Burnout: A Load Problem, Not a Cortisol Diagnosis

Summary

Burnout is a real state of work-driven exhaustion, but it is **not** a clean cortisol or "adrenal" diagnosis (the HPA picture is genuinely mixed, and low cortisol shows up only in severe cases, not in burnout as a class), and its separation from clinical depression is partial and contested; the one robust, decision-grade finding is that **recovery means reducing the workplace load**, not just resting, because individual coping alone repeatedly fails when the chronic stressor is left unchanged. ---