Order the stages by which a demanding job produces burnout in a committed worker, from the conditions to the outcome.

1. Chronic workload, low control and thin rewards persist over months.
2. Emotional resources are depleted faster than they can be replenished.
3. Exhaustion sets in: there is nothing left to bring to the work.
4. Withdrawal follows as a defence: patients become cases, people become problems.
5. The sense that any of it accomplishes anything collapses.

The sequence puts the conditions first deliberately, because that is where the evidence puts them. Burnout is predicted by workload, control, reward, fairness and community at work - features of the job rather than weaknesses of the person - and the people it takes hardest are frequently the most committed, who had the most to deplete.

Depersonalisation appearing after exhaustion is the part worth understanding rather than memorising. The withdrawal is not indifference arriving from nowhere; it is what someone does when they no longer have the emotional resources to engage and must find some way to keep turning up. Distance is a defence against a demand that cannot be met.

Reduced accomplishment comes last and is often the least accurate: the work may still be objectively good while the person doing it can no longer see any value in it. That ordering also explains why interventions aimed at the individual - resilience training, self-care advice - address the end of a chain whose beginning is untouched.