Burnout is like Tinder
#72: About spotting red flags leading to burnout in a workplace
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Happy 2026!
And welcome to our first-ever guest post!
This one was thoughtfully put together by our long-time friend, Alicja Białek (Burnout, Unburdened).
We first met Alicja a decade ago. We worked together at an agency where she was a Project Manager. After all this time as a PO and Delivery Manager, she recently switched careers to become a Transformation Coach for a large corporation and a burnout and executive coach for individuals.
Today, Alicja will talk about burnout.
This is the beginning of the year, and it feels like a lot of our resolutions revolve around getting our relationship with work in place. It has become our little tradition to publish an article about this absolutely vital topic, which is mental health, in January – don’t forget to check last year’s article on how to avoid burnout after reading this masterpiece from Alicja!
Burnout is like Tinder
Let me guess: you’ve already got your 2026 resolution list ready. Maybe it’s finally sticking to that gym routine. Deleting Slack from your phone. Setting a hard boundary at 6 PM—no more “quick sync” calls that somehow stretch until 8.
I’m cheering for you. I really am.
At the same time, I know that a gym subscription won’t fix your burnout if your design team is chronically understaffed. That meditation app won’t help if your stakeholders keep moving the goalposts mid-sprint. That “no meetings after 6” boundary won’t stick if saying no means you’re labeled “not a team player.”
I am saying all of this to demonstrate that there is a narrative that fixing burnout is on us. That if we just optimize ourselves enough, wake up earlier, meditate harder, set firmer boundaries—we’ll finally feel better and work better without burning out.
And I’m here to lift that weight off your shoulders: it’s not all your fault.
The exhaustion you feel after another round of “just one more iteration”? Not your fault.
The cynicism that’s crept in after watching your best design work get watered down in stakeholder review? Not your fault.
The growing sense that no matter how many pixels you perfect, it doesn’t actually matter? Not. Your. Fault.
You might be wondering why a burnout coach is showing up in your design newsletter. Fair question. Here’s why: I spent years watching talented designers completely burn out. Not because they weren’t creative enough or they couldn’t handle feedback on their work, but because the systems they worked in were fundamentally broken.
Designers are particularly vulnerable to burnout as their work is deeply personal yet constantly critiqued. You’re asked to be both wildly creative and rigidly systematic. You’re expected to advocate for users while stakeholders advocate for revenue. That’s not a design challenge you signed up for. This is where the erosion that might lead to burnout often starts. It’s not a fun destination. I’ve been there. It forced me to stay off work for 10 months, onto antidepressants, but ultimately, towards a complete redefinition of how I see myself.
What is burnout, exactly?
Look, the internet has plenty of definitions. “Chronic workplace stress.” “Loss of motivation.” “Persistent exhaustion.”
Technically accurate, completely unhelpful.
Here’s what burnout actually looks like for designers (taken from THIS Reddit chain):
Without going through all the details... new director, ultra demanding, workaholic, expected people to answer phones at 10pm, work until the job was done type...
Basically, after some 18 months of more and more being added to the pile, the only reward being more work, having to boon annual leave just to work undisturbed to get the work down and being pulled in too many directions I snapped.
Broke down completely in a meeting, then a day or two later when my 3 year old was annoying me like any 3 year old does, I almost lost it and lashed out at her. That was the final straw.
Over this person’s tenure, 6 of their 8 line managers left, including me. Some with nothing to go to. Other staff members were signed off with stress or depression. Others were prescribed sleeping pills…
That’s burnout.
Or:
The situation has been manageable for awhile but I’m reaching the point where I no longer enjoy going to work every morning and my work performance is slowly going down the drain and I don’t even care about that anymore.
