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As a worker in her early 20s, Ms Valerie Yuam expected herself to be full of energy and having a zest for life, even after a hard day's work.

Then, just five years after entering the workforce and being "always on the ball", the writer found herself losing steam.

Feature articles that would usually take her a day or two to write, would take her up to a week to complete as she found herself "unable to write anything" at times.

"I felt that nothing I was writing resonated with me anymore," the 25-year-old told �鶹��ý TODAY.

She also found herself being "super irritable" and what started as not wanting to talk to anyone in the morning would drag on to mid-day where she would "zone out" during lunches with colleagues.��

The heavy workload at a music publication��and later on at an independent online news outlet led to her gradual burnout, eating away at her energy and motivation levels.��

It did not help that she had a side hustle handling��public relations projects for artistes, which effectively saw her working past midnight on most weekdays.��

The pressure went beyond affecting her mental and emotional states, manifesting in physical symptoms towards the end of 2023. ��

“Some days, I had to consult a general practitioner simply because I would wake up feeling like someone is grabbing my skull, squeezing and shaking it at the same time."��

Ms Yuam added that she would take painkillers prescribed by doctors to ease the pain.��

"I also completely stopped going for gigs because the crowds would put me under too much stress – my headaches would come and I’d find it hard to breathe."

After enduring the pain for about a month, she took unpaid leave for a month and dropped the bulk of her side projects. When this did not help, she quit her full-time job around June last year.

"I was simply too tired to continue."

Ms Yuam now does freelance work as a journalist and a public relations consultant. She is unsure when she will be ready to take on full-time work again.��

Mr Staffan Stewart, a 31-year-old registered nurse, has also experienced workplace burnout recently.

He powered through 11 years in an industry known for being taxing, but what tipped the scale for him was when his mother had an operation last year and he had to care for her at home after long days on the job at the hospital.

For years, he had gotten used to work commitments eating into his rest days, managers contacting him for non-urgent matters after work hours and having to do administrative work on his days off.

However, when his mother was unwell, he found these intrusions on his personal time difficult to manage.

He started forgoing gym sessions and hanging out at cafes. Instead, he would retreat home, spend hours sleeping or scroll through online content on his mobile phone. Yet, he would never feel rested.��

Soon,��he found himself ignoring text messages from his friends.

“To even reply to my friends, I found it such an effort,” Mr Staffan said.��“After a few weeks, I realised that this was not like me at all.”

He started seeing a counsellor regularly to help him with his burnout, which he said was in part heightened by his family circumstances, but “90 per cent” of it was due to work.

The experiences of Ms Yuam and Mr Staffan do not come as a surprise, given the numerous workplace wellness surveys in recent years highlighting how burnt out workers in Singapore are.

In August 2024, a survey of workers here by human resource solutions firm Employment Hero found that 61 per cent of the respondents experienced burnout because of work in the three preceding months.��

In June the same year, 67 per cent of workers surveyed by health technology provider Telus Health reported at least one of three indicators of burnout.

INSOMNIA, CRYING, FALLING ILL EASILY

These surveys found that burnout was felt by workers at all levels in a company and the top factors contributing to it were heavy workloads and long work hours.

Workers approached by �鶹��ý TODAY said that their burnout usually started with physical and mental exhaustion, coupled with growing negative feelings towards their work.

Ms Tan Wan Ting, 34, who owns digital marketing agency Weave Asia, remembered experiencing burnout a decade ago while she was working in a marketing agency.

After she quit that role, she needed a three-month break to recover.��

When she started her own company seven years ago, she felt a sense of responsibility to ensure that her employees never went through what she did�� – but this led her to feel burnt out as well.

“I was very tired ... usually, even though I might be busy, I still find joy in what I do. But at that point, I didn’t feel that joy anymore. I didn’t know what I was feeling,” Ms Tan of how she felt during the period early last year.

She began seeing a therapist around the middle of last year to help her with her burnout.

“At certain stressful periods, I had insomnia, headaches and caught the flu very easily.

