Burnout rose in 65 percent of workplace sectors examined between 2021 and 2023, while a study of 28,000 adults across 166 countries found a simultaneous global decline in emotional skills linked to resilience — suggesting the burnout crisis isn't only about how much work people face, but also the resources they have left to cope with it.

Burnout is often reduced to a simple workload equation: too much to do, too little time. That is part of the story. A pair of related analyses suggests the other side of the equation may also have weakened during and after the pandemic: the personal and social resources people use when pressure arrives.

In its 2024 State of the Heart report, the nonprofit Six Seconds said burnout increased in 65 per cent of the workplace sectors it examined from 2021 to 2023. A later peer-reviewed study reported a simultaneous decline in self-rated emotional-intelligence skills among 28,000 adults across 166 countries.

The numbers deserve attention, but they need careful translation. These were not two independent sources reaching the same conclusion. Both came from the Six Seconds research programme, and neither directly established that declining emotional skills caused burnout. What they do offer is a timely view of what can happen when job demands stay high while people’s perceived resources fall.

The 65 per cent figure came from 17 sectors

The State of the Heart report charted changes in a measure called Drive across 17 workplace sectors. Eleven bars moved in the direction the report labelled more burnout, which rounds to 65 per cent.

Energy and Oil recorded the largest drop in Drive, at 13.42 per cent. A combined Transport, Storage, Wholesale and Trade, Import and Export category fell 13.26 per cent. Agriculture and Fisheries was the strongest move in the opposite direction, with Drive rising 10.72 per cent.

Here is the important boundary: Six Seconds did not report administering a standard burnout inventory to representative samples in every industry. It treated falling Drive scores as evidence of rising burnout. Drive combines three competencies in its own model: engaging intrinsic motivation, exercising optimism and pursuing meaningful goals.

That is narrower than the World Health Organization’s description of burnout. WHO calls it an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, characterised by exhaustion, mental distance or cynicism toward work, and reduced professional efficacy. The 65 per cent result is therefore the report’s interpretation of a motivational proxy, not a clinical finding that 65 per cent of workers or industries were burned out.

The 28,000-person study compared different people over time

The later peer-reviewed Emotional Recession study analysed 28,000 records drawn from a database of 276,972 people who had taken the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment. The 77-item questionnaire was completed in applied settings such as coaching, education and organisational development.

Researchers built a sample balanced across seven global regions, people above and below 40, and male and female respondents. It included adults from 166 countries between 2019 and 2024. That breadth is unusual, but it does not make the sample a random or population-representative survey of the world.

It was also repeated cross-sectional research. The investigators compared annual averages from different participants rather than following the same 28,000 people for six years. The paper sometimes uses the language of longitudinal decline, but its methods do not show that any given participant lost emotional ability over time.

Average total emotional-intelligence scores were 5.79 per cent lower in 2024 than in 2019. The standardised difference was Cohen’s d of 0.22, conventionally a small effect. All eight competencies declined significantly, with the largest decreases in optimism, intrinsic motivation and pursuit of meaningful goals.

The test measured perceived skills, not observed behaviour

The assessment asks people to describe their own emotional skills and life outcomes. It does not watch someone resolve a disagreement, identify a facial expression or regulate stress during a difficult shift. That distinction is familiar across the field: a systematic review of emotional-intelligence measures found 40 instruments based on ability, trait and mixed models, each with different strengths and limitations.

The new paper is unusually candid about its constraints. Self-ratings can be influenced by response style, limited self-awareness and the situation in which the questionnaire is taken. Two of its competency scales had internal-consistency values just below the conventional 0.70 threshold, and the minimum change the instrument can reliably detect has not been established.

Both the emotional competencies and the four outcome measures came from the same questionnaire, so common-method bias may inflate their associations. Raw data are unavailable publicly because the assessment is proprietary. All four authors were employed by Six Seconds, which owns the instrument and acknowledged that it may benefit from research supporting it.

Those facts do not nullify the pattern. They mean the finding is best read as a decline in self-perceived emotional capacities within this assessment database, not objective proof that humanity’s emotional skills deteriorated by exactly 5.79 per cent.

Burnout is a job problem, not a personality defect

The findings make more sense through Job Demands-Resources theory. Demands consume sustained effort: workload, time pressure, emotional labour, role conflict and constant interruption. Resources help people meet those demands: autonomy, staffing, useful feedback, social support, recovery time and personal capacities.

Decades of research in this framework indicate that high demands combined with low resources lead toward burnout. Resources can buffer pressure and support engagement, especially when demands are high. Emotional regulation, optimism and purpose can plausibly count as personal resources, but they sit alongside job and organisational resources rather than replacing them.

This matters because a careless reading would place the burden back on exhausted workers. If employees are burning out because their resilience has declined, the tempting prescription is another training module. That response ignores WHO’s definition: burnout arises in the occupational context from unmanaged workplace stress.

Resilience training cannot repair impossible work

Training may still have a place. People can learn language for emotions, spot recurring reactions and practise more constructive responses to conflict. Managers can learn to listen, give clearer priorities and recognise when a team is nearing its limits. None of that creates an extra nurse on a short-staffed ward, removes an unachievable target or restores an employee’s evening after repeated late calls.

The WHO guidelines on mental health at work put organisational interventions first. They recommend assessing psychosocial risks and changing working conditions, while also covering manager training, worker training and individual support. The mix is important: coping tools can complement safer work design, but they should not camouflage its absence.

A useful comparison comes from the British four-day-week trial previously examined by Silicon Canals. Burnout fell for 71 per cent of participating employees while most companies kept the shorter schedule. The intervention did not ask people to reinterpret the same exposure. It changed how work and recovery were organised.

Employers should measure demands and resources together

The practical response is to examine both sides of the imbalance. Track workload, hours, role conflict, interruptions and staffing alongside autonomy, schedule control, manager support, psychological safety and genuine recovery. Aggregate patterns are more useful than scoring individuals and labelling the lowest scorers as fragile.

Leaders can ask where priorities routinely exceed capacity, whether employees can stop work without penalty, and which processes generate avoidable effort. Teams need permission to surface overload before it becomes absence or resignation. Managers need enough authority and budget to act on what workers tell them.

The Six Seconds findings do not prove a single global burnout mechanism. The sector result uses falling Drive as a proxy, while the global study relies on different self-report samples across years. Its effect was small, its dataset proprietary and its authors connected to the instrument.

Still, the underlying idea is hard to dismiss. Burnout is neither only the volume of work nor only the strength of the worker. It becomes more likely when demands repeatedly outrun the resources available to meet them. Reducing needless demands and rebuilding personal, social and organisational resources are complementary tasks. Treating emotional skills as the whole solution would turn that balanced lesson into blame.