Burnout comes in three recognizable faces, and they tend to arrive in order. Today you work out which ones you're wearing and how far along the sequence you are. It's a position on a map, not a grade on a test.
The first face needs no introduction, since it's the reason you're here. Exhaustion: drained by the day, unrefreshed by the night, everything costing more effort than it used to. It's the direct readout of the recovery deficit from last session. It usually arrives first, and the other two faces grow out of it.
The second face is the one that frightens people, mostly because nobody explains the machinery. Cynicism (the detachment, the going-through-the-motions, the dark jokes about work you used to care about) is not a personality change. It's cost-cutting. When exhaustion runs long enough without an answer, your mind makes the only budget move it can make unilaterally: it withdraws investment. Caring is expensive, distance is cheap, and the mind imposes the spending freeze that nobody upstairs would.
Which is why 'care more' is useless as advice. The caring became unaffordable, and the freeze is what unaffordable looks like from the inside.
The third face is the quietest and often hurts the most: the conviction that you're no good at this anymore, that you used to be better. Hold onto the mechanism here. Exhaustion makes everything slower and harder, cynicism strips the satisfaction out of finishing, and the mind, which likes a narrative, reads all of that back as evidence of decline. The feeling of competence degrades long before the fact of it does. It's a story the first two faces wrote, and week four puts it on trial against your own records. For now it's enough to note that it is a story, written by tiredness, about tiredness.
Most people arrive with a lot of face one, a fair amount of face two, and a whisper of face three. Wherever you land is information about how far the equation has run, nothing more, and people at every position on this map recover. The three faces share one root, so they share one treatment. Rebuild the recovery side and the sequence runs backwards — the drain answers first, the distance thaws once there's energy enough to afford caring again, and the doubt goes last, when its evidence runs out.