Social media marketers are stuck in a burnout trap. Here’s how to break free

FastCompany: It’s almost midnight when the phone buzzes—a client text, a comment that needs a reply, a trend that will be stale by morning. For the people who run brand accounts on social media, the workday never really ends. We’re marketing researchers who study digital and social media wellness and teach the students who go on to fill these jobs. In a study published in September 2025 , we interviewed social media marketers in the United States, Ireland, India, Germany, and Australia and saw a profession quietly running on empty: passionate, creative people who are mentally drained by jobs that rarely turn off. The numbers back them up.

More than 40% of social media marketers plan to leave their jobs within two years, and nearly half say they get little support from supervisors for their mental health, according to industry research. A job you can’t log off from Plenty of jobs are stressful. What makes this one different is that it’s especially difficult for social media marketers to escape the source of their stress. The platform is simultaneously their workplace, their tool and often their leisure environment.

The same apps they use to create content, monitor engagement, and respond to customers are often the same ones they turn to for entertainment, social connection, and news. As a result, the source of their stress is rarely something they can simply walk away from. There’s also the time involved. The average person spends about 2.5 hours a day on social media, according to global data. The marketers we interviewed often spend easily double or triple that, because they are both producers and consumers of content. @emthesaint i am SO grateful to work with the clients I am right now, truly.

This conversation just needs to be had and normalized because from first hand experience, how much your brain is in taking and the pressure to perform is overwhelming on a good day. #socialmediamanagement #smm #communitymanager ♬ original sound – saint em “It is truly 24/7, 365. You have to post on holidays, weekends,” is how one manager described her schedule. “There is always a clock ticking somewhere.” The strain is starting to show publicly. When Zaria Parvez, Duolingo’s social media manager and designer of its famous owl logo, left the job, she spoke openly about virality, anxiety, and mental health.

Even platform industry guides now treat burnout as a fact of the profession. That matters because decades of research link heavy social media use to anxiety , lower self-esteem and reduced well-being. Researchers usually frame these as consumer problems, and the standard advice is to take a break or do a digital detox . But what happens when scrolling is your job description? You can’t detox from your paycheck. The comparison trap and paradox of tools Our study looked at several forces that drive this burnout. Two stood out. The first is the comparison trap.

To stay current, marketers spend their evenings “doom scrolling” their personal feeds, hunting for trends to use at work. The line between relaxing and researching disappears—and so does the line between watching other creators and measuring yourself against them. One marketer told us that scrolling felt like “constantly being told I was doing things wrong”—whether at work, where every post invited comparison with competitors, or at home, where lifestyle content told her she was failing there, too.

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The article addresses a significant issue in the brand and design industry related to employee well-being, which is increasingly recognized as vital for brand success, making it impactful and relevant, though the topic of burnout is not entirely new.