I’m a pretty down to earth person and since I’ve dealt with a burnout before, I always try to set healthy boundaries with my workplace but I feel like it never gets respected.(…)
Ive also realized that what really triggers me is the amount of changes to the design and feedback we have since the clients are really indecisive and sometimes the process can take up to 1 month for a Facebook post because they keep asking for more and more variation « to see » what it looks like if we do it differently. Sometimes they will ask me for 3-5 versions of the same thing just so they can visualise. My workflow is pretty busy and we’re far from making 2-3 designs a day (for me it’s more of 5-10 designs a day), so making different versions of the same designs can be really time consuming, especially when deadlines are really tight. I’ve also tried voicing my concerns about the amount of work I have to deal with and even tried making a few « ready to use » templates to improve the workflow but they always want something « new ».
I’m starting to feel like I’m working on an assembly line and I really don’t know what to do to make the situation better.”
That’s also burnout.
Here’s the crucial distinction: burnout isn’t occasional. We all have mornings where we’re exhausted or days where nothing seems to get done. That’s normal. But when you’re drained every single day, when you can’t remember the last time you felt genuinely effective at work, when you’ve started to not care about things you used to be passionate about?
That’s chronic. That’s burnout.
The World Health Organization defines it as an “occupational phenomenon”—meaning it’s caused by your workplace, not personal weakness. And it typically shows up in three ways:
Exhaustion: Not “I need a vacation” tired. More like “I don’t know if I can do this anymore, and sleep is not helping me rest” depleted.
Cynicism: That defensive detachment where you stop caring, because what’s the point?
Inefficacy: The growing belief that no matter how good your designs are, they don’t actually make a difference.
Burnout is all three together, creating a vicious cycle that’s hard to break on your own.
Your workplace is like dating on Tinder—and you need to spot the red flags
We miss the idea of a Great Love that will sweep us off our feet and give us a fairytale Happy End. At the same time, we have become disillusioned by the very same vision, by people we meet and effectively, by ourselves, feeling like there has to be something wrong with us, since we are still alone and all we meet are people who ghost us after the first date? Your relationship with your current job is similar to that. We scroll through job offers like dating app profiles, imagining ourselves in that role, with those benefits, in that organizational culture. When you first started, everything felt exciting.
Remember that feeling? The honeymoon period? The team was great, the projects were interesting, and you had energy for those Friday happy hours.
But somewhere along the way, things changed. Maybe you lie awake in the middle of the night thinking: Is it me? Am I just not good enough? Should I defend myself better? Should I just be less precious about my arguments (designs)? Am I being too idealistic?
And aren’t those the questions we ask when shit hits the fan in a relationship? When we start dating, we look for red flags. We assess whether things can change. We ask if this is still good for us. We don’t immediately blame ourselves, right?
So why don’t we do the same with work?
The burnout red flags hiding in your job
Here’s where science backs up your gut feeling: Christina Maslach and Martin Leiter spent decades studying burnout. Their conclusion? Burnout isn’t a personal failing, but a systemic workplace issue. “The structure and functioning of the workplace shape how people interact with one another and how they carry out their jobs. When the workplace does not recognize the human side of work, then the risk of burnout grows, carrying a high price with it.” In this text, I will be using quotes from two of their books “The Truth about Burnout” (1997) and “The Burnout Challenge” (2023).
Maslach and Leiter identified six critical areas where mismatches between you and your workplace lead to burnout. Think of them as the fundamental incompatibilities that kill workplace relationships. When these areas are out of alignment, no amount of meditation apps or boundaries will fix it. Because the problem isn’t you—it’s the relationship itself.
Let me show you what these red flags actually look like in your day-to-day work, with the hope that it will take some heaviness from you, and maybe you will start thinking of your workplace dynamics from a different angle. As Maslach and Leiter so nicely put it: “Workers’ experience of burnout says more about the workplace than about themselves—and that has important implications for defining problems and exploring solutions.” So the match between the worker and workplace is always a relationship issue and about the alignment of any of the dimensions.
