Burnout in Teaching, Nursing and Medicine: Why It Runs So High
In this article
The second half of my HR career was spent at a regional health system. The people I saw leave burned out were rarely people who had stopped caring about patients. More often they cared a great deal and had run out of ways to do the job the way they believed it should be done. The research on teachers describes something very similar.
Teacher burnout, nursing burnout and physician burnout get written about as three separate problems. They have more in common than not: work that can't be postponed, other people's wellbeing riding on it, chronic staffing gaps, and a professional identity that makes stepping back feel like failure. This piece looks at what recent data shows, why these professions run so hot, what organizations can actually change, and what individuals can do in the meantime. It is general information, not medical advice. If you are struggling, talk to a doctor, a licensed counselor or your EAP.
What the numbers show
Different surveys measure burnout in different ways, so the figures below can't be used to rank one profession against another. What they show clearly is scale, and in medicine, that the numbers can move.
| Group | Source | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Health workers overall | CDC Vital Signs, 2023 | 46% often felt burned out in 2022, up from 32% in 2018 |
| Physicians | AMA Organizational Biopsy, 2026 | 41.9% reported at least one burnout symptom in 2025 |
| Nurses | American Nurses Foundation, 2023 | 56% reported burnout; 64% felt a great deal of job stress |
| Teachers | School Mental Health, 2025 | 78% had thoughts of leaving or were leaving the field |
Health workers
The CDC's Vital Signs report on health worker mental health, published in October 2023, compared survey data from 2018 and 2022. The share of health workers who reported often feeling burned out rose from 32% to 46%. The share reporting harassment at work more than doubled, from 6% to 13%, and the share intending to look for a new job rose from 33% to 44%. The CDC's definition of health workers is broad: registered nurses, aides, licensed practical nurses, physicians, pharmacy technicians, dental and vision staff and many others.
Physicians
The American Medical Association's Organizational Biopsy survey, with nearly 19,000 physician responses from 106 health systems and organizations in 38 states, found physician burnout fell to 41.9% in 2025, from 43.2% in 2024 and 48.2% in 2023. Burnout there means reporting at least one symptom. The main stressors the AMA named were ineffective electronic health record systems, concerns about leadership transparency and support, inadequate staffing and excessive administrative tasks. Physicians also flagged the volume of electronic patient messages.
The direction of travel matters as much as the level. A falling rate is a reminder that burnout is not a fixed price of the job.
Nurses
The American Nurses Foundation's 2023 survey of more than 7,400 nurses found 56% experiencing burnout and 64% saying they feel a great deal of stress because of their job. Thirty-nine percent said they were likely to leave their current position within six months. The three main reasons nurses gave for leaving or changing positions were insufficient staffing, feeling unvalued by their organization and inadequate pay. Fifty-six percent said there is stigma attached to getting mental health care.
Teachers
A study published in School Mental Health in March 2025 surveyed 468 teachers about stress, coping, burnout and plans to leave. Seventy-eight percent had thoughts of leaving or were leaving the field. Teachers reported high levels of stress and burnout overall, and stress and burnout predicted intentions to leave beyond what classroom management efficacy or coping skills explained. One finding stands out: experienced teachers felt more capable in the classroom but also reported more burnout and were more likely to be thinking about leaving. Among those not returning, the top reasons were lack of administrative support, followed by being overworked, underpaid and dealing with challenging student behavior.
Why these three professions run so hot
Read those sources side by side and the same drivers keep appearing. Almost none of them are about the individual.
Work that can't wait. A classroom of thirty arrives at 8 a.m. whether or not the lesson plan is finished. Patients keep coming when two nurses call out. There is very little control over pace, and low control over workload is widely linked to burnout in any job.
Staffing that runs short by default. Nurses put insufficient staffing first. Physicians named it among their main stressors. When a position is open, the work doesn't disappear; it lands on whoever is on shift or in the building.
Paperwork that crowds out the real work. For physicians, the electronic health record, administrative tasks and the patient message inbox. For teachers, being overworked ranks near the top of the reasons for leaving, and grading and planning routinely spill into evenings.
Caring about outcomes you can't fully control. Many clinicians describe moral distress: knowing what good care looks like and being unable to provide it because of staffing, time or policy. Teachers describe a version of the same thing when class sizes or student needs outstrip the support available.
Harassment and hostility. The doubling in reported harassment among health workers is a working condition, not a personal resilience problem. For teachers, challenging student behavior ranks among the reasons people leave.
Feeling unsupported from above. Teachers' top reason for leaving was lack of administrative support. Nurses cited feeling unvalued. Physicians named leadership transparency and support. The pattern across all three is that how people are led matters as much as how hard the work is.
