Burnout vs Exhaustion: How to Tell the Difference (And Why It Matters)

"I'm just tired. I just need a good sleep. A weekend off. A holiday."

That's what I told myself the first time I burned out. I was leading product teams at a fast-growing tech company, working across time zones, managing my career in a country that wasn't mine, navigating a culture I was still learning to read. I thought exhaustion was just the price of ambition.

Then I took a holiday. And came back just as depleted. That's when I knew something was different.

Burnout and exhaustion can feel similar on the surface — both involve tiredness, low motivation, difficulty concentrating. But they have different causes, different trajectories, and critically, different solutions. Getting the distinction wrong means treating the wrong thing, which is why so many people go on holiday, feel briefly better, and then crash again within two weeks of returning.

What Is Ordinary Exhaustion?

Exhaustion is a normal physiological response to sustained effort. You've worked hard, slept less than you needed, pushed through something demanding. Your body is asking for recovery. The key feature of ordinary exhaustion is that rest works. Sleep helps. A few days off and you feel restored. The motivation comes back. You're glad to return.

Exhaustion is temporary and proportional. It makes sense given what you've been doing. And importantly, it doesn't touch your sense of self or your relationship with your work in a deeper way.

What Is Burnout?

Burnout, as defined by the World Health Organisation, is a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It has three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism or detachment from your work, and reduced professional efficacy. In plain English: you're not just tired, something in you has gone cold.

The crucial difference is that burnout doesn't respond to rest the way exhaustion does. You can sleep for ten hours and still wake feeling hollow. You can take a week's holiday and spend most of it unable to enjoy it because the dread is already building about going back. Rest becomes something you crave but that doesn't touch the emptiness underneath.

The 5 Clearest Signs It's Burnout, Not Just Tiredness

• 🔴 Rest doesn't restore you. You sleep, you rest, you holiday — and you come back the same or worse.

• 🔴 Cynicism and detachment have crept in. Work that used to feel meaningful now feels pointless, irritating, or vaguely disgusting.

• 🔴 You've lost yourself outside of work. You can't remember what you used to enjoy. Hobbies feel like obligations. Social plans feel exhausting rather than nourishing.

• 🔴 Your body is sending signals. Frequent illness, headaches, jaw clenching, digestive issues, heart palpitations, or skin flare-ups. The body absorbs what the mind refuses to acknowledge.

• 🔴 Emotional numbness or disproportionate reactions. Either you feel strangely flat and disconnected, or small things trigger outsized emotion, tears in a meeting, rage at a minor inconvenience.
  

The Expat Layer: Why Burnout Hits Differently Abroad

If you're living abroad, building a career in a country that isn't yours, navigating a new language and culture, maintaining relationships across time zones, managing the invisible labour of integration, you're carrying a background load that most people around you don't see or understand.

This doesn't just add to burnout risk. It also makes it harder to recognise. Because when everything around you is unfamiliar, it's hard to know what 'normal' tired feels like anymore. Hard to know whether the flatness you feel is situational or systemic. Hard to reach out for help when you're not sure where to reach, or in which language, or to whom.

In my second burnout, years into my Berlin life, I remember thinking: I should be fine. I have a good life here. I chose this. The gap between what I thought I should feel and what I actually felt was its own kind of loneliness.

What to Do If You Recognise Yourself Here

If rest isn't working, the answer isn't more rest, it's a different kind of support. Burnout recovery requires addressing the nervous system (not just the mind), examining the conditions and patterns that created the burnout (not just managing the symptoms), and rebuilding a relationship with yourself and your energy that's sustainable long term.

This is exactly the work I do with clients, in Berlin and online, in English, drawing on 17 years in corporate leadership, my own two burnout recoveries, and training in somatic coaching, breathwork, Yin Yoga, and Vipassana meditation. If you suspect you're beyond ordinary tiredness, I'd love to help you figure out where you actually are. Book a free 30-minute discovery call and let's find out together.

Book a Free Discovery Call