Beyond the Grind: Escaping America’s Culture of Burnout

Hustle, always on, rise and grind – keeping up with the workaholics is overwhelming. Chasing success can feel like running on an endless treadmill, and it’s exhausting! But we don’t have to be trapped in this cycle. Enter Kristen Donnelly and Erin Hinson, authors of “The Culture of Burnout: Why Your Exhaustion is Not Your Fault.” This book invites readers to dismantle our pervasive burnout culture and pave the way to a more balanced working life.

What is your book about?

America has a culture of burnout. This country is built on and continues to perpetuate the idea that a person’s worth comes only from hard work, that rest is a wasteful indulgence, that exhaustion is a personal failure instead of a cultural inevitability and that good health starts and stops with physical fitness. We are also inundated with the message that there is only “one right way” to find well-being.

This book explores that culture of burnout: how we got here; why burnout is so hard to escape from; how workplace wellness programs, generational differences, gender roles, the Puritans, and a 24-hour news cycle got us into this mess; and how empathy, boundaries, and cultivating holistic well-being can move us towards a culture of balance instead.

Topics include:

1. What is Burnout?
2. The Soup We Swim In: How America’s History Created a Culture of Burnout
3. Our Culture of Burnout: Where We Stand Now
4. Solutions: Moving Forward to a Culture of Balance

Why should people read it? Who is the book for?

This book will help those living in a state of burnout understand how they got here and how they can escape. It will guide those in a position of authority or leadership to create a path forward for developing a culture of balance in their organization, where their team members feel valued and supported as entire individuals with individual needs, individual work styles and individual ways of performing self-care. It will help all Americans reassess the assumptions they make about the value of hard work, what it means to be lazy, if “wellness” is worth the price tag, and how to avoid falling into the pit of burnout themselves.

This book is for anyone who has ever felt exhausted right down to their core and wished that there was a better way.

Single most important takeaway:

Our culture of burnout means that we are all, collectively, fostering an environment that breeds exhaustion, disconnection and a sense of personal failure. If we can, instead, move to a culture of balance, we can foster an environment that supports growth, comfort, safety and community. The first step to that is understanding.

Meet the author

Kristen Donnelly and Erin Hinson are two best friends, giant nerds and The Good Doctors of Abbey Research. They both completed their PhDs at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, then returned to Pennsylvania, where they both now live, to begin work as authors, speakers, educators and corporate trainers.