Work Burnout Quiz

Am I burnt out? Reading your result

There is no honest yes or no, and any quiz that gives you one is selling certainty it does not have. What you get instead is a description, and the shape of your three scores is it. Start with which one is highest.

• Exhaustion high, detachment low. Depleted, and you still care. That is a load problem, and load problems are the most fixable kind.
• Exhaustion and detachment both high. This is what most people mean by burnout. The distance you put between yourself and the work is not indifference, it is a way of spending less on something that stopped paying you back, and rest does not touch the reason you stepped back.
• All three high. Don't try to reason your way out of this alone. Once your sense of your own competence has gone too, your read on your options is skewed one way: everything looks impossible and you look like the problem. Talk to a doctor.

The most useful output here isn't the score, though. It's the list of specific items you rated “often” or “always”. Those are concrete, describable things, and they are enormously more useful in a conversation than “I'm burnt out”, which is easy for a manager to hear as a mood rather than a problem. Write them down before you close the tab.

If you're weighing whether to leave, do that separately and ideally not at your most depleted. Our should I quit my job quiz splits whether leaving is justified from whether you're currently in a position to do it, which is a more honest framing than a single verdict when you're exhausted.

Why three scores instead of one

Burnout is not a single feeling and treating it as one is why so much advice about it lands badly. The three dimensions below appear again and again in how researchers and clinicians describe it, and they respond to completely different things.

• Exhaustion. Energy gone, and rest isn't refilling it. This is the dimension that actually responds to time off.
• Detachment. Cynicism and distance from the work and the people in it. It usually follows exhaustion as a way of coping, and rest does not reach it, because it's a response to the situation rather than to fatigue.
• Effectiveness. The sense that you're no longer any good at this. It is typically the least accurate of the three, and the most damaging, because it quietly rewrites how you see yourself rather than how you see the job.

Exhausted but still invested, and exhausted and checked out, would produce a similar single number. That number would tell you nothing useful about which one you have, and they do not have the same fix.

What exhaustion feels like on an ordinary Tuesday

Not dramatic. Mostly it is a change in what things cost. Opening a document you need to write takes three attempts. You reread the same message four times. Small decisions, which restaurant, which of two equally fine options, become genuinely hard, because the part of you that makes those cheaply has nothing left. The tell is the recovery curve rather than the tiredness: a full weekend gives back less than it used to, and what it gives back is gone by Tuesday afternoon.

What detachment feels like, and why people miss it

Detachment rarely arrives as anger. It arrives as relief. You skip the optional meeting and nothing bad happens. You stop reading the strategy email. Someone announces a reorganization and you notice you have no reaction at all, where a year ago you would have had opinions.

This is the dimension people underrate, because it feels like maturity. Boundaries and detachment look identical from outside and are opposites underneath: boundaries protect something you still want, detachment is what is left when you stopped expecting the thing to be worth protecting. If the withdrawal came with relief rather than a decision, score it honestly. From the outside it reads as quiet quitting, which is why it gets treated as an attitude problem instead of a symptom.

Why the effectiveness score is the least trustworthy

When you are running empty it is hard to remember what you accomplished: you scan for evidence of competence, find none to hand, and conclude there is none. Meanwhile the work that slips first is the visible part, replies and updates and follow-ups, so the sample of your performance you can see is the worst of it. Treat a low effectiveness score as a symptom, not as information about your ability.

Burnout versus ordinary tiredness

The real question behind a burnout quiz is usually whether you have a problem or are simply busy. The distinction is not how tired you feel. It is whether the tiredness still tracks its cause.

Ordinary tiredness has a name and an end date, and it responds to the obvious remedies in the obvious amounts. Burnout is where that relationship has broken: the busy period ends and you do not come back, and the problem has spread beyond your energy into how you see the work.

One more thing worth saying plainly: exhaustion often shows up in the body before anyone frames it as a work problem. Sleep that does not restore, headaches, stomach trouble, catching everything going round the office. Those all have other explanations too, several of them medical and treatable, which is exactly why guessing is a bad plan and a doctor is a good one.

Burnout versus depression

These overlap, they can look nearly identical from the inside, and only a qualified professional can separate them. A twelve-item quiz cannot do it and neither can a longer one.

What matters is that the two point at different interventions, which is the part most pages skip. If what you have is burnout and it gets treated as a personal resilience problem, you get handed meditation apps and sleep advice while the cause sits untouched, and you conclude you are failing at recovery. If what you have is depression and it gets treated as a job problem, you may quit, change industries, and find the same weight waiting on the other side.

The rule of thumb usually drawn is that burnout is tied to a context and lifts when the context genuinely changes, while depression follows you into things you used to enjoy. That is all it is, a rule of thumb, and plenty of people have both. The practical order does not change either way: get depression and anxiety ruled in or out by someone qualified, and work on the job in parallel rather than instead.

