Am I burnt out, or just tired?
This is educational, not diagnostic. These questions help you notice a pattern in your own routine. They cannot tell you what is causing it, and they are not a substitute for care from a doctor or clinician.
Your answers are scored on your device. Nothing you enter here is sent to us or saved.
Over the past two weeks, how often have you woken up already feeling tired?
Think about how you feel in the first ten minutes, before coffee.
By the middle of the afternoon, how much is usually left in the tank?
Over the past two weeks, how often have you felt physically worn out, with heavy limbs and everything taking more effort than it should?
Thinking about everything you are responsible for, paid work, home, family, anyone you care for: how often does the day ask more of you than you have to give?
How often do you get to the end of a day having done everything for everyone else and nothing for yourself?
When you think about tomorrow's list, how does it land?
After a normal night's sleep, how often do you wake up feeling genuinely restored?
Not just functional: actually restored. There is a difference and most of us stop noticing it.
Think about your last proper break: a weekend off, a holiday, a few days with nothing scheduled. How much did it help?
If you cannot remember your last proper break, pick the last time you had two days clear.
When you get an evening to yourself, what tends to happen?
How long has this level of tiredness been going on?
This one does not affect your result. It is here so we do not suggest something that would not suit you right now.
Have you noticed any of these alongside the tiredness in the past few weeks?
This one does not affect your result. It is here so we do not suggest something that would not suit you right now.
Has your mood been low, flat, or not quite itself recently? If so, roughly how long for?
Answer only what you are comfortable answering. You can skip this and still get a result.
Is that getting in the way of your day: work, family, things you normally enjoy?
Answer only what you are comfortable answering. You can skip this and still get a result.
Have you given birth in the last twelve months?
Answer only what you are comfortable answering. You can skip this and still get a result.
Please talk to your GP, midwife, or health visitor soon
Please arrange this soon.
You told us you gave birth in the last twelve months and that low mood has been getting in the way of your day. That combination is worth a proper conversation with your GP, midwife, or health visitor soon. It is common, it is treatable, and raising it early is the strong move.
We have not scored your answers. A habit plan is not the right tool here, and a quiz result would only get in the way of the conversation that will actually help.
Please talk to your GP about how you have been feeling
Please arrange this soon.
You told us your mood has been low for a few weeks and that it is getting in the way of your day. That deserves a proper conversation with a clinician soon, not a habit plan from a quiz, so we have not scored your answers.
A GP appointment is a good next step, and it is fine to bring exactly what you told us here: how long this has lasted and how often it gets in the way.
Please book a GP appointment soon
Please arrange this soon.
Alongside the tiredness, you ticked something on the list that deserves a proper check rather than a habit tip. We have not scored your answers, because tiredness with any of those alongside it is a question for a clinician first.
Most of the time there is a straightforward explanation, and a GP can look into it properly. It is a short appointment, and it is worth booking soon.
Your result: Coping, with reserves
Your answers add up to out of 100, read together with the three bars rather than on its own.
Across the three areas we asked about, you are not consistently running past what you have. There will be hard days in there, everyone's answers have some, but the pattern is one of a routine that is currently holding, and rest is still doing its job. That is worth knowing, because the thing to do with reserves is protect them, not spend them.
The most useful line in your answers is the day-to-day wear: waking tired and running out before the afternoon is done. That is the symptom rather than the cause, so the programme works backwards from it.what the day is asking of you. On your answers, the load rather than your capacity is the thing that has changed, which is better news than it feels, because loads can be renegotiated.that rest is not putting anything back. You told us your last proper break did not hold, and that is the single most useful thing in this whole set of answers: it means the problem is the quality of your recovery, not the quantity of your effort.
- Pick the one answer above that was worst and treat it as the early-warning signal. It is the one that moves first when things get busier.
- Protect the recovery you already have rather than adding anything. If you have evenings that are yours, defend them; if your weekend break works, keep it in the diary.
- Give it four weeks and check again. Behaviour, not symptoms: see what has stuck.
Where this goes in Femy: Sleep Reset, used here as maintenance rather than repair: one sub-minute habit a day
Start with: Stage 01 Foundation, 'Steady Energy All Day'
You will notice we have not told you whether you are burnt out. That is deliberate. The instruments that measure burnout are licensed, they were built and normed in workplaces rather than in women's lives, and their own authors treat burnout as a continuum with no cut-off rather than something you either have or do not. On top of that, exhaustion of this kind overlaps heavily with low mood, with a pooled correlation around 0.52 across the literature, and researchers genuinely disagree about whether the two are separable at all. So we have described what you told us instead. If you want the label, that is a conversation with a clinician, and it is a reasonable one to have.
