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Being overworked is being pushed beyond the limits that keep you balanced. You can be overworked for years and survive. It just means you need to do extra stuff in your personal time to replenish the extra you gave out.
A burnout is not sudden. It is an accumulation of being overworked and overwhelmed over a period a weeks/months/years. It is a slow degradation of your mental state that can lead to a physical degradation of your physical self.
Most doctors do not know how to treat it and think a 2 weeks medical leave will have you brand new. A burnout is no joke and can take 2 to 6 months to recover and some more to get to a balanced state.
A lot of folks in North America are on the brinks of a burnout - and that’s excluding the millions that are in a middle of one but aren’t diagnosed yet
Coach
Burnout is the “snap”, kind of like the heart attack that happens after years of unrealized stress (overwork)
Just recently I heard somebody refer to being overworked as doing a lot at the gym, you are sore for a while, but you come back from it. Being burnt out though is when you get injured at the gym and do nothing to help, so it just keeps getting worse until you need a huge intervention.
I go back and forth from thinking the term burnout is grossly overused to thinking the condition is more common than we realize. I've known of employees who really worked themselves into a state of near total mental collapse. The comment about how you can recover from overwork but not being burnt out seems pretty accurate. People need to know when to slow down before things get severe, but that's easier said than done.