Navigating Burnout

There are some useful analogies here. I'll add one of my own.

Burnout may or may not be linked to depression but they share characteristics. One of them is the idea of Learned Helplessness: if you keep trying at something, and failing, eventually your brain will learn that it is pointless to expend energy in trying that thing anymore. It will learn helplessness towards that thing.

If this thing isn't too important to you, no big deal. But if it's something that your identity is deeply connected to - your work, your research, your relationship, your family - then this learned helplessness can spread to other areas of your psyche. If it spreads to all areas related to work, we're likely to call it burnout. If it spreads even further to areas related to family, friendship, relationships, and hobbies, we're likely to call it depression.

Your brain will decide: I can't succeed at X so there's no point trying X anymore, but X is what gives my life meaning and purpose so there's no point trying anything anymore.

This is one reason why CBT therapy has proven so effective. At it's heart, it's about retraining modalities of thought (thought habits). It can help retrain your brain away from this learned helplessness.

If you are interested in learning more about this, I first encountered this idea in books by Martin Seligman. One of the most interesting ideas from him is that we should be training children how to recognize and prevent this tendency of falling into learned helplessness, which would amount to a psychological inoculation against depression and burnout.