Free assessment · 3 minutes
Burnout Assessment, in your nervous system's language
19 questions across depletion, recovery, engagement, and what's already working for you. A personalised assessment in your inbox, written from the biology.
01 · The distinction
Stress, tiredness, and burnout are not the same thing.
Most people learn the difference too late.
Stress is a response. It is time-limited and reversible. The body mobilises, and when the load passes, the system resets. Stress is meant to come and go.
Tiredness is energy depletion. A full night, a slow weekend, a holiday: these restore what's been spent.
Burnout is something else. Burnout is what happens when stress accumulates and recovery is postponed long enough that the system stops being able to come back online on its own. The marker isn't exhaustion as such — it's that rest, when you finally get it, no longer restores you.
By the time burnout feels like burnout, the cascade has been underway for months. The earlier stages are silent. Most people only recognise it at the end, when the cost has become visible.
This assessment is built to surface those earlier stages.
02 · Recognition
What burnout can look like
Some of the most telling early signs are the ones high-functioning people are most likely to dismiss. You may still be doing the job, but it costs more than it used to. A weekend or a holiday no longer fully resets you. You reach for more coffee, more wine, or different food to keep going. Your sleep is broken in ways that have no obvious explanation. Small irritations feel disproportionately heavy. You catch yourself going through the motions, less interested than you used to be.
These signs are biology responding to load, not character flaws. The pattern matters more than any single sign, and the pattern is what this assessment reads.
03 · The three axes
Why a screening conversation, not a quiz
Most burnout content describes the late stage. Most burnout quizzes ask "are you tired?". Tiredness is the wrong question. Plenty of people in early burnout are not yet tired. Some are performing better than ever, running on borrowed energy and the body's compensatory mechanisms.
The questions you are about to answer read three axes that conventional quizzes miss.
How empty the tank is.
Not just tiredness, but whether the reserves the body usually mobilises are still there.
Whether your system can still come back online.
This is the most important axis. It is the difference between stress and burnout. When recovery is still working, the system is under load but resilient. When recovery is failing, the cascade is already in motion.
Whether meaning and connection are still intact.
The slowest axis to shift, and the most diagnostic when it does. The body's first protective move under sustained load is to detach meaning slightly, so the system has somewhere to retreat to.
Most people land high on one or two axes and lower on others. The pattern is the point, and the assessment you receive meets you in that pattern.
04 · Your assessment
What you will receive
On submission, you'll be told your assessment is on its way. Within a few minutes, a science-embedded reading arrives in your inbox.
It names the pattern your answers point to, the biology underneath it, and what the work calls for. The reading walks through the relevant physiology in depth — the HPA axis, cortisol rhythm, sympathetic dominance, the cost of compensation, what recovery looks like over weeks and months.
It's written in the voice of Sonia Ouarti, drawing on her work at the intersection of nervous-system physiology, recovery, and sustainable performance.
Written by
Sonia Ouarti
Neuroscience-informed coach with over 20 years in tech leadership. MSc Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. Works with global organisations including Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, and Sony.
About this assessment
This is a screening tool. It's designed to help you notice patterns in how your body, your recovery, and your engagement are responding right now. It doesn't give you a diagnostic label, and it doesn't replace clinical judgement.
The questions draw on three sources: six adapted from the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (Kristensen et al., 2005), a publicly available, peer-reviewed instrument; two informed by concepts from the Maslach Burnout Inventory (specifically the cynicism subscale, used as a frame rather than reproduced verbatim); and eight original questions developed by Sonia, drawing on her work in nervous-system physiology and recovery. The scoring logic and the assessment you receive are her own.
If the assessment resonates strongly, or if you are concerned about your wellbeing more broadly, speaking to your GP or a qualified mental-health practitioner is the right next step, alongside any work you might do here, not instead of it.
Sending your answers.