A calling that makes it hard to step back. People choose these jobs for reasons that go beyond pay, and that is part of what makes burnout dangerous. Taking time off can feel like abandoning patients or students. Stigma around mental health care, which more than half of nurses in the ANF survey reported, makes it harder still.
What's different in each profession
Teaching
There is no stepping out for ten minutes when a class is in front of you, and breaks, when they exist, can be eaten by supervision duties. Evenings and weekends absorb grading and planning. The finding that experienced teachers report more burnout is worth taking seriously: this is not only a problem of new teachers who haven't found their feet, and losing veterans takes institutional knowledge with them.
Nursing
Nursing combines the emotional load of patient care with the physical load of long shifts, rotating schedules and nights. A short-staffed shift means more patients each, missed breaks and a real fear of mistakes. Our piece on chronic stress in shift and frontline work covers how shift patterns and fatigue build up, and most of it applies directly to nursing units.
Medicine
For physicians, the hours spent on documentation and the inbox are a large part of the story, and that work often spills past clinic hours. Leadership matters here too: physicians who don't trust that their concerns are heard tend to stop raising them.
What helps at the organizational level
The CDC's report lists six things employers can do: model and support taking time off, include workers in decision-making, value worker safety and health, assign a senior leader to promote staff wellbeing, ensure adequate staffing and train supervisors to provide support. It also reports that health workers had fewer mental health problems when they said they worked in supportive environments, and fewer burnout symptoms when they trusted management.
From the HR side, this is how I'd turn that list into owned actions in a hospital, clinic or school district:
| Driver | What helps | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
| Staffing gaps | Float pools and substitute coverage, realistic ratios and class sizes, limits on mandatory overtime, backfill for leave | Executive leadership and finance |
| Paperwork | An audit of documentation and duplicate forms, with a target to cut; clerical and scribe support | Operations, IT, principals |
| Breaks and time off | Breaks with real coverage, leave requests that get approved, leaders who visibly take time off | Unit managers and principals |
| Harassment and violence | Reporting that leads to visible action, security and behavior support | Safety teams and administration |
| No voice | Staff on scheduling, workflow and policy decisions that affect them | Senior leadership |
| Weak frontline support | Training for charge nurses, department chairs and assistant principals | HR and education teams |
| Access to care | A confidential EAP and counseling outside the chain of command, leaders who talk openly about using it | HR and benefits |
Two cautions. First, a resilience workshop on its own puts the fix on the person who is already depleted. It can sit alongside structural change but can't replace it. Second, the frontline supervisor is where most of this succeeds or fails. A charge nurse or assistant principal who notices, asks and acts is worth more than a wellness portal nobody opens. People need to be able to say "we're unsafe today" or "this policy is hurting students" without it costing them, and that kind of psychological safety is built by leaders, shift by shift.
If you want to see where your organization stands, our workplace mental health self-check scores leadership commitment alongside access to care and two other areas.
What individuals can do
None of this means waiting for the system to fix itself. These steps won't remove the causes, but they can protect you while you push for changes and decide what you want next.
- Name the specific stressor. "I'm burned out" is hard to act on. "The after-hours charting is what's breaking me" or "it's the behavior in fourth period" points toward an actual fix, or at least a specific request.
- Check how you're doing. Our burnout self-check takes a few minutes and gives you language for a conversation with a doctor or counselor.
- Get support early. Your EAP is usually free and confidential. A doctor or licensed counselor can help sort out whether this is burnout, depression, anxiety or a mix, which matters because depression and anxiety have established treatments.
- Protect recovery time. Sleep between shifts, real days off and vacation time that is actually used. If time off isn't enough, medical leave may be an option; our guide to stress leave from work explains how FMLA and ADA leave work.
- Find your people. Peer support from colleagues who do the same job can make an impossible week feel survivable.
- Ask for one concrete change. A different schedule, a lighter caseload for a month, a duty taken off your plate. Specific requests are easier for a manager to grant.
- Consider a move within the field before leaving it. A different unit, school, specialty, setting or schedule can change the job more than people expect.
If you are having thoughts of suicide or harming yourself, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. It's free, confidential and available at any hour.
Further reading
How we chose: both books were picked on their authors' credentials and publisher information. Burnout, by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, explains the stress response and practical ways to complete it at the end of a hard day, which suits people whose stressors won't go away by Friday. The Fearless Organization is by Amy C. Edmondson, the Harvard researcher whose work defined psychological safety in teams, and it is written for leaders who want people to speak up about problems before they become harm. Neither is treatment.
The units where people stayed in my health system years weren't the ones with the best perks. They were the ones where the manager knew who was struggling, staffing got fixed when people said it was unsafe, and asking for help didn't count against you. That is something any hospital, practice or school can build, and it starts with treating burnout as a working-conditions problem first.
