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

Have you ever felt mentally tired after a day that, on paper, involved doing almost nothing physically demanding at all? You picked up your phone to check one message, and somehow, an hour later, you have scrolled through three different apps, answered four work messages, and absorbed more information than you can actually account for. In a world that is permanently connected, the mind rarely gets a genuine break. Between work messages, social media updates, emails, and a ste

You slept eight hours and woke up exhausted. You have a list of things to do and cannot make yourself start any of them. Something that used to excite you now feels like a chore. You are snapping at people you love over things that should not matter. And somewhere underneath all of it is a quiet, persistent voice asking: what is wrong with me? Nothing is wrong with you. But something important is signalling that it has been running on empty for too long. Emotional burnout is