“Sometimes, you keep thinking about certain complex cases at night, so even though you’re physically exhausted, you can't sleep.”

It was exhausting to have these residual thoughts after working hours, when all she wanted to focus on at home was her two young children, she added.

The toll of workplace burnout can be so bad that for some people, it could lead to emotional outbursts either at work or outside of work.

Mr Gerald Tan, a career counsellor, recalled one such client, who was feeling burnt out because of her long work hours that took time away from her family, which then compounded her "mum guilt".

“I remember she said to me, ‘I’d be working at my laptop, but I’m crying. I hate my life now, but I still have to complete this task’,” he said.

TAKE MICRO-BREAKS, SEEK PROFESSIONAL HELP��

Interviewees told �鶹��ý TODAY that after experiencing serious periods of burnout, they have learnt to adjust their working styles and lives to avoid a recurrence.

For Ms Sim the social worker, she has made it a habit to take a day off��after handling particularly complex or difficult cases so that she can return to work and focus on other cases feeling recharged.��

Mr Tan the career counsellor said that he, too, had experienced burnout before when he first started his company, Avodah Solutions.

For the first six months, he would keep his schedule packed with work, planting himself at his workstation for about nine straight hours taking back-to-back client meetings.��

He thought that it was par for the course for a fledgling company.

“I would put all my attention on work, not giving much attention even to food. For me, I just ate to make sure I did not die.”��

After six months, though, he came to the realisation – with the help of his wife and close friends – that his situation was not sustainable.

He then began to make adjustments to his work routine, such as spacing out the work calls and tasks, taking micro-breaks in between to admire his potted plants and asking his wife to check on him to ensure that he sticks to his routine of taking breaks.

And some others, such as Ms Yuam the writer and Mr Staffan the registered nurse, sought help from mental health professionals so that they may better understand the root cause of their problems and work out the steps to take to improve their situation.

For Mr Staffan, this included being firmer about his work-life boundaries and not responding to non-urgent work messages.

He acknowledged that there may be hesitance among some workers to seek professional help for burnout or mental health issues in general.��

This is particularly so when it comes to approaching in-house or company-funded counsellors, because they feel that their supervisors would be informed about it and this might leave a negative impression of them as a worker.

However, Mr Staffan stressed the importance of getting professional help as early as possible.

“It’s just like having a physical sickness, you would want to see the doctor as early as possible so you can recover and not wait until things are too late, right?”

MORE DAYS OFF, FLEXI-WORK AND ATTENTION PAID TO WORKLOADS

Over the years, many suggestions have been mooted to tackle burnout at the workplace and protect the mental wellness of workers in general.

Among them are��flexible work arrangements��– such as remote work, a compressed work week and job sharing – which have seen a general rise in demand after the COVID-19 pandemic.

A study by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) published in January 2024, for instance, found that employees provided with teleworking options registered lower work stress and burnout scores than those who were not given the options.

However, rolling out these measures may be challenging, especially for flexible work arrangements such as a shorter work week or job sharing, since it may incur costs or come with operational complexities that may make it less feasible for certain companies, as some enterprises and experts told TODAY previously.��

Having said that, there might be hope yet on this front.

MOM said on Friday (Mar 7) that the proportion of firms here offering flexible work arrangements has risen to 72.7 per cent in 2024 from 68.1 per cent the year before.

Last December, the authorities rolled out��a guideline on flexible work arrangements, which stipulates that while companies can reject workers' requests for such arrangements, the employer must consider them based on reasonable business grounds and communicate the outcomes within two months.

Another way to help reduce the chances of burnout is to get into the practice of establishing healthy boundaries for work-life balance.��

In February 2024 during a parliamentary debate on mental health, Mr Melvin Yong, Member of Parliament (MP) for Radin Mas constituency, repeated his call for legislation that gives workers the “right to disconnect” and not respond to work-related correspondences after their work hours.

More recently, last month, during the debate over this year’s national Budget, MPs from the ruling and opposition parties focused on the topic of giving more days off to workers.