This is an educational description of the pattern in your answers. It is not a mental health assessment and it does not measure depression or anxiety. If your mood has been low for two weeks or more, please speak to your GP. If something here is new, getting worse, or worrying you, speak to a clinician rather than wait.
Your result: Depleted
Your answers add up to out of 100, read together with the three bars rather than on its own.
One of the three areas is consistently carrying more than the others, and it is showing up as tiredness. Rest is still working for you. Not perfectly, but it is putting something back, which matters, because it means the useful move here is one targeted change rather than an overhaul.
The most useful line in your answers is the day-to-day wear: waking tired and running out before the afternoon is done. That is the symptom rather than the cause, so the programme works backwards from it.what the day is asking of you. On your answers, the load rather than your capacity is the thing that has changed, which is better news than it feels, because loads can be renegotiated.that rest is not putting anything back. You told us your last proper break did not hold, and that is the single most useful thing in this whole set of answers: it means the problem is the quality of your recovery, not the quantity of your effort.
- Start with the area that scored highest, not with all three. Femy's whole design principle is never more than one thing at a time, and this is why.
- If the loaded area was what the day is asking of you, the change is subtractive: find the one commitment in the next fortnight you can decline, postpone or hand over.
- If it was whether rest is putting anything back, start with sleep timing rather than sleep length. Going to bed and getting up at more consistent times does more for how restored you feel than an extra half hour does.
Where this goes in Femy: Assigned by the highest sub-scale: Sleep Reset if recovery, the stress protocol if load, Sleep Reset if day-to-day wear
Start with: Stage 01 Foundation, 'Stress, Mood, and Your Cycle', with 'Fix Your Sleep First' first
You will notice we have not told you whether you are burnt out. That is deliberate. The instruments that measure burnout are licensed, they were built and normed in workplaces rather than in women's lives, and their own authors treat burnout as a continuum with no cut-off rather than something you either have or do not. On top of that, exhaustion of this kind overlaps heavily with low mood, with a pooled correlation around 0.52 across the literature, and researchers genuinely disagree about whether the two are separable at all. So we have described what you told us instead. If you want the label, that is a conversation with a clinician, and it is a reasonable one to have.
This is an educational description of the pattern in your answers. It is not a mental health assessment and it does not measure depression or anxiety. If your mood has been low for two weeks or more, please speak to your GP. If something here is new, getting worse, or worrying you, speak to a clinician rather than wait.
Your result: Running on empty
Your answers add up to out of 100, read together with the three bars rather than on its own.
Most of your answers point the same way: the days are asking more than you have, and rest is not putting it back. That second part is the important one. When a weekend or a holiday stops restoring you, adding a new habit on top of a full week tends not to work. That is why the answer here is a sequence rather than a list, and why the first thing in it is not a productivity change.
The most useful line in your answers is the day-to-day wear: waking tired and running out before the afternoon is done. That is the symptom rather than the cause, so the programme works backwards from it.what the day is asking of you. On your answers, the load rather than your capacity is the thing that has changed, which is better news than it feels, because loads can be renegotiated.that rest is not putting anything back. You told us your last proper break did not hold, and that is the single most useful thing in this whole set of answers: it means the problem is the quality of your recovery, not the quantity of your effort.
- Sleep and its timing come first, before anything else, because non-restorative rest is what makes every other change fail to land.
- Then one subtraction, not one addition. Something in the next two weeks has to come off the list rather than be done more efficiently.
- Tell one person. Carrying this alone is a load in its own right, and the research on social contact and health is among the strongest in the whole field.
- If this has been going on for months, or if your mood has been low with it, put it to your GP. Not because a quiz found something, but because it is a short appointment and there are a handful of common things they can check easily.
Where this goes in Femy: Sleep Reset first, then 'Reset and Recharge'
Start with: Stage 01 Foundation, 'Fix Your Sleep First', then Stage 02 'Reset and Recharge'
You will notice we have not told you whether you are burnt out. That is deliberate. The instruments that measure burnout are licensed, they were built and normed in workplaces rather than in women's lives, and their own authors treat burnout as a continuum with no cut-off rather than something you either have or do not. On top of that, exhaustion of this kind overlaps heavily with low mood, with a pooled correlation around 0.52 across the literature, and researchers genuinely disagree about whether the two are separable at all. So we have described what you told us instead. If you want the label, that is a conversation with a clinician, and it is a reasonable one to have.
