Are you closer to burnout than you think?
The seven signs before the crash.
Start the quiz →What this quiz explores
Burnout doesn't announce itself. It arrives as a series of small adjustments you make without noticing: the calls you stop taking, the standards you stop defending, the Sunday that starts earlier each month. This quiz puts you along how depleted you are and by which direction you're depleting in.
How it works
The quiz has 3 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.
Three states of depletion
Running Warm
You're tired in the ordinary way, which is worth knowing because it means what you have is maintenance, not repair.
Some weeks are heavy, weekends still work, and you can remember the last time the job felt good without having to search for it. Your standards are intact and you still find people worth talking to. This is what a demanding job feels like when it hasn't tipped, and it's a real result rather than a consolation prize, because most people reading this won't get it.
The Overextended
You still care, which is exactly what's letting this continue longer than it should.
The load is the problem. You believe in the work, you like the people, and you have been absorbing more than one person's job for long enough that your body has started sending invoices: short sleep, more colds, a shorter fuse than you'd like. When something new arrives you take it, and something else slips without anyone being told. Your investment is what makes you valuable and it's also what's been used to load you. The trap is the belief that this is a season. It has probably been more than one season. Organizations don't self-correct around a person who keeps absorbing, because from the outside absorbed work looks like capacity, and the reward for handling an unreasonable quarter is another one. Nobody is coming to notice. Make the invisible visible this month. Write down everything you're carrying, with rough hours, and take it to your manager as a prioritization question rather than a complaint: here's the list, here's what I can do well, which of these should slip. That framing puts the decision where it belongs. Separately, take real time off, fully disconnected, and expect the first several days to feel worse rather than better before anything lifts.
The Disengaged
You're not exhausted, you're checked out, and those need completely different responses.
You have the energy. You could concentrate if you decided to. What's gone is the reason to, and it left slowly enough that you can't date it. The announcements sound like noise, you've stopped defending your standards because the friction isn't worth it, and you've noticed a hardness in how you talk about colleagues that wasn't there two years ago. Cynicism is protective. It's also corrosive, and it generalizes: it rarely stays inside working hours. The trap is misdiagnosis. People in this state take a holiday, come back to the same flatness, and conclude something is wrong with them. Rest doesn't fix a meaning problem. The other trap is that disengagement is comfortable, and it's possible to sit here for years, doing acceptable work, while the version of you that cared about things gets further away. Test the diagnosis rather than accepting it. Take one piece of work in the next month and do it to your old standard, all the way, and see whether anything flickers. If it does, this is about your situation and it's fixable, possibly without leaving. If nothing flickers, that's real information too, and it points at a bigger question about fit that a change of role or company answers better than another quarter of endurance.
A reflection tool, not a clinical assessment. See a doctor for anything persistent.
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.
Read more about how our quizzes are created, including how scoring works and what we do and do not claim.