This post uses Jonathan Haidt’s elephant/rider framework: the elephant is the hedonistic, reward-seeking id, and the rider is the rational ego/superego that guides it.
It’s easy to extend this framework to explain burnout. You can think of the rider and the elephant as having agreed to a sacred pact: In exchange for doing what the rider asks, the elephant is promised certain rewards. When things are going well, the needs of both rider and elephant are satisfied, even if the balance isn’t exactly even day-to-day.
Burnout results when the rider asks the elephant, over and over again, to commit a tremendous amount of energy to a task, but then fails to provide the reward the elephant is expecting. As a result, the link between effort and reward breaks for the elephant, with catastrophic consequences for the rider.
It’s a very good post and well worth reading. I subscribed to the author’s RSS feed!