This is an educational description of the pattern in your answers. It is not a mental health assessment and it does not measure depression or anxiety. If your mood has been low for two weeks or more, please speak to your GP. If something here is new, getting worse, or worrying you, speak to a clinician rather than wait.
Not enough answers for a result band
Your answers add up to out of 100, read together with the three bars rather than on its own.
You skipped enough of the scored questions that a band would be guesswork, so we have left it off rather than pretend. The bars below show what we could read from the answers you did give.
The most useful line in your answers is the day-to-day wear: waking tired and running out before the afternoon is done. That is the symptom rather than the cause, so the programme works backwards from it.what the day is asking of you. On your answers, the load rather than your capacity is the thing that has changed, which is better news than it feels, because loads can be renegotiated.that rest is not putting anything back. You told us your last proper break did not hold, and that is the single most useful thing in this whole set of answers: it means the problem is the quality of your recovery, not the quantity of your effort.
- Start with the area whose bar is highest, or answer a few more questions next time for the fuller picture.
You will notice we have not told you whether you are burnt out. That is deliberate. The instruments that measure burnout are licensed, they were built and normed in workplaces rather than in women's lives, and their own authors treat burnout as a continuum with no cut-off rather than something you either have or do not. On top of that, exhaustion of this kind overlaps heavily with low mood, with a pooled correlation around 0.52 across the literature, and researchers genuinely disagree about whether the two are separable at all. So we have described what you told us instead. If you want the label, that is a conversation with a clinician, and it is a reasonable one to have.
This is an educational description of the pattern in your answers. It is not a mental health assessment and it does not measure depression or anxiety. If your mood has been low for two weeks or more, please speak to your GP. If something here is new, getting worse, or worrying you, speak to a clinician rather than wait.
There is a version of tired that a good weekend fixes, and a version that it does not. They feel similar from the inside, which is why the question is so hard to answer on your own.
This self-check will not tell you whether you are burnt out. Nobody can do that from twelve questions, and the research community does not actually agree on where exhaustion ends and low mood begins. We have put the detail on that further down the page, because you deserve to know what the thing you are filling in can and cannot do.
What it can do is separate three things that all feel like tiredness and need completely different first moves: how worn out you are day to day, how much your days are asking of you, and whether rest is putting anything back. That last one is the question most tiredness quizzes never ask, and it is usually the one that decides where to start.
How this self-check is put together
Nine questions, scored zero to three each, grouped into three areas: how worn out you feel day to day, how much your days are asking of you, and whether rest is putting anything back. The three sums are shown as bars and the total is converted to a number out of 100. Four further questions carry no points at all. They are there so that we do not answer something with a habit tip when it deserves an appointment.
Why there is no burnout score here. The two instruments that dominate this space are not available to us and would not be the right tool anyway. The Maslach Burnout Inventory's licence forbids both open-web availability and giving individual feedback to respondents, which is the entire function of a quiz. The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory is the better-designed instrument for our purposes because it restricts itself to exhaustion, the one component of burnout researchers broadly agree on, and its authors explicitly reject cut-points, describing burnout as a continuum running from complete exhaustion to full vitality (Kristensen 2005). We have written our own items in that spirit and used none of its text. Its reference population is 2,391 Danish human-service employees (Borritz 2005): a well-characterised group, but not a general population of women, which is a second reason its distributions cannot set our boundaries.
So where do the boundaries come from? From habit logic, and we would rather say that plainly than dress it up. The lower boundary sits where the average answer falls below 'some days', because below that there is no consistent load to work on and the useful action is protecting what works. The upper boundary sits where the average answer reaches 'most days' across all three areas, because that is where one new habit stops being a plausible answer and sequencing takes over. There is a third route into the top band that is not arithmetic at all: if rest has stopped restoring you and your days are still full, that combination lands in the top band regardless of the total, because it is the pattern where habit-only advice reliably fails.
