INFJ burnout is when, even if it is something that you are passionate about and love to do, you feel like you are going through the motions and aren't doing what your soul called you to do and you feel empty. A little pep talk from someone who knows us well can usually wake us up and put us back on the right track.
Perhaps the most telling sign of burnout is a dwindling passion for your job, or doubt about whether this is the job for you. When you have become entirely spent, the amount of energy you can dedicate to your job starts to dwindle. When INFJs can't give their 100 percent, we start second-guessing our decisions.
Too many forces pull and push at me; my desires to help other people and to achieve my own dreams combine with an intense ability to feel others' emotional pain. These cumulative factors place me — and all INFJs — at risk of burnout.
My advice to you is to be kind to yourself. Nurture yourself. Set boundaries for what you know is too much or unreasonable. But most important is to discover how you got to burnout and make some changes in you life to never go there again.
When they're depressed or uninspired, they feel fatigued and drained. INFJs without a vision for the future feel listless and apathetic, as if they're lost in a fog and unable to find a light to guide them home.
Unhealthy INFJs either leave conflict directly or insist that other people “make up” as quickly as possible. This is because INFJs tend to absorb the feelings of the people they are with, which means if there is anger or frustration in the environment they feel stressed or frustrated.
They tend to dislike last-minute changes and repeated mistakes, which they see as thoughtless or uncaring. At work, INFJs may find it difficult to keep their personal feelings out of their interactions with others. They'll likely become stressed if they feel unappreciated, dismissed, or ignored.
Because of how INFJs deal with past pain, they're likely to have similar reactions to trauma. These include: Avoiding people, places, or things that remind them of the trauma. Experiencing fear and anxiety about the outside world.
INFJs in the Grip
You might start overdoing sensing activities, such as eating, drinking, or exercising too much. You try to control everything in your environment and make endless lists. You may walk through your house and become hyperaware of all the things that need fixing or that are out of place.
Burnout is when you have high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and low levels of personal accomplishment. The two strongest relationships between personality traits and burnout are extroversion and neuroticism. Resting from an environment designed to foster burnout only puts a small stopper in it.
INFJs tend to be especially drained by conflict with others. They're likely to avoid tension as much as they can, which may lead them to withhold information due to a fear of causing conflict.
Intuitive Weirdness
INFJs have an abstract, futuristic approach to the world around them. Rather than seeing things for what they are, they see things for what they “mean.” When forced to focus all their attention outside the intuitive plane, they can come across as stressed, unsteady, or overwhelmed.
The INFJ type result is one of the most common mistypes I come across; I've found that usually, about 80% of the people who type as INFJs online are actually ISFJs, INFPs, or ISFPs.
INFJs are easily overwhelmed by bright lights, strong smells, scratchy fabric or loud noise. This is not simply overreacting. For them, it feels like the volume is always turned up too high, sometimes bringing them to tears or making them avoid people.
If INFJs are in a state of grip stress they can be more harsh, reactive, blunt, and critical than usual. They might tear down relationships, plans, or even physical objects around them in a state of self-destructive fury.
A heartbroken INFJ might think they should never have trusted this person in the first place and eat themselves up with guilt. They might get angry and defensive, scared of ever letting another person in. It's okay to feel those things, but it's not healthy to stay there long-term.
In addition to being highly sensitive (sometimes to an extreme degree), many INFJs also struggle with high amounts of anxiety and depression. A lot of INFJs report that they experience a low-key depression running in the background of their lives, even when it appears that everything is going well on the surface.
The Shadow Functions of the INFJ Personality Type:
Shadow functions are the less conscious sides of our personality type. They can be experienced in positive or negative ways, but they're far less mature than our “ego-syntonic” functions (dominant, auxiliary, tertiary, inferior).
INFJs are also driven to end injustice, so much that they may go to the extreme of cutting any person who exhibits toxic behavior out of their lives. INFJs can use their stubbornness to their advantage when cutting ties with narcissists, if they're willing to confront conflict head-on.
The biggest wound of an INFJ, the self-sacrificing wound, is what stops us from pursuing our dreams and becoming the fullest expression of ourselves. Without purpose, our life feels somewhat incomplete. After all, we know in our heart of hearts that there is so much more to life than what is right now.
INFJs love when you help them out with something they may not be able to do for themselves, such as take care of them when they are sick or help them with housework (especially something they loathe).
INFJs are, in many ways, an emotional sponge. Wired to think about feelings, relationships, and what's best for people, we tend to absorb the emotions of others even in the best of times. Unsurprisingly, that can leave us pretty exhausted — and that's true even if the feelings we're picking up are mostly positive ones.
In my experience as an MBTI® practitioner, one of the most common struggles I hear from INFJs is the struggle of being misunderstood. INFJs feel misunderstood in their external environment and even by themselves.