It's the job. Not you.

How you feel on a proper break away from work. Burnout is classified internationally as an occupational phenomenon — it attaches to the job, so people typically feel noticeably better on a genuine holiday and worse again on returning. If the flatness, fatigue and loss of interest persist regardless of setting, at weekends and in things you used to enjoy, that points elsewhere. Treating depression as burnout delays treatment that works, which is why this comes before any score.

Because that's where the evidence sits. Individual interventions like mindfulness and resilience training show modest and often short-lived effects; changes to workload, control and reward show larger ones. Most burnout content is aimed at making you cope better, which puts the fix on the person with the least power over the cause. The six job factors — workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values — are where this actually looks.

Probably because the problem isn't effort. High demands combined with low control is the pattern most consistently associated with harm — more than high demands on their own. When there's no decision you're allowed to make without escalating, more effort doesn't touch the cause and simply adds to the exhaustion. That combination gets identified specifically, because it changes what you should ask for: one decision you can make yourself, rather than general support.

Then that's said plainly rather than dodged. Actions get sorted into what you can do, what needs a manager, and what only the organisation can fix — and the third category isn't pretended into reach. Where conditions can't change and raising it has failed repeatedly, leaving is a solution rather than a defeat. And if you can't afford to leave, the honest goal becomes surviving it while planning an exit rather than recovering inside it.

Yes, and it's a specific one: psychological detachment matters more for recovery than the number of hours off. Being physically away while checking messages provides very little, which is why holidays can feel useless. A defined window where messages aren't looked at recovers more than an extra hour off does, and it costs nothing. Beyond that, if functioning is affected, burnout is a legitimate reason to see a doctor — people delay that out of shame far longer than they should.