🚩 RED FLAG #1: Work Overload
This one is typically the one we associate with burnout the most. Having too much to do, “hustle culture,” “always on.” I think we still have not recovered from the idea that having a lot to do is the measure of our success, that working overtime is better for your career than not having enough to fill in these 40 hours. But this leads to inefficacy, exhaustion, high levels of stress, and lack of sleep (to name a few). There is always more to do, there are too few resources, and not enough hours in a day. You’re juggling: design system updates, three product features, stakeholder presentations, user research, AND mentoring a junior designer.
What is worth noting, except for the piles of work?
After intense sprints, you don’t have the time to recover and reflect on the job done (it’s okay to work hard for a short period, but we all need time to stop)
You are punished for exercising your boundaries
You lack the support to recover, with the amount of work given and the time you are expected to spend at work and during breaks
You miss the resources and space to do your job effectively
🚩 RED FLAG #2: Lack of Control
Micromanaging manager? Not able to make a decision to move forward with your tasks? That can be so frustrating!! We want to feel competent, to have the autonomy to solve problems and use our knowledge. We want to feel we have a say in what we will be held accountable for. For some of us, this one can be even harder to deal with than the actual workload itself. “Policies that impose narrow constraints on how work is done (...) allow no room for judgment or innovation and leave workers feeling less responsible for their outcomes, not more.” If you feel you lack influence over the quality and type of job at hand, we might be onto something.
On a day-to-day basis, this might look like:
There are a lot of different rules and processes that aim to constrain and control your work—specific regulations, time-logging rules to the minute. Every task you deliver is checked in terms of the time and resources it took to complete.
Your leader changes your workload without explanation. Stakeholders bypass you and go straight to engineering. You find out about major product decisions from Slack, not the design kickoff.
Design by committee means your cohesive vision becomes a Frankenstein of everyone’s “small feedback.”
Your colleagues and supervisors are rigidly attached to “the way we’ve always done it”—no flexibility, no experimentation, no adaptation.
🚩 RED FLAG #3: Insufficient Rewards
We all want to be rewarded for our work, whether with money, security, prestige, or simply pride in a job well done. The reality is that money is tight, budgets are cut, and promised raises are not given. You do more for less. You lose your motivation. In the end, you are left with neither internal nor external gratification
What could this feel like?
Your redesign increased conversion by 23%. Leadership celebrated the engineering team. Design wasn’t mentioned.
The reward system at your company has no credibility or serves the employees’ interests (why do we want another Happy Friday if we only got a 2% raise?).
The reward system is not transparent—who gets rewarded, why, and on what basis?
Favoritism is alive and well.
🚩 RED FLAG #4: Breakdown of Community
How well you connect with your coworkers matters just as much as your actual workload, or maybe even more. Your day-to-day interactions with colleagues and managers are equally important to your sense of security and teamwork as your salary or benefits. If there’s conflict, lack of mutual support or respect, your sense of belonging vanishes, and you become an island.
As a designer, you often don’t experience the same built-in community that dev teams have. You’re a team of one, reporting to engineering. No one to review your work, share wins with, or vent about impossible deadlines. On top of that, other designers might view you as competition, rather than a collaborator. What’s important, the example comes from the top. If these behaviors are not modeled, employees don’t have enough incentives to make commitments to each other.
🚩 RED FLAG #5: Absence of Fairness
We already know that burnout is about the relationship. Viable relationships are based on such qualities as trust and respect. And it goes both ways: if we, as employees, are treated fairly, we feel like members of the workplace community. Conversely, we treat our workplace fairly when we have respect for the practices and processes and believe we can trust them. This mutual connection is a basis for a healthy workplace. “Cynicism, anger, and hostility are likely to arise when people feel they are not being treated with the fairness that comes from being treated with respect.”
What to look for when we talk about fairness?
