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In today’s workplace culture, burnout is everywhere; from LinkedIn posts to wellness workshops, it has become a catch-all phrase for feeling overwhelmed, drained, or “just not okay.” But while the conversation has grown louder, the definitions haven’t necessarily grown clearer.
So, what actually is burnout?
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout as an “occupational phenomenon,” not a medical condition. It’s the result of chronic workplace stress which has not been successfully managed, a definition which, rightly or wrongly, shifts attention from individual blame to systemic responsibility. But while this reframing is important, it still leaves a key question unanswered: where exactly does burnout come from, and how should we identify it?
Much of today’s thinking on burnout still draws heavily on the work of Christina Maslach, who in the 1980s developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the first widely accepted tool for diagnosing burnout in professional settings. According to Maslach, burnout is driven by chronic interpersonal stressors at work and is characterised by three core dimensions:
* Emotional exhaustion
* Depersonalisation (a sense of detachment from one’s work or the people one serves)
* Reduced personal accomplishment
High scores on exhaustion and depersonalisation, combined with low scores on accomplishment, are seen as indicators of high burnout risk.
A slightly different approach was taken by researchers behind the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI). Rather than focus on interpersonal dynamics, the Copenhagen measure centres around exhaustion across three domains:
* Personal burnout
* Work-related burnout
* Client-related burnout
This model is more inclusive across industries and helps differentiate between general exhaustion and job-specific strain.
More recently, the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) proposed a re-definition of burnout, returning towards the Maslach model, as a single, unified syndrome rather than a combination of separate dimensions. BAT focuses on four core symptoms:
* Exhaustion
* Mental distance
* Cognitive impairment
* Emotional impairment
It also accounts for secondary symptoms, such as psychological distress and physical complaints, making it one of the more holistic tools in use today, and building out a framework of burnout related complications. The BAT’s strength lies in its adaptability across cultures and professions, and its ability to track the real-world impacts of burnout more broadly.
Despite the academic progress, burnout in popular commentary is often used to describe any kind of stress, fatigue, or dissatisfaction at work. While this normalises discussion, which is undoubtedly a good thing, it also risks diluting the term. If everything is burnout, then nothing is. We lose the precision needed to take meaningful action. This is evident in the proliferation of "do-it-yourself" burnout tests and assessments.
Interestingly, one of the earliest and most striking depictions of burnout wasn’t psychological at all, it was literary. In 1960, Graham Greene published A Burnt-Out Case, telling the story of an architect who had lost all sense of meaning in his work and pleasure in his life. Long before clinical definitions existed, Greene had captured the motivational collapse that often lies at the heart of the burnout experience.
Greene was close. At MindAlpha, we build on that insight.
We define burnout as a state of extreme low motivation which has become debilitating to the extent that it may be damaging an individual’s performance and posing a threat to their mental or physical wellbeing.
Unlike the WHO, Maslach, Copenhagen, or BAT models, we don’t view burnout as a condition or a fixed syndrome. We see it as an extreme form of demotivation, caused by accumulated trauma, and crucially, coming potentially from multiple sources, not all of them tied to the workplace.
This distinction is key. If we assume burnout is always “caused by work,” we risk overlooking the broader psychological and contextual drivers: misaligned values, social isolation, invisible pressure, or past experiences which compound over time. In some cases, burnout may have more to do with what’s missing than what’s present: belonging, recognition, safety, or a sense of purpose.
The way we define burnout shapes the way we try to solve it. If we see it as a simple matter of workload, we’ll offer time off. If we see it as exhaustion, we’ll recommend rest. But if we understand burnout as extreme demotivation, we can start asking deeper questions:
Where is the motivational system breaking down?
What’s out of balance: autonomy, proficiency, belonging, a sense of safety, or a sense of purpose?
What patterns can we spot before performance or wellbeing are affected?
These are the questions we’ll explore in our next article,where we dig into how burnout can be measured, predicted, and ultimately prevented using a motivational lens.
For now, one thing is clear: burnout isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a signal. The challenge is learning to read it properly
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