Are You Burned Out or Just Bored? Tell the difference before you make the wrong move

You rested. It didn't help. Or the job got easy, and that's somehow worse. Either way, every day is heavy, everyone around you calls it burnout, and you're about to make a move based on a word you haven't checked.

Here's the research reason to check first: Christina Maslach, the researcher who defined burnout, measures it as three things at once: exhaustion, cynicism, and the creeping sense you're no good at the job anymore. Tired by itself isn't burnout. And workplace boredom is real enough that researchers gave it its own name, boreout, because chronic under-challenge wears you down the way overload does. "Just bored" isn't a smaller problem. It's a different one, and the two need opposite fixes.

These questions split them one honest answer at a time: whether a bad day asked too much of you or too little, whether the feeling lives in this job or has gone flat everywhere, whether the weight follows you into hours that are yours, whether new work makes you flinch or light up, and whether you feel like you're failing at this job or like it's beneath what you can do. Every page picks a side. Both is an answer, and it usually means the question is bigger than this job.

And if the flatness covers everything, the food, the people, the things that were never the job, the last page says the honest thing: that's a conversation for a person, not a purchase.

Free. Enter your email and the questions are yours on this page, right away.

Where to go next:

• If it's burnout: Burned Out, where naming it turns into what has to change
• If it's bored, split, or unclear: What Do You Actually Want?