After a busy and stressful day, most people just want to take some time and relax. Maybe you’ve been on the run for the last 12 hours, and now all you can think about is sitting down on the couch and regrouping. Although being exhausted at the end of the day happens to everyone now and then, what happens when your "joie de vivre" has lost all its "joie"?

Exhaustion is a component of the state of burnout in which your energy levels feel depleted and your mind disengages from what your body is doing. Considered a threat to mental health, the World Health Organization has even included burnout as an occupational phenomenon worthy of including in its International Classification of Diseases, the ICD-11. Its recent online publication, Mental Health at Work, lists no less than 13 risk factors that include a variety of conditions related to burnout, including lack of control over work pace, long and inflexible hours, and discrimination and exclusion.

At an extreme, everyone might experience burnout if the conditions are bad enough, and all 13 risk factors are present in someone’s life. However, when the environment isn’t quite that toxic, what could explain why some people tune out emotionally and others remain engaged?

There is good reason to expect that individual differences in susceptibility to exhaustion can be understood in terms of personality. The Five Factor Model, a leading personality trait approach, includes the dimensions of neuroticism,........

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