The overlap we are not going to pretend away. Exhaustion of this kind and low mood are closely related and the field has not settled how closely. One meta-analysis puts the burnout-depression correlation at 0.520 and reads the two as overlapping but distinct (Koutsimani 2019). A bifactor analysis of similar data reads them as one syndrome, with a common factor absorbing roughly two-thirds of the common variance and burnout components correlating more strongly with depression than with each other (Bianchi 2020). The same group went on to publish an instrument built on the argument that burnout scales are detecting depression (Bianchi and Schonfeld 2020). We cannot resolve that and we should not appear to. It is the reason two of our questions ask about mood and score nothing: if low mood has been there for a fortnight or more and it is getting in the way of your day, this page stops scoring and points you somewhere more useful.
What the number is for. It is a description of your current routine, not a measure of your body or your resilience. There is a good reason to be careful about promising more: a smartphone app trialled for preventing depression in workers showed no effect at all in the intention-to-treat analysis, and benefit only among the people who actually engaged with it (Deady 2023). So this is what you are currently doing, not what will happen to you.
Common questions
How should I use this result?
As a starting point for one change, not as a verdict. The most useful part is not the number: it is which of the three areas came out highest, because that decides what to do first. If rest is the area that scored worst, start with sleep timing. If it is what your days are asking, the first move is subtractive.
Is this medical advice?
No. Femy is educational content about wellness habits. It does not diagnose, treat, or replace care from a doctor or clinician.
Does this tell me if I am burnt out?
No, and that is on purpose rather than a limitation we are apologising for. Burnout has no agreed cut-off, the instruments that measure it are licensed and were built in workplaces, and their own authors treat it as a continuum. We describe the pattern in your answers instead. If you want the label, that is a conversation with a clinician.
Is this a depression test?
No. It does not measure depression or anxiety and it does not screen for either. Two questions ask about mood, they contribute no points, and they exist so that the page can step aside and point you towards your GP rather than hand you a habit plan. If your mood has been low for two weeks or more, please speak to your GP.
What happens to what I enter?
It is scored on your device as you go. Nothing you type here is sent to us or saved. We count how many people finish the quiz and which of the three results they get, as totals only: never tied to you, your device, or the answers you gave.
Why does it ask about my last holiday?
Because whether a break restores you is more informative than how tired you feel today. Tiredness that lifts with rest and tiredness that does not need different first moves, and that question is the cheapest way to tell them apart.
Can I retake it?
Yes, though not straight away: we do not prompt a retake inside four weeks and we do not draw you a trend line. Symptom scores bounce around week to week, and watching them is rarely useful. Check in again after Week 4 of the programme and look at which habits have stuck instead.
Sources checked
Built from published research, with every source listed below. We checked these sources for the figures we quote: the typical ranges, the guideline targets, and the doses used in the trials we describe. We compare your answers to published general guidance for adults. We have not tested this quiz against any clinical measure.
- Kristensen (2005). The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory: A new tool for the assessment of burnout. Work & Stress. doi.org/10.1080/02678370500297720
- Borritz (2006). Burnout among employees in human service work: design and baseline findings of the PUMA study. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health. doi.org/10.1080/14034940510032275
- Koutsimani (2019). The Relationship Between Burnout, Depression, and Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Frontiers in Psychology. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00284
- Bianchi (2020). Do burnout and depressive symptoms form a single syndrome? Confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modeling bifactor analysis. Journal of Psychosomatic Research. doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2020.109954
- Bianchi (2020). The Occupational Depression Inventory: A new tool for clinicians and epidemiologists. Journal of Psychosomatic Research. doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2020.110249
- Maslach (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Organizational Behavior. doi.org/10.1002/job.4030020205
- Lee (2012). Review of the Psychometric Evidence of the Perceived Stress Scale. Asian Nursing Research. doi.org/10.1016/j.anr.2012.08.004
- Barbosa‐Leiker (2013). Measurement Invariance of the Perceived Stress Scale and Latent Mean Differences across Gender and Time. Stress and Health. doi.org/10.1002/smi.2463
- Richardson (2012). Meta-Analysis of Perceived Stress and Its Association With Incident Coronary Heart Disease. The American Journal of Cardiology. doi.org/10.1016/j.amjcard.2012.08.004
- Deady (2023). Selective Prevention of Depression in Workers Using a Smartphone App: Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Medical Internet Research. doi.org/10.2196/45963
- Zhang (2013). Differentiating Nonrestorative Sleep from Nocturnal Insomnia Symptoms: Demographic, Clinical, Inflammatory, and Functional Correlates. Sleep. doi.org/10.5665/sleep.2624
- Baglioni (2011). Insomnia as a predictor of depression: A meta-analytic evaluation of longitudinal epidemiological studies. Journal of Affective Disorders. doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2011.01.011