Non-Constituency MP Hazel Poa from the Progress Singapore Party suggested increasing the number of public holidays to create better work-life balance, noting that the number of public holidays has remained unchanged after it was reduced from 16 to 11 in 1968.

Mr Louis Ng, MP for Nee Soon Group Representation Constituency, asked to raise the minimum paid��annual leave for workers from its current legislated seven days a year – another policy that has not been revised for almost six decades, he noted.

Speaking to �鶹��ý TODAY, he said that other measures such as flexible work arrangements are beneficial because they allow workers to better juggle their caregiving duties, which are added sources of stress.��

“But at the same time, it cannot be an alternative to annual leave, which really is for rest and for spending time with your loved ones,” he added.

Agreeing, human capital management solutions firm ADP said that although flexible work arrangements help to reduce stress, it must be put in practice in a structured manner to prevent overwork.

Ms Jessica Zhang, senior vice-president for the Asia-Pacific region at ADP, said: “Employers should establish clear work boundaries, encourage disconnection and ensure that flexibility doesn’t imply being ‘always on’.”��

Workers who spoke to �鶹��ý TODAY said that since annual leave days and the number of public holidays are fixed, more needs to be done by employers to mitigate burnout.

A 37-year-old regional marketing manager in the chemicals industry, who gave her name as just Ms Tan, said that in her previous company, the bulk of her boss' own tasks would be dumped onto her plate. This wore her down and she felt burnt out.��

Ms Sim the social worker said that in her experience, the work environment plays a contributing factor to workers’ stress levels. And different organisations have a different idea of what is an acceptable caseload and they also have different programmes to support the well-being of workers.

She is thankful that her current employer HCA Hospice provides access to external therapists and in-house counselling and allows workers to take sabbatical leave.

Other companies such as enterprise communications provider Verizon Business and financial news agency Bloomberg provide counselling support for their employees.��

Mr Kelvin Cen, Bloomberg's head of the Southeast Asia region, said that the take-up rate for this has gone up from 0.01 per cent at some offices to 3 per cent, after the company rolled out an awareness programme for it.

"The data on its own may be a cause for concern for some people, but from our view, this tells us that employees are now better equipped with the right tools to take care of their well-being, because we believe that we are at our best when our employees are at theirs," he added.

Ms Charu Srivastava, co-founder of communications consultancy firm TriOn & Co, suffered burnout while still working at another firm about four years ago, to the extent that she had breakdowns during and outside of work. She remembers to this day how��her supervisors were not as supportive as she would have hoped.

So when she started TriOn with two other partners, they decided to make work-life balance and mental health a priority.��

“We will say NO to clients and work that are detrimental to our mental health,” a line on the company's website states.

In practice, this translates to clearly communicating to clients the company’s work hours – they practise a four-and-a-half-day week – and setting realistic schedules for projects.

She also tells her employees that they do not need to respond to work correspondences outside their work hours, save for urgent cases. This, too, is communicated to their clients.

“We do not work in silos. A company may set healthy boundaries with their workers, but a client’s expectation of them may be different,” she said of the need for clear communication to all sides.��

She also said that for the entire "ecosystem" to change, a push by the government is needed.

"And I think it has to be enacted by law, to provide imperative for the players to make changes."

She pointed to the recent guidelines making it compulsory for companies to formally take into consideration its employees' requests for flexible work arrangements as one good step forward, and suggested that regulating other measures such as the right to disconnect after work may be useful as well.

Ms Ng Jan Nee, head of human resources, operations and administration at HCA Hospice, proposed increasing subsidies for corporate wellness initiatives and providing incentives for companies, so that they may be encouraged to roll out more measures to support workers.

In the meantime, Ms Yuam the writer is hoping that when she is ready to get back to full-time employment, most companies would have adjusted to flexi-work arrangements – especially a four-day work week – so that workers can have more rest time.

She is not yet ready to go full-steam ahead, so for now, she is gradually resuming the activities that she used to enjoy, which includes attending concerts. She is also learning a new language.

"I am not rushing anything ... I’m taking it one slow day at a time at the moment."