How it builds, and why order matters

Exhaustion tends to come first. Detachment follows, as a way of reducing what the work costs you. The collapse in your sense of effectiveness comes last, once you have been operating at a distance long enough that results genuinely do suffer and you have evidence to convict yourself with.

You will find stage models online, from three stages up to twelve. They are decent descriptions and bad timetables. People skip stages, sit in one for a year, and slide backwards. Don't use a stage number to decide whether you have earned the right to do something about it.

Order matters for one practical reason: the fix gets more expensive at every step. At exhaustion alone it is arithmetic, fewer things or more people or more time, which is a conversation about a calendar and your manager knows how to have it. Once detachment sets in you are trying to rebuild a relationship to the work, which needs the reason for the distance to change, not the hours. By the time your sense of competence has gone you are also fighting your own read on your options, which is the worst moment to make career decisions. Acting early is not moralizing, it is cheaper.

Why time off stops working

The obvious thing to try first is a real break. It works, then it stops working, and people conclude something is wrong with them. Nothing is. The break did exactly what a break can do.

Rest replenishes energy, and energy is one of your three scores. It does not change how much work is waiting, how much control you have over it, or what you have come to believe about the place. So you come back with exhaustion down and the other two exactly where you left them, the same demands resume at the same rate, and the reserve you rebuilt gets spent on the same overdraft. Relief that fades once the same demands resume is not a failed vacation. It is a measurement.

What helps, by leading dimension

Generic burnout advice fails because it is aimed at the average of three different problems. Take the dimension that scored highest, do the things under that heading this week, and ignore the others for now.

If exhaustion is highest

The goal for the next fortnight is a real reduction in load, not better coping with the same load. Coping better is what got the load this big.

• Track where the hours actually go for one week. Write it down as it happens, without editing. You are looking for the recurring commitment that costs far more than you assumed it did.
• Drop one recurring thing this month. One meeting, one report nobody reads, one channel you monitor out of habit. Not delegate, not optimize: stop. The point is to prove the load is movable, because you probably no longer believe it is.
• Protect one recovery block and defend it like a client meeting. Recovery that gets cancelled whenever something comes up is not recovery, it is a preference.
• Get the physical side checked if it has been months. Sleep, thyroid, iron and other ordinary things produce exhaustion that no amount of workload management will fix.

If detachment is highest

Don't try to care harder. Willed enthusiasm is exhausting and does not last a week. Detachment is nearly always about something specific, and the work is to name it.

• Finish this sentence honestly: I stopped caring when ___. If an answer arrives straight away, that is the thing to work on. A reorganization, a promotion that went elsewhere, a decision you were overruled on, a resourcing promise that quietly expired, a manager change.
• Then ask whether that thing can change. Some can, and are worth one direct conversation. Some cannot, and knowing that is worth more than another six months of trying to reignite something.
• Re-contact one part of the work you used to like. Not as a morale exercise, as a test of whether the capacity to be interested is still there. If nothing lands anywhere, mention that to a doctor.

If your sense of effectiveness is lowest

• Reconstruct the last three months from records, not memory. Calendar, sent mail, tickets, documents. Write the list. Running empty makes your own output hard to recall, so build the list from records and judge it afterwards.
• Ask one person you trust for a specific read. Not “am I doing okay”, which invites reassurance. Ask which part of your work has actually slipped lately, and listen.
• Fix the visible slippage first. Late replies and missed updates are what other people notice, and they are the cheapest thing on the list to repair.

Change the work or change the job

At some point you decide whether this is fixable where you are. Identify what the mismatch actually is first, because some mismatches are negotiable and some are properties of the organization that no individual conversation will move.

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter's areas of worklife model groups the job-side causes into six: workload, control (no say over decisions or resources), reward (recognition and reward, financial or otherwise, that never arrives), community (poor relationships, no support, unresolved conflict), fairness (decisions that are not seen as fair or equitable), and values (a gap between your values and the organization's). Mayo Clinic's page on job burnout names a similar set of causes: lack of control, lack of clarity about what's expected of you, conflicts with others, too much or too little to do, lack of support, and problems with work-life balance. These are properties of jobs, not of the people in them.

Now the practical part. Workload, control and clarity of expectations are the areas most often negotiable inside the same job, because a manager can change them with a decision. Reward is sometimes negotiable and slow. Fairness and values usually are not, because they describe how the organization behaves, and one person raising them rarely moves it. If your honest answer is fairness or values, be realistic that fixing it means changing who you work for. When the pattern is broader than your own role, read the signs of a toxic work environment before concluding the problem is your capacity.

The test before you decide: write the sentence “the mismatch is ___” and see whether it names something a specific person could change. If it does, you have a conversation to have. If it does not, you have a decision to make, and it is better made after some recovery than during the worst week.

Raising it with your manager

The risk people worry about is real: say “I'm burnt out” and some managers hear “I can't do this job”, and now you are in a performance conversation you did not want. The way through is not to hide it, it is to bring something specific enough that it reads as a problem with the work rather than a verdict on you.

