The pattern this test is looking for
Burnout rarely announces itself. The pattern usually runs like this: the tiredness stops responding to sleep. The work that used to be merely demanding starts to feel like sand. The people you serve — patients, students, clients, your own kids — start to register as weight before they register as people. And somewhere in there, quietly, you begin doing the math on how long you can keep this up.
If any of that reads less like a description and more like a mirror, the nineteen questions above are worth your next five minutes. They come from the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory — the CBI — one of the most used burnout measures in the world.1 It won't tell you whether you're weak, lazy, or failing. It will tell you something far more useful: how depleted you are, and where the depletion is coming from.
What the three subscales actually separate
Most burnout tests give you one number. The CBI gives you three, and that design choice is its quiet genius.
Personal burnout (6 questions) measures exhaustion in you, full stop — tired, worn out, physically and emotionally drained — with no assumption about the cause. Work-related burnout (7 questions) measures the exhaustion you attribute to your work: worn out at the end of the working day, drained at the thought of another one. Client-related burnout (6 questions) measures the exhaustion you attribute to working with the people you care for or serve — and "serve" is deliberately broad. Clients, patients, students, customers, a parent with dementia, a child who needs more than most.
That word attribute is doing the heavy lifting. The CBI's designers understood that exhaustion is one thing, but the story you tell about its source is separate information — and it's the information that determines what to do next.1 Two people can score identically on personal burnout while one is being drained by their job and the other by caring for a sick parent while their job is actually fine. Same tiredness. Completely different next move. A single-number test can't see the difference. This one can.
It also protects you from a common and costly mistake: fixing the wrong thing. People with high personal burnout but a healthy job sometimes quit a job that wasn't the problem, only to find the exhaustion followed them out the door — because it was never coming from work. Others with a clearly toxic workload blame themselves, grinding harder on personal "resilience" while the actual source sits untouched in their calendar. The three-way split is a diagnostic, not a formality. It aims your effort at the load that's actually there instead of the one that's easiest to reach for.
How the scoring works
Each question is answered on a five-point scale — never/almost never, seldom, sometimes, often, always — and each answer maps to a value of 0, 25, 50, 75, or 100. (One question, about having enough energy for family and friends, runs in the opposite direction and is reverse-scored.) Each subscale score is simply the average of its items, so every subscale lands between 0 and 100. The overall score averages the three subscales.
| Score | Band | Standard reading |
|---|---|---|
| 0–24 | Low | Ordinary tiredness; recovery is keeping pace |
| 25–49 | Mild | Early signals — the cheapest time to act |
| 50–74 | Moderate | Real burnout; recovery needs structural change |
| 75–100 | Severe | Serious depletion; professional support is warranted |
Fifty is the line researchers generally treat as burnout worth acting on, and seventy-five as severe.2 But the single most useful thing on your results screen isn't the overall number. It's the spread between your three subscales.
Reading your breakdown
Here's how to read the shape of your result, not just its height.
High personal, lower work and client. The exhaustion is real, but you're not pinning it on your job or your caring roles — which suggests the load may be life-wide: finances, health, grief, an accumulation of everything. It's also the pattern where burnout and depression overlap most, because depression doesn't respect the boundaries of a job description. If the tiredness follows you into weekends, holidays, and the things you used to enjoy, take the PHQ-9 depression screen too. Not because something is necessarily wrong — because two readings beat one guess.
High work-related, lower elsewhere. The clearest pattern the CBI produces. You have energy for your life; your work is eating it. This is the result that should redirect your effort away from self-improvement and toward job-improvement: workload, role clarity, hours, the conversation with your manager you've been drafting in your head for months.
High client-related. This is the compassion-fatigue signature, and it's common in exactly the people who'd be embarrassed to admit it — nurses, teachers, therapists, social workers, caregivers, parents. Finding it hard to work with the people you serve doesn't mean you've stopped caring. It usually means you've been caring on credit for a long time, and the account is overdrawn. The research on human-service workers is unambiguous: this pattern is an occupational hazard of caring work, not a character flaw in the carer.1
High across all three. The load is everywhere and so is the depletion. Don't try to fine-tune the diagnosis — read the sections below on moderate and severe scores, and start there.
What actually helps, at each level
Low (0–24). Keep whatever you're doing that lets you recover, and keep it deliberately. Burnout arrives by drift, not by decision — nobody schedules it. Naming your current recovery habits out loud is how you defend them when the next heavy season arrives.
Mild (25–49). This is the cheapest possible moment to act, and the temptation is to waste it on promises. "I'll rest more" is not a plan. Make one structural adjustment instead: a recurring block that's actually yours, one standing commitment ended, one task handed off for real. If you're not sure where your energy is actually going, the energy budget tool will show you — most people are shocked by the accounting.
Moderate (50–74). Be honest with yourself here, because this is the level where the usual advice quietly stops working. A long weekend will not touch a subscale score of 60. Recovery at this level requires load removed or redistributed — not managed better, not survived more gracefully — and that almost always means involving other people. Your manager, if the load is work. Your family, if it's care. A doctor or therapist, if the exhaustion has started collecting interest in your body and mood. Asking at this stage isn't weakness; it's the competent move, made while you still have the resources to make it.
Severe (75–100). Take this seriously, and take it soon. Sustained functioning at this level costs health — sleep, immunity, cardiovascular strain, and the slow corrosion of every relationship that matters to you. A conversation with a doctor or therapist is warranted, and so is a real reduction in load: not eventually, not after the busy season, but as the next decision you make. Nobody hands out medals for the most complete collapse.
The honest part about recovery
Here's what the recovery brochures skip: at moderate and severe levels, burnout recovery is measured in months, not weekends. The exhaustion took a long time to accumulate, and it discharges slowly even after the load comes off. People who expect to feel restored in two weeks often conclude that rest "isn't working" and go back to overloading — which is how one burnout becomes three.
So set the timeline honestly. Reduce load structurally, protect recovery daily, and measure progress in trend, not in mood. The Steadiness Log is built for exactly this — a five-question quarterly baseline that shows the slope of your recovery instead of the noise of any given week. And if you want to understand the load-versus-recovery balance that got you here in the first place, the Ballast Stress Check reads both sides of that ledger in two minutes.
It also helps to know what recovery does not mean. It isn't a single heroic reset — the two-week sabbatical you take and then walk straight back into the same load. That pattern reliably fails, because the sabbatical treats the exhaustion while leaving the machine that produced it running. Real recovery is quieter and more structural: less load coming in, more restoration going on, held steady long enough for the deficit to actually discharge. If nothing about the load changes, no amount of rest will hold, and the number will climb back to where it was — often higher, because now you've also spent your reserves proving to yourself that rest "didn't work."
Where the CBI comes from — and why it's here
The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory was developed by Tage Kristensen and colleagues at Denmark's National Institute of Occupational Health and published in 2005, built on the PUMA study of nearly 2,000 human-service workers.1 Its creators had a pointed reason for building it: the dominant instrument, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, is commercially licensed — researchers and clinicians pay per use. The CBI was released free, with citation, on the argument that a public-health problem deserves a public instrument. It has since been translated and validated across dozens of countries and professions.2
One more thing worth knowing: the WHO classifies burnout in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition3 — which matches what this test measures. Burnout is not a diagnosis, and this tool doesn't make one. It's a reading of depletion and its sources, scored entirely in your browser. Nothing you answered left your device, and nothing will unless you choose to share it.