Diane is a single mom with a seven-year-old son. She works forty hours a week as a receptionist in a medical office and is currently completing class work to become a dental hygienist. She is also the “room parent” for her son’s second-grade class and is frequently called on to help bake for classroom celebrations and to chaperone class trips. Luis is a nineteen-year-old sophomore at a state university. He is working two part-time jobs to help meet the cost of tuition and is taking six classes with the hopes of graduating one semester early.

These two individuals have different lives, different goals, and different constraints. Yet they have one thing in common: they are sinking under intense pressures from the organizations in their lives. But their pressures are not just a matter of time management. Diane and Luis also must also manage their emotion labor—their display of the appropriate emotions that satisfy organizational role expectations (Miller, Birkholt, Scott, & Stage, 1995). Diane must maintain a cheerful demeanor with patients at the medical office and be supportive to her son’s teacher. Luis must show respect for his professors as well as the customers at his job. Controlling or maintaining particular emotions is important, but over time it can become stressful for employees and can lead to burnout (Maslach, 1982; Teven, 2007b). Burnout is a sense of apathy or exhaustion that results from long-term stress or frustration. Burnout hurts its victims as well as the organizations and communities they belong to, as it can lead to negative self-evaluations and emotional exhaustion (Hallsten, Voss, Stark, & Josephson, 2011; Maslach, 1982).

Many workplaces are aware of the dangers of burnout and implement programs to assist employees with work–life balance, which involves achieving success in one’s personal and professional life. Such programs include flexible work arrangements, paid vacation, and onsite child care. In addition, more and more companies are recognizing that they must top their competitors in offering new and creative work–life options in order to recruit the best job candidates.

Yet even in seemingly supportive work environments, many employees are still unable to balance their work and their personal life. For some, this is a choice: “I never go on vacation,” says New York City real estate agent Ellen Kapit. “And when I do, I have my computer, my Palm, my e-mail, and my phone with me at all times” (Rosenbloom, 2006). For employees like Kapit, choosing the organization over other areas of life may be a sign of ambition, pride, guilt, a sense of overimportance, or simply a love of work, according to Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute (as cited in Rosenbloom, 2006). Yet it can also be a sign of fear. In the most recent annual August Work and Education poll, Gallup reports that 43 percent of U.S. workers exhibit widespread concern about having their benefits reduced and feeling less secure in their jobs (Gallup, 2013). The sad truth remains that in far too many workplaces, there is an unspoken rule that if you take a vacation, put your family first, or have outside interests that take up a lot of time, you are not committed to the organization.

So if you’re feeling burned out or on the verge of collapsing from organizational pressure, what should you do? This question is at the forefront of a great deal of research in sociology, psychology, business, and communication. Here are a few tips that various scholars, medical doctors, and other professionals find helpful (Mayo Clinic, 2012 ):