Is burnout really just loneliness in disguise?
While discussions about burnout typically center on workload management and better boundaries, Josie Santi proposes that it may just be loneliness and a lack of interpersonal engagement.
The holistic health coach reframes burnout not as a productivity issue but as a “disconnection crisis,” particularly among millennial and Gen Z professionals.
“When I was dealing with burnout, I thought what a lot of us think: I need to have more structure. I need to set more boundaries with work. I need to have more me time,” she said. “I had the perfect morning routine. I added all the wellness habits, and I was still feeling so depleted. What I learned was I didn’t need more structure — I needed to laugh. I needed to play.”
“Disconnection — from our bodies, our teams, even the structure of our own days — is at the heart of so much of what we call burnout,” said Melissa Painter, a workplace behavior strategist and founder of the well-being platform Breakthru, which is used by companies like Microsoft, PwC and Walmart to help employees manage stress, improve focus, and feel more connected to themselves and each other throughout the work day.
“It’s not just about too much work — it’s about not enough recovery, not enough agency and not enough meaningful interaction,” she said.
“Burnout and loneliness are often treated as separate issues, but they share the same roots: broken relational dynamics at work,” said Dan Pelton, clinical psychologist and author of the forthcoming book Rethinking Employee Resilience. He added, “When employees feel unseen or excluded, they don’t just burn out — they withdraw. This fuels loneliness, which then reinforces disengagement. It’s not laziness or fragility — it’s a protective response to a system that’s stopped caring.”
As Mental Health Awareness Month approaches, all this may lead HR managers to ask whether traditional workplace wellness benefits are truly addressing the root cause of employee distress.
In a recent episode of her “The Everygirl Podcast,” Santi interviewed clinical psychologist Jody Carrington, whose provocative quote — “Self-care is a waste of fucking time if you’re doing it with your shoulders up” — directly challenges the well-worn corporate approach to wellness solutions, which could end up adding more pressure versus relieving it. As Carrington put it in the podcast, “We’ve never been this disconnected in the history of the free world.”
“Self-care, how we think of it, is actually stressing us out more,” Santi said, noting that our culture has commodified self-care to the point that it’s more about what books and other products you need to buy versus what you need to put into practice. “It’s asking yourself every single day: What do I need to do today?” she said.
Santi rejects the idea of work-life balance, arguing that they are not, in fact, disparate concepts. “Your life outside of work impacts your career, and your career impacts your life outside of work — they are interconnected,” she said.
Santi proposes a more holistic approach, one that equates the level of energy one invests in one’s work life and home life. She suggests creating opportunities for empathy building in the workplace, fostering genuine connections with colleagues that go beyond just work matters, and recognizing “micro-moments of connection” — waving to a neighbor or asking the barista how his day is going.
And she advises, give the smartphone a rest. Carving out device-free times of day, particularly at night, serves not only to instill peace and quiet but to beat back artificial connections. “We wake up in the morning, we check our emails, our texts, scroll through Instagram, and we’re feeling this artificial sense of connection that’s not actually fulfilling us,” she said.
“What people need isn’t more content or more to-dos on their list,” seconds Painter. “They need more permission — permission to pause, to step away, to move, to reset. And ideally, to do it with others.”