Burnout Test — Exhaustion, Distance, Loss of Impact

Three dimensions of work burnout, each on its own scale: exhaustion (how depleted the work leaves you), detachment (how much distance you've put between yourself and the job) and loss of impact (how disconnected your effort feels from any result). You get a level on each plus an overall reading. It describes a period in your working life, not your character — retake it in three months and it can honestly look different.

From Christina Maslach's three-dimensional model of job burnout (Maslach & Jackson, 1981), which is also the shape the World Health Organization adopted. ICD-11 describes burn-out as "a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed", with three dimensions: energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one's job, and reduced professional efficacy. Our three scales follow those three dimensions.

No. WHO files burn-out in the chapter on factors influencing health — not among the diseases — and stated plainly in 2019 that it is not classified as a medical condition. It is an occupational phenomenon. Depression is a separate thing, and this test cannot tell the two apart: they share exhaustion and flatness, but depression is not confined to work and needs a professional to assess.

No. This is not the MBI, and we are not affiliated with Christina Maslach, Mind Garden or the World Health Organization. The MBI is a copyrighted, commercially licensed instrument. We took the construct and the three dimension names — descriptive terms, and WHO's own public wording — and wrote all eighteen of our own statements.

Deliberate change from the original. The MBI scores its third dimension as personal accomplishment, where a low score is the burnout signal — so that scale runs opposite to the other two. We inverted it into "loss of impact", so on all three bars higher means more burnout and the chart reads honestly at a glance. The trade-off: our third scale is not directly comparable to a published MBI accomplishment score. We publish no norms anyway.

By the definition, yes — WHO says the term refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to other areas of life. That is why every question here names work, the workday or colleagues. Care work and study count as work for this purpose. If the flatness covers everything and not just your job, that is a different question, and a professional is the right person to bring it to.

Yes, and that is the most useful thing on this page. Burnout research puts the drivers in working conditions rather than in personal weakness — Maslach and Leiter describe six areas where a mismatch does the damage: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values. Which of your three bars is highest is a hint about which of those is off. Nobody burns out because they lack character.

We don't hand out prescriptions — a test that has met you for four minutes has no business telling you to quit your job. Read which bar is highest and treat it as information about your conditions, not a verdict on you. And if this is costing you — sleep, health, the people you live with — take it to someone qualified. That is not an escalation, it is the appropriate next step.