Burnout Severity Assessment — Free Test | Modern Vitality Hub
Burnout Severity Assessment
Twelve questions that sort what you are feeling into five separate patterns: emotional exhaustion, detachment, recovery capacity, physical signals and boundary erosion. It is a structured way of looking at your own answers, not a medical test.
What burnout actually refers to
Burnout is not a synonym for tiredness, and it is not a medical diagnosis in most healthcare systems. The World Health Organization lists it in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon: a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. That wording is deliberate. It places the cause in a prolonged mismatch between demands and resources rather than in a personal shortcoming, and it keeps the term tied to work rather than to life in general.
Research on the subject, most of it built on the Maslach Burnout Inventory, keeps returning to three components. Exhaustion is the depletion of emotional and physical energy. Depersonalisation, sometimes called cynicism, is the distancing that follows: work starts to feel mechanical, colleagues or clients become cases rather than people. Reduced professional efficacy is the sense that effort no longer produces results. The three do not move together. Someone can be exhausted while still caring intensely, which is why a single overall number tells you much less than a breakdown by pattern.
Where the mismatch usually comes from
Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter described six areas where the fit between a person and their job tends to break down. Reading them is often more clarifying than any score, because most people recognise one or two immediately:
- Workload. Sustained demand with no recovery period built in, so the deficit compounds week after week.
- Control. Little say over how the work is done, which turns ordinary problems into helplessness.
- Reward. Effort that goes unnoticed, financially or socially, until it stops feeling worth repeating.
- Community. Isolation or unresolved conflict, which removes the buffer that colleagues normally provide.
- Fairness. Decisions that seem arbitrary, which damages trust faster than heavy workload does.
- Values. A gap between what the job requires and what you believe is right, the version that tends to hurt the most.
Why exhaustion is easy to misread
The overlap with other conditions is the reason this page keeps insisting on a doctor. Depression, generalised anxiety, iron deficiency, hypothyroidism, obstructive sleep apnoea, long-covid fatigue, perimenopause and grief all produce the same opening symptoms: no energy, no interest, poor concentration, disrupted sleep. Burnout is distinguished mainly by being tied to a context. If a genuine two-week break barely moves the needle, or if the flatness follows you into things you used to enjoy, the explanation is probably not only occupational, and that is a question for a clinician rather than a quiz.
How this assessment is scored
Each question is answered on a five-point frequency scale from never to almost always, worth 0 to 4 points. Twelve questions produce a maximum of 48. Three of them are worded positively, about protected time, real days off and sleep that restores you, and those are reversed before scoring, so consistently answering "almost always" to them lowers your total. Points are also grouped into the five dimensions shown in the result, and the dimension bars are expressed as a percentage of what that dimension could reach, which is what makes them comparable to each other.
The bands are interpretive rather than clinical. They exist so the result reads as a description instead of a verdict: 0 to 11 as low strain, 12 to 23 as early signals, 24 to 35 as elevated strain, 36 to 48 as high strain. No validated cut-off score for burnout exists in the research literature, and published studies use different instruments and different thresholds. Treat your number as a snapshot of the last few weeks and pay more attention to which bars are highest than to the total.
What it cannot do
It cannot see your medical history, your medication, your finances, your caregiving load or the specifics of your workplace. It relies entirely on self-report, which shifts with mood and with how the current week has gone. It has not been validated against any clinical measure. Its usefulness is narrow and real: it gives you organised language for something that usually arrives as a vague fog, and that language travels well into a conversation with a manager, a partner or a doctor.
Your answers
Question
Why this is asked
Your result
Low strain
Where the strain sits
Each bar is a percentage of what that dimension could reach, so the five can be compared with each other. Every bar points the same way: longer means more strain, including the recovery row, which is scored as a deficit.
The pattern in your answers
Recovery capacity
Built from the three positively worded questions: protected time in your day, real days off, and sleep that leaves you rested. This is the part most people can move first.
All five dimensions at once
The same five numbers as the bars above, drawn as one shape. A lopsided outline points at a specific problem, a large even one points at general depletion.
Reading it honestly
What your answers point at first
Generated from your highest dimension. These are common starting points, not instructions, and none of them replace advice from a clinician who knows your history.
A two-week experiment
Two weeks is long enough to notice a difference and short enough to actually finish. Write down where you started so you have something to compare against.
Reasons to involve a doctor
Tick anything that applies. Any single tick is a reason to book an appointment rather than keep self-managing, because these point to causes a questionnaire cannot see.
Stress or burnout
| Feature | Acute stress | Burnout |
|---|---|---|
| Emotion | Over-engaged, urgency, anxiety | Disengaged, flat, numb |
| Energy | Hyperactive, running hot | Depleted, running empty |
| Timescale | Days to weeks, tied to an event | Months, tied to a situation |
| Effect of rest | A weekend helps noticeably | A weekend changes little |
| Sense of loss | Loss of control | Loss of motivation and meaning |
Two plausible paths from here
Descriptions of common trajectories, not predictions about you.
- Nothing changes. Sleep debt accumulates, small tasks start costing more than they should, irritability shows up at home before it shows up at work, and the distance from the work grows until it feels permanent.
- One area changes. Protected recovery time returns first, usually sleep. Energy follows over several weeks, and interest returns last, which is why people abandon changes too early.
Topics worth reading next
Search these on the site rather than following a link, so nothing here breaks if a page moves.
Questions people ask
Can this tell me whether I have burnout?
No. It organises your own answers into a clearer picture, which is useful for noticing patterns and for describing them to someone else. Diagnosis requires a clinician who can rule out the conditions that imitate burnout.
Are my answers stored anywhere?
No. Everything runs in your browser, nothing is transmitted, and closing the page discards the result.
My score is low but I feel awful. What does that mean?
It usually means the strain is not primarily occupational. Depression, anxiety, grief, caregiving load, chronic illness and sleep disorders all produce exhaustion that a work-focused questionnaire will miss. That is worth raising with a doctor.
How often should I retake it?
Monthly at most. Burnout shifts over weeks and months, not days, and frequent retesting mostly measures how your week went.
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