Note what the strong version does not do. It does not diagnose itself, blame anyone, or ask for everything. It proposes one change and a date to look at the result, which also protects you: if the change is made and nothing improves, you have evidence the problem is bigger than the reporting, obtained without an argument. Mayo Clinic's page on job burnout opens its list of what to do the same way, with talking to your boss about your concerns, before seeking support, exercise and sleep.

1. 1

   Pick three specifics, not a label

   Take the items you rated often or always and turn each into something observable. “I feel overwhelmed” becomes “I’m starting at seven to get an hour before the meetings begin”. Facts survive a skeptical listener; feelings do not.
2. 2

   Name the effect on the work before they do

   Say what has slipped. It will be noticed anyway, and saying it yourself changes the meaning from an excuse to a diagnosis. It also gives the conversation an objective: restore that thing.
3. 3

   Bring one bounded change, not a list

   One thing, with a duration. Drop a workstream for six weeks, hand off a recurring meeting, move a deadline, add a person. A single time-boxed request is far more likely to get a yes than a general plea for less work.
4. 4

   Set the review date in the meeting itself

   Agree a date to check whether it worked and put it in the calendar before you leave the room. People skip this step, and skipping it is how a good conversation quietly turns into nothing changing.

If you genuinely do not trust your manager with this, don't force it. Start with a doctor, or an employee assistance line if your employer has one, or HR if the cause is something HR owns. And treat the fact that you cannot raise a workload problem with your own manager as information about the job.

Time off and what a doctor can write

Plenty of people reach this page wondering whether they can be signed off work. That depends on where you live and on the clinician, but one thing is worth knowing first and almost nobody says it: burnout on its own is not a diagnosis. On the WHO wording quoted above it is an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, so a clinician works from what you actually present with, which may be a sleep problem, an anxiety or mood condition, or work-related stress.

So don't lead with the word burnout. It is a summary, and they need the raw material. Bring detail instead:

• How long it has been going on, in months.
• What your sleep is doing, specifically: getting to sleep, staying asleep, waking early, waking unrefreshed.
• What you have stopped being able to do that you could do before, at work and outside it.
• Concentration and memory: rereading, losing the thread, forgetting things you normally wouldn't.
• Physical symptoms, appetite changes, and any change in how much you are drinking.
• What changed at work around the time it started.

The items you rated highest in this quiz are a decent script for that conversation. Read them out. And the caveat on leave: a return to the identical job at the identical load tends to rebuild the identical state, and the second time round people are much harder on themselves about it.

Answering honestly, and the limits

Self-report has real failure modes and they mostly push one way, towards underrating. Worth knowing before you trust your own answers:

• You answer for this week. The questions ask about three months for a reason. A calm week hides a bad quarter, and one awful week inflates everything. Answer for the pattern.
• You compare yourself to the most overloaded person you know. Your reference point should be how you functioned a year ago, not how your worst-off colleague functions now.
• You are still delivering, so you discount it. Output is a lagging indicator; it holds up long after the cost stopped being sustainable.
• You answer as the person you want to be. Especially on the detachment items, where the honest answer feels like an admission about your character rather than a description of your week.

It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a validated clinical scale. It is not the Maslach Burnout Inventory or any other licensed instrument. It uses the three-dimension structure because that is the standard way burnout is described and because it makes the result actionable, not to imply clinical validity. Self-report on a website has real limits: how you answer depends on the week you're having, and exhaustion has many causes other than work, several of them medical and treatable.

On privacy: the scoring happens in your browser and we never receive your answers. They are also kept out of the page address while you answer, which matters because anything in the address bar is read by more than this page. Press Copy link and the link you get carries your answers so the result can be reopened later, so treat that one as private.

So use it for what it is good for. It gives you language, it separates three things you may have been experiencing as one, and it gives you a list of specifics to bring to someone who can actually help. Then talk to a doctor, or to your manager, or both. One good use later: retake it once something at work has actually changed and had time to bite, and compare the three scores rather than the total. Exhaustion dropping while detachment holds means you got a rest, not a fix.

For employers reading this

Burnout is a retention problem long before it is a wellbeing statistic. The pattern above is what precedes the resignations you didn't see coming, and by the time someone scores highly on detachment, a retention conversation is already late. Engagement strategies that actually work address workload and control rather than perks, and TeamPredict exists to flag the outward signals earlier, while the job is still fixable.

Two things follow from the three dimensions if you manage people. The six areas above are all things you control and your employee does not, which is why individual wellbeing programs so often bounce off: they answer a workload problem with a personal-resilience offer. And the symptom you will actually notice, someone doing the minimum and going quiet in meetings, is the middle stage, not the start. The start was months of exhaustion that looked like reliability, because that is the phase when people are still absorbing the overflow. Why good employees leave covers the same ground from the exit side.