Burnout is really just a form of depression that strongly relates to work.

It can be mild, possibly in an early stage (see: most, not all, of the comments here). Or it can be severe and have acute symptoms. And the connection between those is gradual.

Severe examples would be things like extreme tiredness, such that you can just fall asleep after a few minutes of work, sudden fear/anxiety/stress attacks, severely decreased stamina and cognitive ability, overly sensitive/overblown reactions to any kind of stress factor, complete shut down of your system, blackouts/fainting etc.

If you have full-blown burnout, then just doing a bit of exercise and a long holiday won't cut it. It's as if your whole body and mind will do everything to stop you from working, because going on like before is impossible. It can pin you down, leaving you unable to act without support. It might take years to recover from it, just like other forms of depression.

It's very good that people are aware of this and discuss possible early/mild symptoms. However do _not_ downplay the severity of its potential. An issue here is that it seems to hit some of the most productive and hardworking people the hardest, possibly because they power through the early symptoms for so long until they shut down.

In my case, it was limited to work stuff. I would want to do literally anything except work. Even tech stuff, I could spend any amount of time building a random website that serves no purpose, I just didn't want to look at Jira anymore.

Then I took a sabbatical, traveled, all of that and suddenly I started caring about the product, company, etc. again

I think the symptoms are pretty similar, the main difference from what I understand is burnout is triggered by repeated stress from work, and it's a mechanism our brains use to defend against that kind of constant stress. Typically it goes away if you remove the stress (aka job).

From the experiences I’ve had and seen I think the depression can be kind of like a symptom. It could be just a component of the burnout, it could be a temporary state having to do with other situations/conditions. Or it could be the clinical type that is biochemical and a completely different animal to be dealing with.

If someone can do most stuff in general then it doesn’t sound like the clinical type to me.