Free Burnout & Work Stress Check

Take the check

Ten questions drawn from the areas workplace stress research keeps coming back to: how much is being asked, how much say you have, how clear it is, what support there is, whether effort gets noticed, and whether you ever recover. It covers your last two weeks at work or in class.

What your score means

Every item scores 0 to 3, so 30 in total. These bands describe load, not diagnosis. Burnout isn’t a clinical diagnosis the way an anxiety disorder is, and this check doesn’t pretend otherwise.

Stress, strain and burnout are three different things

Stress is just the response to a demand, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It rises, you meet the thing, it drops again. Strain is what piles up when that cycle stops finishing. Demand stays high, recovery never arrives, and your baseline creeps upward.

Burnout is where long strain ends up, and it has a shape you can recognise. Tiredness sleep won’t touch. Creeping cynicism about work you genuinely used to care about. And a growing sense that you’re getting worse at it. That last part is the cruel one. Burnout convinces you that you’ve become bad at your job, when what really happened is that you ran out of road.

What actually helps

Nearly all burnout advice is aimed at you personally, because you’re the one reading it. Let’s be honest that a lot of workplace strain is structural, and no breathing exercise has ever fixed an impossible workload. With that said:

• Guard recovery, not just rest. Scrolling isn’t recovery. Recovery is whatever actually takes your attention somewhere else. Exercise, a craft, another person, something you do with your hands.
• Find the edge you can move. The workload may not be yours to change, but something usually is. The order you do things in. One recurring meeting. When you answer messages. Getting even a little control back shifts the strain more than it should.
• Write down the invisible work. A lot of strain comes from effort nobody counted, including you. Listing what you really did in a week is often the quickest way to understand why you’re so tired.
• Put a wall somewhere. If work can reach you at any hour then no hour is really off. One window a day where you’re genuinely unreachable does more good than a longer holiday.
• Say it out loud to someone. A manager, a mentor, a counsellor. Strain kept private gets blamed on the person carrying it, usually by the person carrying it.

When it’s worth talking to someone

When the strain starts following you home, it’s no longer a problem you can solve at work. Sleep goes. Sunday evenings get heavy. You lose patience with people who deserve better. It’s also, unhelpfully, the exact stage where most people decide to just get through it, which is how one hard quarter turns into a hard year.

If you’re weighing up a bigger change, the Lume Lens working profile looks at direction instead of strain. Different question, different tool. Worth knowing which one you’re actually asking.

Talking to someone about it

A session is a private 1:1 conversation with Sachin Bajaj, who has an M.Sc in Clinical Psychology from Gurugram University and a PGDGC from Jamia Millia Islamia. It’s ₹499 for 45 minutes, and ₹249 for your first with the code FIRST50.

Nothing goes to your parents, school, college or employer. A first name is enough to book. For most people that turns out to matter more than the price.

Frequently asked questions