Burnout Test

A burnout test asks how often you feel the main signs of burnout at work: exhaustion, mental distance from your job, trouble focusing and trouble keeping your emotions in check. This one is the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT), answered from never to always. Your average in each area is compared with a sample of working people, so you see whether your signs are low, average, high or very high.

Choose the full version (23 statements, about four minutes) or the short one (12 statements, about two). Answer for how work has been lately, not for your worst day. Tap an answer or use the keys 1 to 5, and go back if you change your mind.

Your result has three layers. The overall score is the average of all your answers on a 1 to 5 scale. Each of the four areas gets its own average and its own bar. Behind every bar sit the ranges from the BAT manual, built from 1,500 working people in Flanders, Belgium: low means you score like the lowest quarter of that group, average like the middle half, high like the top quarter, and very high like the top 5 percent.

Under the bars you see the statements you answered often or always, a short read of the overall pattern, and next steps for the area that stands out most. Save the result and the page shows it the next time you come back, with the date, a trend line and how each area moved. Two weeks is a good gap: long enough for a change at work to show, short enough to catch things before they slide.

The BAT sees burnout as one state that shows up in four connected ways:

• Exhaustion: a deep loss of physical and mental energy, tired after little effort, unable to recover after work.
• Mental distance: pulling back from work, little enthusiasm, indifference or cynicism, running on autopilot.
• Cognitive impairment: trouble concentrating, thinking clearly and remembering, and more mistakes.
• Emotional impairment: irritability, overreacting, getting upset without knowing why.

These are the most common signs of burnout people recognize, and the four bars show which ones are carrying the most. The full BAT also has a separate scale of secondary complaints such as poor sleep, worry, tension, headaches and muscle pain. That scale is scored on its own in the manual, so this page leaves it out and focuses on the core. Burnout also tends to build in steps; the stages of burnout describe how it usually develops.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the best-known burnout questionnaire, and many people search for it by name. It is sold by its publisher, Mind Garden, and every use needs a paid license, so it cannot be offered on an open web page.

The BAT was developed at KU Leuven by Wilmar Schaufeli, Steffie Desart and Hans De Witte. Its authors made it non-proprietary: anyone may use it at no cost, without asking, as long as it is not changed and their paper is cited (Schaufeli, Desart and De Witte, 2020, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(24), 9495, doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17249495). That is why this page uses their exact English wording, their 1 to 5 scale and their scoring. The 12-item version comes from a later study that cut the BAT down while keeping its structure (Hadžibajramović, Schaufeli and De Witte, 2022, BMC Public Health, 22, 560).

The World Health Organization describes burnout in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition: chronic workplace stress that has not been managed well, showing up as exhaustion, mental distance from the job and reduced effectiveness at work (WHO, 2019).

A score here is a mirror, not a verdict. The BAT manual itself says no self-report questionnaire can settle whether someone has burnout; that takes a fuller conversation with a trained professional. The reference group is Belgian workers, not Americans, so use the ranges as a guide and pay most attention to how your own scores move over time.

Exhaustion also has causes that have nothing to do with work: poor sleep, illness, low mood, a new baby. If you have felt drained for weeks, see your doctor, especially when the tiredness does not lift on weekends or holidays.

The BAT and the WHO definition are about work. If what wears you out is at home, these fit better: caregiver burnout, parental burnout and relationship burnout. For any area of life, the energy audit maps what drains you and what charges you.

Start with recovery, not willpower. Protect a hard stop to the workday and real time off, and find out what kind of rest you need. Bring one concrete request to your manager, such as a deadline moved or a meeting dropped. If you have felt this way for a while, book a visit with your doctor. How to recover from burnout walks through the steps, and emotional exhaustion covers the part that follows you home.

Stress and burnout are related but not the same: stress is too much, burnout is too little left. If you are not sure which fits, the stress level test looks at the last two weeks, and the 60-second mental health check-in tracks how you are doing day to day.