Introduction Most of us use the words interchangeably. "I'm so stressed.""I'm completely burnt out." We say them in passing over coffee, in work chats, in the middle of a conversation that moves on too quickly to sit with either. And because both feel like exhaustion, and both seem to come from doing too much, they get treated as the same thing. They are not the same thing. This distinction matters more than most people realise because stress and burnout don't just feel diffe