When we believe that the evaluation and promotion process is not handled in a just way
Inequity of workload and pay
When we get blamed for things you didn’t do
When conflicts arise, they’re either ignored or handled poorly
🚩 RED FLAG #6: Conflicting Values
Very often, a mismatch in values is a critical factor in a person’s burnout. In the workplace, this dimension might be overlooked or misunderstood compared to the previous five. But people really care about whether they are being treated fairly or whether they are doing a meaningful job that they can be proud of. “What people find especially aggravating is that often organizations emphasize a dedication to excellent service or production while they take actions that damage the quality of work.”
So how might this red flag appear in your workplace?
Leadership talks about being user-centered, but when it’s time to decide between what users need and what’s faster to build, engineering timelines win.
You have to make trade-offs between the quality of work you want to do (and value more) and the work you have to do.
The company says “design-led,” but designers aren’t in strategic conversations until the execution phase.
This is not about being “too precious”
These six mismatches show up in every industry. But designers? You experience them with particular intensity.
Because design work is inherently:
Personal (your creative vision is on the line)
Collaborative (requires buy-in from everyone)
Subjective (everyone has “design feedback”)
Undervalued (still fighting to get “a seat at the table”)
Emotionally demanding (you’re advocating for people who aren’t in the room)
Look at those six areas again. Every single red flag points to organizational dysfunction, not your failure as a designer.
Maslach and Leiter are crystal clear about this: “Based on extensive research, we strongly disagree that ‘fixing the person’ should be the focus in dealing with burnout. We argue instead that burnout results from mismatches between the person and the job, and that solutions must therefore address both the workers and the workplace.”
When you recognize these red flags in your current job, your first instinct might be: “Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I am just being too precious about my designs. Maybe I just need to toughen up.”
And while it is quite natural to think this way, given the workplace climate many of us function in, I want to encourage you to stop. This isn’t about you being “too precious” or “too weak.” This is about your workplace failing to recognize the human side of work.
I’m not saying you should immediately quit. Some relationships can be repaired. Some mismatches can be addressed.
What I am saying: stop putting all the weight of fixing this on yourself.
Your 2026 resolution shouldn’t be “I’ll be less sensitive to feedback” or “I’ll just design faster.” But rather “I’ll recognize what’s actually broken and decide if this relationship can be repaired.”
Count how many of these six areas are mismatched in your current design role:
1-2 mismatches? Might be fixable. Start documenting the impact of design decisions, advocate for design in strategy conversations, and demand a seat at the table during those meetings.
3-4 mismatches? Requires significant organizational change. Consider whether leadership actually values design or just likes the aesthetics, or just needs somebody to draw what will be developed during the “real work.”
5-6 mismatches? You’re not in a design role. You’re in a production role with a design title.
Just like with Tinder, workplace relationships only work when there’s a real match, not you performing or shrinking to keep someone interested. The vibe should feel energizing, not draining. Values should align in practice, not just on paper. Boundaries should be respected, not something you have to fight for every single time.
And yes, you’ll make mistakes in the process. You’ll say “yes” when you mean “no.” You’ll give one more chance when you probably shouldn’t have. You’ll compromise on things that matter to you. That’s the growth part.
But it takes two to tango. If you’re the only one adjusting your steps, adapting your pace, compromising your needs? That is not a partnership, and you don’t owe anyone a solo act.
If the dance is one-sided, it might be time to find a different partner. There are so many other fish in the sea.
Here’s to 2026, may it treat us better than that hairy last date from 2025 that had too big an ego to even cry about!
Alicja Białek is a burnout prevention coach who learned about workplace dysfunction the hard way: 10 months off work, antidepressants, and a complete career reinvention. After 9 years leading IT teams as a PM and Delivery Manager, she now helps executives and creative professionals recognize organizational red flags before they break—and create work environments that don’t require self-sacrifice. She combines Harvard Medical School Lifestyle & Wellness Coaching with Certified Burnout Coach certification and is finalizing her ACC ICF accreditation.
Want to talk through your red flags?
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