Burnout is tied to a context, almost always work, while depression follows you everywhere. That is the short answer, and the most useful test that comes out of it is whether the symptoms ease when you get real distance from the job.
The longer answer is that this distinction is less settled than most articles about it suggest. Researchers have spent a decade arguing about how far the two can be pulled apart, and they have not finished.
Is burnout a medical condition?
No. The World Health Organization includes burnout in ICD-11 under factors influencing health status, in the section on problems associated with employment or unemployment, and states directly that it is not conceptualised as a medical condition. [who-2019-icd11-burnout] Depression, by contrast, is a diagnosable condition with agreed criteria.
WHO defines burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, with three dimensions: exhaustion, increased mental distance from the job or feelings of cynicism about it, and reduced professional efficacy. It also says the term refers to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to other areas of life.
That last clause gets ignored constantly. “Burnt out on parenting” and “burnt out on dating” are ordinary English now, and they describe something real, but they are outside what the classification covers.
Why the two are so hard to separate
They are hard to separate because burnout has no diagnostic threshold, so every study draws its own line. Depression has criteria that most researchers apply the same way; burnout has questionnaires with cut-offs that vary, which is why prevalence estimates for it range across an implausibly wide band.
The disagreement in the literature is genuine and worth knowing about. A 2015 review examining 92 studies concluded that the overlap between burnout and depressive symptoms was substantial enough to question whether burnout is a distinct entity at all, and noted that burnout lacks a consensual definition. [bianchi-2015-overlap] A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis came to the opposite conclusion, finding the two related but separable constructs rather than one thing under two names. [koutsimani-2019-meta]
Both are careful pieces of work. What they disagree about is whether the correlation between the measures reflects one underlying condition or two that frequently co-occur, and that is not the kind of question a further round of surveys settles.
The framing that has held up best treats burnout as a response to chronic job stressors, described by the three dimensions above and produced by a mismatch between a person and the demands of their work rather than by a weakness in the person. [maslach-2016-burnout]
The test that actually helps: does it lift when you leave?
The most useful question is what happens to the symptoms when work is genuinely removed for a week or more. Burnout tends to ease with real distance from the job; depression tends to be portable, showing up on holiday, at weekends, and in the parts of your life that have nothing to do with your employer.
A schematic of the clinical heuristic described in this section, not measured data. Real recovery curves vary widely between people, and the two patterns often occur in the same person at once.
Two honest caveats about that test. A week is often not long enough for the exhaustion of the first pattern to shift, so a bad holiday proves less than people think. And plenty of people show the first pattern for a while and then the second, because sustained workplace stress is one of the routes into a depressive episode rather than an alternative to it.
The symptoms that point away from burnout
Some experiences belong to depression rather than to occupational exhaustion, and they are the ones worth taking to a GP. Guilt or worthlessness that has nothing to do with your job, loss of interest in things you do outside work, changes in appetite, early-morning waking, and any thought of harming yourself all sit outside what burnout describes.
Tiredness and cynicism about work are the shared ground. What separates the two is whether the flatness has spread into the rest of your life, and whether you can still enjoy things when nobody is asking you to perform.
If you have had thoughts of ending your life, contact your GP urgently or, in the UK, call Samaritans free on 116 123 at any hour.
Has this spread beyond work?
Tick anything true of the last two weeks. This is a reflection prompt rather than a test, and it produces no diagnosis.
0 of 7 ticked
Most of what you ticked sits outside what burnout describes. The depression screener below takes about two minutes and gives you something concrete to bring to a GP appointment, which is a better use of ten minutes than deciding which label fits.
Some of this is occupational and some is not, which is the most common situation rather than an unusual one. Both screeners are worth doing, and the answer may be that you need changes at work and an appointment.
This pattern points towards the occupational one. The burnout screener is the better starting point, and the section below on what changes it is where to go next.
Two free screeners on this site cover both sides. The burnout screener uses the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, and the depression screener uses the PHQ-9. Both score in your browser and send nothing anywhere. Neither is a diagnosis, and doing both is reasonable when the picture is mixed.
What changes burnout, and what does not
Burnout responds to changes in the job rather than to changes in how hard you rest. Because it is produced by a sustained mismatch between a person and their work, rest without any change to workload, control or recognition tends to buy a few weeks before the exhaustion returns. [maslach-2016-burnout]
The levers that matter are unglamorous and mostly not individual:
- Workload that fits the hours. The most common mismatch, and the one no amount of morning routine addresses.
- Some control over how the work is done. Autonomy over method and pace protects against exhaustion more reliably than autonomy over hours.
- Recognition that matches effort. Not praise. Being paid and promoted in proportion to what you do.
- Work that does not contradict your values. Sustained conflict between what you believe and what the job asks is corrosive in a way tiredness is not.
- Relationships at work that are not adversarial. Isolation and unresolved conflict accelerate the other four.
Where none of those can move, the honest answer is often that the job is the problem and the decision is about the job. That is a harder conversation than a sleep routine, and it is the one that works.
If the exhaustion has turned into a struggle to start anything at all, our guide to finding motivation when you have none covers the mechanics of getting moving, and the burnout pillar covers recovery more broadly.
When to seek help
Speak to a GP if low mood or loss of interest has been present most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or more, which is the threshold used to consider a depressive episode. Go sooner if it is affecting your ability to work or care for yourself.
Go urgently if you have thoughts of harming yourself, if you are using alcohol or drugs to get through the day, or if you cannot function at home as well as at work. A GP appointment covers both possibilities in one conversation, so you do not need to have worked out which one it is before you go.
How MyFreud can help
The question this article turns on is whether your mood tracks your working week or ignores it, and that is answerable with a fortnight of actual data rather than by trying to remember how last month felt. MyFreud gives you daily mood tracking that shows the pattern across weekdays and weekends, which is exactly the comparison a GP will ask you to make and the one that is hardest to reconstruct from memory.
Download MyFreud and start today: App Store or Google Play.