What the Research Actually Says About Burnout in Occupational Therapy, and What to Do About It

School-Based OT Burnout

If you've ever ended a school year feeling like you left something behind — your energy, your enthusiasm, maybe a little of yourself — you're not imagining it. Burnout in occupational therapy is real, it's documented, and a recent study published in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy gives us some of the clearest language yet for understanding why it happens and what actually helps.

Here's what the research says, and what it means for you.

First, let's talk about what burnout actually costs.

Burnout isn't just feeling tired. Research shows that common outcomes include depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, headaches, respiratory infections, gastrointestinal distress, poor job performance, absenteeism, and turnover. Beyond the individual practitioner, burnout among health care providers has been negatively associated with patient satisfaction, patient safety, and provider mental health.

In other words: when OTs burn out, everyone feels it — including the students and clients they serve.

Why occupational therapy professionals are at high risk.

Health care professionals as a whole face unique stressors — exposure to human suffering, pressure from patients and families, and demanding working conditions. But occupational therapy professionals face an additional layer of risk factors specific to the profession: unmanageable workloads, lack of autonomy and respect, lack of professional identity recognition, managing unique cases and manager's sometimes unrealistic demands.

If that list sounds familiar, it's because these aren't abstract findings. They're the daily reality of a lot of OT practitioners.

One finding worth noting: research suggests that burnout is least prevalent among occupational therapists working in physical rehabilitation and intellectual disability settings, while the highest burnout levels are seen among those working with older adults and in child care. However, context matters — setting, organizational structure, and individual factors all play a role. What the research consistently confirms is that those with ten or fewer years of experience in occupational therapy are at higher risk for burnout. If you're early in your career and you're already feeling it, that's not weakness. That's a documented pattern.

The strongest predictors of burnout — by the numbers.

The Lynner et al. (2025) study used relative weight analysis to identify the most significant predictors of burnout among OT professionals. The results are worth knowing:

For personal and work-related burnout, the strongest predictors were:

• Workload (accounting for 21% of personal burnout and 19% of work-related burnout)

• Professional identity strains and misidentification by others (11% and 8%, respectively)

• Role conflict (7% for both)

For client-related burnout, the strongest predictors were:

• Negative relationships with supervisors (8%)

• Role ambiguity (7%)

• Surface acting — performing emotions you don't feel (7%)

The takeaway: excessive workload is the single strongest risk factor for burnout in this profession. And supervisor support — or the lack of it — shows up repeatedly as both a risk factor and a protective one.

The intervention the research keeps pointing to: job crafting.

One of the most actionable findings in this study involves job crafting — a strategy in which an employee proactively alters aspects of their job by modifying demands or acquiring resources.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It's essentially the just-right challenge principle applied to your own work life.

Job crafting involves three things:

• Increasing structural and social resources (support, tools, information)

• Increasing challenging and motivating job demands

• Decreasing demands that create stress without adding meaning

For OTs, this might look like working with a supervisor to adjust your caseload or schedule, developing ways to repurpose treatment activities across multiple students or clients, or actively seeking out the parts of your role that connect most directly to your core values as a practitioner.

That last point matters more than it might sound. The research suggests that finding significance in preferred tasks — what researchers call cognitive job crafting — can reignite a practitioner's connection to their work. If those meaningful tasks are infrequent or lack depth, collaborating with a supervisor to create more access to them is a legitimate and evidence-supported strategy.

Three recommendations from the research.

Lynner et al. (2025) offer three concrete recommendations for reducing burnout in occupational therapy:

1. Employers should train OTs on job crafting and actively support the process. This isn't something individual practitioners should have to figure out alone. Organizations have a responsibility to facilitate it.

2. Reduce job demands and increase job resources. This means addressing workload and role ambiguity at the organizational level, and increasing social support — particularly from supervisors.

3. Foster meaningful work. Help OTs align their daily tasks with their core professional values. When that alignment exists, burnout is less likely to take hold.

What this means in practice.

Reading research about burnout when you're already burned out can feel abstract, even frustrating. So here's the practical bottom line:

What you're experiencing is not a personal failing. It is the predictable outcome of a professional environment with high demands, inadequate resources, and insufficient recognition of what occupational therapy actually requires.

The research is clear that burnout reduction strategies must address both organizational and psychological dimensions of the work experience. Individual coping strategies help — but they are not sufficient on their own. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.

What you can do right now: identify one aspect of your job that you have some control over and consider how you might craft it — adjust it, modify it, or approach it differently — to better match your strengths and reduce unnecessary strain. It won't solve everything. But it's a place to start.

One more thing.

Part of what keeps school-based OTs stuck in burnout is isolation, the sense that no one else understands the specific weight of this work. I'm building something for practitioners like you, and my newsletter community will hear about it first. If you want to be in that loop, grab the current month's freebie below to get on the list. My free resource rotates monthly, so what is available today may not be here next time you visit.

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Reference

Lynner, B., Stoa, R., Fisher, G., del Pozo, E., & Lizerbram, R. (2025). Feel the burn, heal the burn: Job crafting and burnout among occupational therapy professionals. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 79, 7901205080. https://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.2025.050731