by Kelley Cours Anderson, College of Charleston; Ashley Hass, University of Portland, and Breanne A. Mertz, University of Tampa, [This article first appeared in The Conversation, republished with permission]
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.
“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. Social comparison is one of the best-documented ways social media erodes self-esteem, and these workers get a double dose: personal and professional, all day, every day.
The second force is what we call the paradox of tools. The industry’s go-to fix is technology: Scheduling platforms let marketers queue posts weeks ahead, and artificial intelligence tools draft captions and reports. These shortcuts help – one of our interviewees called content tools “the primary method for social media managers to combat burnout” – but they also come with a catch.
For example, scheduled posts can backfire when the news turns grim, so someone still has to watch the feed. Algorithms reward constant and fresh engagement, so marketers worry that leaning on AI makes their content sound robotic, a real risk when authenticity is what makes brands work on social media. The tools promise freedom, yet the “always-on” expectation remains untouched.
It’s not a willpower problem
It would be easy to dismiss these as problems of people who need better screen-time habits. Our research suggests otherwise.
Marketers in our study had jobs that bundled strategy, design, customer service and crisis management into one poorly defined, often junior, position. Stepping back has a direct cost, because time offline shows up in the metrics they’re judged on.
This is also a cultural problem. Americans see round-the-clock availability as dedication to the job. But other countries have pushed back: France, Italy, Spain and Ireland, for example, have written a “right to disconnect” into law, while Australia recently extended its own version to small-business employees.
A member of our own research team, Kiley Pettit, has experienced this firsthand while working as a full-time traveler. She has balanced clients across multiple countries and time zones, with the workday often stretching from early mornings to late night. The boundaries between work and personal time have become increasingly blurred, she told us.
Addressing the burnout
For the marketers themselves, our findings suggest two ways out of the burnout trap.
First, it’s better to experiment than copy: Disconnection is personal, and what restores one person, such as a radical break, may backfire for another who does better with small habit shifts, such as response windows or boundary scripts for clients (“I reply between 9 and 5”).
Second, we recommend using technology deliberately: Schedule proactively instead of chasing trends in real time, and treat AI as an assistant for routine tasks, not a replacement for the creative work that makes the job worth doing.
That said, individual habits and better tools only go so far. Burnout is built into the job – so the job must change.
The deeper fix is structural. In our view, employers need to define social media roles more clearly and staff them realistically, set communication charters with real response windows, and make digital fatigue a normal topic during check-ins rather than a confession. Turnover costs one-half to two times a worker’s salary, so supporting these employees makes good business sense as well.
Social media marketing burnout isn’t a personal failing or ordinary job stress. It’s the predictable result of working in an environment where the workplace, the tools of the trade and often leisure time all occupy the same space. The brands profiting from that attention, and the employers hiring for it, must decide whether the people behind the screens get to log off, too.
Kelley Cours Anderson, Assistant Professor of Marketing, College of Charleston; Ashley Hass, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Portland, and Breanne A. Mertz, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Tampa
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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