability to take your own actions or feel your own success can very quickly turn into apathy and the dangerous, angry, kind of burnout. But there are options.

Learn more in Burnout and Limited Autonomy: What You Can Do to Get Free – Pt 2