Burnout, Depression or Anxiety- How to Tell the Difference

When we experience stress at work, home, school, or with relationships, we can become stressed-out and may develop low moods, hopelessness, anxiety, or thoughts of not being able to cope. With continued, chronic stress, then we may get more mood and anxiety symptoms. So how do you tell if you have burnout, depression, or anxiety from exposure to chronic stress? The following flowchart can help to outline the development of burnout, depression, and anxiety:

As you see from the flowchart, burnout is the result of exposure to mounting stressors (i.e. job pressure, relationship problems, financial problems) which overwhelm your capacity to cope with them. So if you continue to have all this stress and you don’t get proper help, then you can develop burnout, also known as being stressed-out. With burnout, this is equivalent to an adjustment disorder, where you start to have symptoms of anxiety and/or depression, but it is not full-blown anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder yet.

So when you have burnout, then you are at risk for the development of an anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder (which are really two sides of the same coin). So if you don’t get help for burnout, then you may develop an anxiety disorder and/or depression. Which one develops depends on how you think about your stressors: