How far into burnout are you?
There are stages. Knowing yours changes what helps.
Start the quiz →What this quiz explores
Burnout is usually talked about as a yes or no, which is why the advice people get is so badly matched to where they are. A long weekend helps at one stage and is meaningless at another. This places you along the progression.
How it works
The quiz has 4 possible results. Each answer option was written to lean toward one of them.
Your result is the one your answers pointed to most often. Skipped questions, and the occasional answer that does not lean toward any result, are not counted.
Alongside the result you see your answer profile: the share of your answers that pointed to each result. Close percentages mean you sit between two results, which is common.
Four stages of the burnout curve
Early Signal
You're tired in a way that still responds to rest, which means this is the cheap stage to fix.
Weekends mostly work, your interest in the work is intact, and your standards haven't moved. What's changed is small: less restoration than you used to get, a flatter Wednesday, a few more weeks than usual since you felt properly rested. That's early, and early is the whole opportunity here.
The Established Pattern
Rest no longer clears it, which tells you the problem is structural rather than a matter of recovery.
You need most of a holiday to unwind and the benefit fades within a fortnight. Your interest is fading, your standards are slipping in ways that bother you, and it's been months rather than weeks. You've probably tried adjustments that didn't stick, because the load kept doing what it was doing. The trap at this stage is that the remedies people suggest are the ones for the previous stage. A weekend, a break, better habits: all reasonable, all insufficient, and each failed attempt makes it feel like a problem with you rather than with the arrangement. It isn't. When recovery stops working, the thing that has to change is the input. Make the load visible and negotiate it as a priority question rather than a complaint: here's everything I'm carrying, here's what I can do well, which should slip. Take real time off, fully disconnected, and expect the first few days to feel worse before anything lifts. This is also a reasonable point to talk to a doctor, since sleep changes and physical symptoms at this stage are worth looking at properly rather than absorbing.
The Deep Burnout
This has moved past what a job change alone will solve, and the most useful thing here is to stop treating it as a work problem.
Nothing restores you. Concentration is unreliable, the work that took an hour takes a day, the things you used to enjoy stopped being enjoyable, and people close to you have said they're worried. You've likely been covering at work for a long time, which takes an enormous amount of energy nobody can see. Your view of yourself has taken damage, and it has started to feel like a fact about who you are rather than a state you're in. It isn't. What matters most here is that this territory overlaps substantially with depression, and the two are hard to tell apart from the inside. That distinction changes what helps, and it isn't one to make alone. The other thing worth naming: people at this stage tend to build elaborate plans about resigning or moving, and the plan becomes another weight, when what's needed first is distance and another person involved. Please talk to a doctor about this, sooner than feels justified. Take whatever leave you have. Tell one person close to you the real version rather than the managed one. Hold off on large career decisions until you've had some distance, because almost nobody makes a good one from here. And if things feel heavier than exhaustion, or you've had thoughts of not wanting to be here, please reach out today to a doctor or a crisis line rather than waiting; that is a common thing to feel at this depth and there is help for it.
The Rebuilding
You came out the other side and made real changes, and the work now is keeping them when the pressure returns.
Weekends restore you again. Interest is returning, your concentration is back, and people have said you seem more like yourself. Crucially, you didn't just recover, you changed something structural: the workload, the boundaries, the job itself. That distinction is what separates a real recovery from a pause.
Not a diagnosis. If you are in immediate distress, please contact a doctor or a crisis line.
What this quiz can’t tell you
- It is not a clinical screening tool. The questions were written for self-reflection and have not been validated against diagnostic criteria.
- It reflects how you answered today. Sleep, stress and circumstances change the answers, and so the result.
- A result describes a pattern in your answers, not a condition. Only a qualified professional who knows your history can assess that.
How this quiz was designed
Built from the occupational literature on burnout as a process rather than a state. Cross-check with the career-category burnout-check quiz for direction of depletion.
Read more about how our quizzes are created, including how scoring works and what we do and do not claim.