You know you're burned out when things that used to motivate you to get up early and work through lunch now feel like burdens. Not just work stuff either, but burnout it starts affecting your life outside work, on things that you thought had nothing to do with work.

> a challenging situation

You're challenged when, even if you don't know how to get through it, you have in your mind a structure, a way of getting through it. You know you can figure it out, you just have to work it out, and the process of working through it energizes you. You're over-stressed when you don't see a way through, or when you see the way through but dread doing the necessary things.

Tolerance for stress depends, in part, on a person's level of resilience: your ability to face reality exactly as it is, your sense that what you do will have some meaningful impact, and your self-confidence in your ability to handle the situation. You might remember a time when you were a kid and something you dealt with seemed like the end of the world, but now you look back and wonder what the big deal was. Your ability to manage stressful situations grew.

In short, when you're burnt out, you're tired even when you get enough sleep, you are reflexively cynical and critical of the work, and you begin to feel like problems you should be able to handle require extraordinary efforts. Those feelings happen now and then when you're not burnt out, but if it becomes chronic, that's burnout.

For me, I knew I was burned out when I just could not face the thought of going into the office and doing my job any longer. It made me physically sick to my stomach and then, over time, started to manifest itself in other ways that negatively affected my physical health.

The linked article really spoke to me - as do a lot of the comments in this thread. I think that for those who burn out, the hardest thing is perhaps learning to forgive yourself. Sounds cliched but there it is.

Like literally dropped my notice yesterday. Cashed out a bunch of stock last week -- good timing, cuz shit is fallin this week! -- and already looking at grad school and cert programs.

Oooooh boy you should look into medicine. This is a profession that has been dealing with insane burnout since before software existed and is only recently getting any amount of attention from within the community. (Think 80+ hour surgical residency for 8 years with the self-perpetuating cycle of "that's what I had to do so I make these residents do it too" logic of hazing)

I was previously pre-med and at one of my med school interviews (when the school was bragging about their mental health resources) they mentioned a story of a physician who played candy crush every morning before he got out of bed "just so that he could have one win for the day."

The Maslach Burnout Inventory, mentioned in TFA, is probably the most widely used/recognised specific classification / diagnostic mechanism.

If you think you're experiencing burnout, my recommendation would be to seek mental health support and specifically request the burnout assessment. Getting that might be more difficult than you'd expect, the sector is often averse to making such determinations.

The main reason I know it was a burnout is that I never really found back. I am done with tech, or rather done with 40 hour weeks, done with unrealistic deadlines, done with so many things actually.