Boreout, not burnout: why under-stimulated professionals are quietly moonlighting to reclaim their minds

Burnout has long dominated conversations about occupational health, but psychologists are turning their attention to its quieter, less visible counterpart: boreout. A new qualitative study published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology suggests that for some professionals, the chronic boredom and under-stimulation of a primary job may be driving them to take on second jobs—not merely for money, but as a deliberate psychological strategy to reclaim autonomy, purpose, and cognitive challenge. The research, conducted by Anisha Sultan Ali and Jhoanne Mae Carlos Toriaga at Mapúa University in the Philippines, offers a rare window into the lived experiences of dual-role professionals who juggle two or more jobs simultaneously, revealing a striking paradox: the very act of escaping boredom through moonlighting introduces a new set of physical and psychological costs that may push workers from boreout toward burnout.

The study focused on Filipino dual-role professionals, or DRPs, across the healthcare, education, and industry sectors in Metro Manila. While burnout results from excessive job demands, boreout emerges from insufficient challenge and repetitive tasks—a condition that can silently erode engagement and productivity while appearing far less alarming from the outside. The researchers anchored their investigation in two established frameworks: the Job Demands-Resources model, which describes how work environments comprise demands that require sustained effort and resources that support growth and buffer against stress, and Person-Environment Fit theory, which emphasizes the compatibility between employees’ skills, needs, and the characteristics of their work environment. Through this lens, boreout can be understood as a form of person-environment misfit, where the need for meaningful and stimulating work goes unmet.

To capture the phenomenon, the team employed a phenomenological research design using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, conducting semi-structured interviews with six dual-role professionals aged between 28 and 43. Participants included a physician who moonlights as a researcher, a respiratory therapist who teaches at a review center, a professor who works as a respiratory therapist, a public high school teacher who tutors online, a business process outsourcing employee who works as a virtual assistant, and a saleslady who resells items online. Crucially, the researchers excluded individuals who moonlighted purely for financial reasons, isolating those whose secondary employment reflected a genuine psychological response to primary-role under-stimulation. Interviews lasted between 45 and 60 minutes, were transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using thematic analysis following the six-phase process developed by Braun and Clarke.

Three major themes emerged from the data, supported by ten categories and 31 codes. The first theme, Structural Constraints and the Internal Experience of Professional Underutilization, revealed how rigid workplace routines and administrative burdens trigger what participants described as an internal conflict of stalled potential. One physician participant estimated that roughly 70 percent of being a doctor is paperwork, while a professor described grading as mechanical—check, score, record, repeat—until thinking becomes unnecessary. Participants reported feeling as though they were performing tasks on autopilot, executing instructions without room to experiment or innovate. One educator captured the distress succinctly: it feels like you are betraying your own potential, sometimes even feeling embarrassed after years of experience to realize this is really all they are doing.

The second theme, Intentional Pursuit of Economic and Professional Growth, documented how professionals proactively turned to moonlighting as a resource-seeking coping mechanism. Viewed through the Job Demands-Resources model, rigid procedural routines and administrative burdens function as structural job demands, while autonomy, task variety, and cognitive challenge represent severely depleted resources. Moonlighting, in this framework, becomes an explicit strategy to restore psychological and cognitive resources entirely missing from the primary job. Participants described craving cognitive stimulation, reclaiming autonomy, and maintaining skills that would otherwise decline. One participant noted reading clinical journals not because it was required, but because they wanted their mind to stay engaged—stimulation was something they actively chased. Others emphasized the sense of ownership and intellectual engagement their secondary roles provided, along with the freedom of not being trapped in being just one thing.

Financial motivation remained a significant driver, particularly in a context where rising costs of living and persistent inflation make single incomes increasingly difficult to sustain. In the Philippines, 14.5 percent of the workforce were moonlighters as early as 2009, compared with approximately 4 percent of European workers in 2018 and 4.8 percent of U.S. workers by 2022. The researchers noted that moonlighting in developed countries is often viewed as a tool for career development, whereas in developing countries it more commonly functions as a survival strategy driven by economic necessity. Yet the study’s deliberate exclusion of purely financially motivated moonlighters confirmed that the psychological strain of severe person-environment misfit is a potent enough catalyst to drive secondary employment on its own.

However, the compensatory behavior captured in the third theme, Psychological and Physical Toll of Juggling Roles, revealed a troubling paradox. While secondary roles successfully provide the missing cognitive resources—stimulation, purpose, and autonomy—they simultaneously generate intense new demands and strain. Participants described cognitive and emotional switching as profoundly draining, particularly when moving from dealing with critically ill patients and deaths directly into teaching mode, where energy and patience with students become essential. Sleep disruption emerged as a major biological strain, with unstable body clocks and fragmented rest periods. One participant described days when they felt overstimulated from noise but under-stimulated intellectually at the same time—a state the researchers termed the stagnation-exhaustion paradox, where high activity levels do not translate into professional progress.

The relationship among boreout, moonlighting, and possible burnout is presented as an emerging theoretical interpretation rather than a demonstrated causal pathway. Because clinical burnout was not directly measured, the researchers cannot definitively establish that moonlighting resolves the psychological resource deficit of boreout only to introduce a unique work conflict that poses a risk of transitioning directly into physical burnout. Still, the proposition carries significant implications for high-stakes environments like healthcare, where participants explicitly highlighted the performance pressure of maintaining patient safety despite severe sleep disruption. Hospitals expect employees to be fully focused and well-rested, making the multi-role demands of moonlighting a critical safety and contractual concern.

Several methodological limitations warrant acknowledgment. The participant selection procedure preselected cases consistent with the theoretical relationship by excluding individuals who moonlighted exclusively for financial reasons and focusing on those reporting under-stimulation. Consequently, while the data describes how under-stimulated professionals experience moonlighting, it cannot establish that boreout is a general driver for all moonlighters. The exclusion of purely financially motivated moonlighters may underrepresent the experiences of economically driven dual-role professionals whose secondary roles may also generate boreout-related responses. Future studies should employ larger and more diverse samples across additional Philippine regions and occupational sectors, and the researchers recommend developing a culturally sound psychometric instrument from the identified themes, along with longitudinal studies tracking the long-term trajectory of the stagnation-exhaustion paradox.

Ultimately, the study suggests that addressing professional under-stimulation requires systemic organizational interventions rather than placing the burden of fulfillment on individual employees. In healthcare, where existing hospital trainings focus heavily on compliance and protocol updates, administrators must offer deeper specialized professional development and streamline administrative burdens to restore cognitive challenge. In education, where boreout often stems from mechanical repetitive tasks like grading, institutions can facilitate job crafting by integrating collaborative mentorship or curriculum design opportunities that satisfy educators’ intrinsic need for generativity. In industry and business process outsourcing sectors, where strict protocols leave employees feeling like they are on autopilot, managers should implement strategic skill utilization through cross-training or task rotation to break rigid procedural routines. By proactively addressing under-stimulation, employers can protect their workforce from the severe exhaustion of multi-role coping, safeguarding both employee wellbeing and overall workplace safety.

Subject of Research: Occupational Psychology

Article Title: Job boreout among dual-role professionals: moonlighting as a psychological response to primary-role understimulation

Article References: Ali, A. S., & Toriaga, J. M. C. (2026). Job boreout among dual-role professionals: moonlighting as a psychological response to primary-role understimulation. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 4, Article 1938501. https://doi.org/10.3389/forgp.2026.1938501

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1938501

Keywords: boreout, moonlighting, dual-role professionals, occupational psychology, job boredom, workplace wellbeing, burnout, person-environment fit, job demands-resources model, Philippines, dual-role, professionals