Burnout is a state of chronic depletion that builds when demands outpace your ability to recover, usually over months or longer. The classic burnout symptoms are emotional exhaustion, a growing sense of detachment or cynicism, and a drop in how effective you feel. Burnout is not a formal psychiatric diagnosis, but it overlaps heavily with conditions like depression and anxiety, which is part of why it gets missed or mislabeled so often. The key thing to understand is that your underlying neurology changes the entry point.

Burnout and depression overlap so much that they're easy to confuse, even for the people living through them. Both leave you exhausted. Both make it hard to care about things you used to care about. Both can flatten your mood and drain your energy. But they are not the same thing, and the difference matters, because treating one like the other is a big reason people stay stuck for months or years longer than they need to.