Millennials are the most likely generation to experience burnout

Millennials might’ve been promised a more stable future and workplace than will exist for them.

Gen Xers and Baby Boomers likely remember a time when a one-company tenure was the norm. Gen Z workers shudder at the thought of that. Older generations also know what it’s like to buy a house for a fraction of its current market value, while many younger professionals probably don’t put home ownership on their vision boards anymore. So, where does that leave millennials? Perhaps, stuck somewhere between the promise of what their parents had and the reality that their kids are born into.

This pressure could be causing higher rates of burnout, as 66% of millennials say they feel “moderate” or “high” levels of burnout compared to 60% of Gen Xers, 56% of Gen Zers, and 39% of Baby Boomers, according to a recent Aflac report.

Millennials are going through “a perfect storm of professional and personal stress,” said Leah Phifer Buck, an employee engagement consultant and founder of consulting firm WhyWork. These employees, those roughly between 29 and 44 years old, are commonly slammed with caregiving responsibilities for kids and/or aging parents while navigating the growing demands of their careers, Buck told HR Brew, which can exacerbate stress and increase their likelihood of burnout.

What gives? Millennials might be asking themselves the same question. This generation has gone through multiple economic recessions before even reaching a mid-life crisis. From the dot-com bubble bust in 2001, the Great Recession in 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic, and now the current administration’s foreign tariff policies, millennials could be wrapped into yet another chilling economic downturn.

“We might never achieve the level of economic stability that the Baby Boomer generation, our parents, did, but I think that a lot of millennials are starting to reconcile with that,” Buck said. “As they make peace with the economic reality that they face, they’re starting to lean into, ‘How can I still do what I love? How can I still do things that light me up and find joy in my job?’”

Matthew Owenby, chief strategy officer and corporate services executive at Aflac, agrees that millennials have gone through many unstable times, and it could have taken away the workplace they had hoped to be working in. But he told HR Brew that another big contributor to their higher rates of burnout is the lack of work-life balance exhibited by many company executives.

“Leaders need to be aware that they’re controlling the pace of the work for their workforce,” he said. “A lot of this burnout [and] a lot of the experience that employees are having, millennial and otherwise, are directly related to leadership or the lack thereof.”

What’s there to do? As a millennial herself, Buck said there’s a desire among her generation to “improve the system,” which increases pressure to do better and be better workers, leaders, parents, etc. Sometimes millennials “beat our heads against a wall,” she said, trying to help everyone else so much that they’ve burned themselves out. She suggests a solution lies somewhere between companies making structural changes and employees taking on responsibility.

Starting with mental healthcare coverage, Buck noted, it’s important for HR to effectively communicate available benefits and resources for tackling burnout, but it then becomes incumbent on employees to utilize them.

“I work with clients all the time who say, ‘We don’t know why our employees are so stressed or burned out, because we offer this great mental healthcare coverage.’ But then when I dig deeper and I ask them, ‘Well, how are you communicating the coverage to employees?’” Buck said. “That’s often where the disconnect lies. It’s not that the employers aren’t offering these things, it’s that maybe employees don’t know about it or aren’t taking advantage of it.”

Helping millennial employees tackle burnout boils down to basic communications, expectation setting, and leadership modeling work-life balance, Owenby said.

“It’s fun to talk about work-life balance. It’s another thing to achieve it, and then it’s another thing to encourage it, and encourage leaders to encourage that,” he said. “There has to be a higher standard when it comes to educating leaders, and I think there has to be specific programs in place within corporations to deal with the nuances that the millennial generation is experiencing.”

Will the next generations burn out too? Buck said she has hope that Gen Z and younger generations will be better about avoiding burnout and mitigating its symptoms when they arise.

“While they may not have all the answers, the fact that they’re surfacing these conversations, and a lot of these discussions are being led by millennials and really pushed by Gen Z, I see as a really promising step forward in this discussion,” she said.