Burnout Test for Work and Emotional Exhaustion

By two things: how long it lasts and whether it reverses. Tiredness clears after a weekend or a holiday; burnout does not, and it drags on for months. That is why a score alone is not enough: the test also asks how long the state has lasted and whether rest still restores you, and it reads the combination. High scores in the first week of a hard project are not yet burnout.

The instrument is built on exhaustion: constant tiredness, being physically and emotionally drained, the thought "I cannot take this any more", the sense that every working hour is tiring, and having nothing left for family and friends afterwards. Irritability, cynicism about the job and detachment from the people it exists for usually come with it. Trouble concentrating and remembering is another common sign — this instrument does not measure that one.

There is no single recognized stage scale — the popular five-step and twelve-step schemes are models, not measurements, and none of them has published norms. Two distinctions are testable, and this test gives you exactly those: how intense the exhaustion is (the 50-point line) and whether it has become chronic and no longer reversible by rest. That is enough to know what to do; a stage number adds nothing to it.

From the outside they look alike, but the help is different. Burnout is tied to context: away from work people usually feel better, and the state shifts when conditions change. Depression does not pick a context and affects interest and mood across the board. If your personal scale is high while the work scales are not — exhaustion the job does not account for — the test will offer a separate screening: these are different things, and guessing between them is a poor method.

No. ICD-11 describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, and this questionnaire does not diagnose. A high score is a reason to pay attention and, if the state persists, to discuss it with a professional — not a verdict about an illness.

The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) by Kristensen, Borritz, Villadsen and Christensen, 2005. It was created as an open alternative to the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which is licensed commercially. The wording, both response scales, the scoring rules and the norms come from the first-edition document published by Denmark's National Institute of Occupational Health.

It is the threshold at which the authors classify a state as a high degree of burnout. It is not a line between health and illness but the line studies used to count the share of people at a high level. In a sample of human-service workers, 22% crossed it on the personal scale, 20% on the work scale and 16% on the client scale.

With published samples, and we name them. The personal scale is compared with a representative sample of Danish adults (1,498 people); the work and client scales with the PUMA study of human-service professions. These are different populations and we do not blend them: if you work in a helping profession, tick that, and the personal scale will be compared with the closer sample.

Because the original is built that way: the authors used frequency anchors for some items and degree anchors for others. That is not sloppiness but two different kinds of question, and swapping one scale for the other changes what is being asked.

Only if your work involves people — patients, students, children, clients. For a programmer or an accountant that scale measures nothing, which is why we ask instead of scoring it silently.

Look at which scale leads — the steps under the result are tied to it. If the work scale leads, the source is the job: rest helps briefly, and what has to change is the workload, the role or the conditions. If the personal scale leads, the issue is wider than work and changing employers usually does not help. If all three are high and have been for more than a week, that is a reason to see a doctor or a therapist: persistent exhaustion can also come from conditions a questionnaire cannot measure.

Your answers and the run history are written to this browser's storage and stay there. What goes into our anonymous statistics is technical: how many items were answered, which of the three scales led, and which of the four patterns came out — no scores, no answers, nothing that identifies a person or a run. The "Share" link is separate again and carries three rounded numbers, so a colleague opening it sees the shape of the result and not what you said to any question. If you would rather leave nothing on the device either, "Clear history" removes the stored runs.