Burnout has been defined and measured in various ways by psychologists and medical professionals, but it is also true that “you know it when you feel it.” If you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning; or spend most of your workday procrastinating; or wonder why what you are doing is valuable; or feel impatient with loved ones, colleagues, and strangers; or tend to give more energy to things than you get back, then you know you have burnout.
There is a path beyond burnout, and it begins with seeing that the burnout itself may only be the surface of the problem. Burnout comes about when we are out of tune with ourselves for too long.
Philosophical counseling aims to help you find greater self-attunement through helping you to distinguish your own appreciation of the things you do from externalized metrics and collective judgments about them. From its perspective, the crisis of work dissatisfaction or burnout that you are experiencing is above all a call to deepen your self-knowledge.