Burnout doesn't announce itself. It doesn't arrive with fanfare or a clear before-and-after moment. It accumulates — quietly, steadily — until one day you realise that the version of you who used to care about things has been replaced by someone just trying to get through the day. We talk about burnout a lot now. It's entered the mainstream vocabulary in a way it hadn't a decade ago, which is both progress and a problem — because the more a word gets used, the more diluted it becomes. Burnout has started to mean everything from "I had a really busy week" to "I am fundamentally not okay and I haven't been for a long time." Those are very different things, and conflating them means a lot of people in genuine crisis are either dismissing their own experience or not getting the right kind of help. So let's talk about what burnout actually is. Not as a buzzword. As a real, diagnosable, physiologically grounded phenomenon — and one that has seriou...