Does work drag? Do you start watching your clock as soon as it ticks 9.35 am? Is the only thing that motivated you to return to your office after the Christmas holidays were of the fact that your employer hasn’t blocked Facebook yet? If the answer to these is yes, you may be suffering from ‘rust out’. A disease that gets worse if you did not find an immediate remedy.

As the name suggests, rust out is burn out’s boredom-based counterpart. Instead of working all hours and going out in a blaze of stress-related glory, you do an uninspiring job that fails to stretch you and become disinterested and apathetic.

It’s surprisingly common: according to new research by occupational psychologist Dr Sandi Mann, a third of workers in the United Kingdom find their jobs boring.

The severity of the case might be even alarming in countries where people are, by choice rather than force, accustomed to skipping the daily drudgery of what might appear to them dull. Worse still, Mann believes that the harm caused by boredom may exceed that caused by overwork.

Unchecked rust can lead to depression and even physical symptoms that is likely to get severe if not treated before it gets worse. The causes of rust out read like a checklist of modern workplace woes: the deskilling of once complex jobs, lack of empowerment, paperwork overload, endless meetings, repetitive tasks, and so on. It can affect anyone but hits two groups particularly hard.

The first is middle level managers whose careers have ground to a halt; the second is the younger workers who in more hierarchical days would have been

promoted, but in today’s flatter structures are stuck in jobs that are beneath them or so they would believe.

So what can be done? Businesses need to recognise rust and talk about it. They should ensure people are in jobs suited to their skills and build a workplace with creative tension, or in other words, that little bit of stress that is good for you.

If your work has become de-motivating, tell your boss, try to take on new responsibilities, clarify your goals and vary routines. And if your job is fundamentally rusty, find a new one. Perhaps the worst thing you can do is nothing.