It was clear to me that, by the start of December, I was burnt. Yet I felt that I didn’t deserve the status of Burnt Out because it was a 5 month period, averaging 45 hours a week. The difference is that the pressure was higher than usual.<p>How do you define burnout and how do you know if you’re there?<p>And then what steps do you take to recover?
The diagnostic criteria for occupational burnout are pretty well standardized and can easily be found online (e.g. <a href="https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient-resources/resources/burnout-syndrome.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient-resources/resource...</a>) and, based on my personal experience, are pretty accurate. What about these common lists of symptoms do you disagree with?<p>You mention average hours worked per week being not unreasonable and not feeling you "deserve" to be labeled as burnt out, so I'll also note that, although severe overwork is a risk factor for burnout, it's only one of a variety of risk factors.
Burnout isn’t defined by a certain number of hours. It’s defined by how you feel. The difficult thing to disentangle it from (especially because they feed off one another) is depression.