Emotional exhaustion is a symptom of burnout, a chronic state of physical and emotional depletion that results from excessive work or personal demands, or continuous stress. It describes a feeling of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one's work. It is manifested by both physical fatigue and a sense of feeling psychologically and emotionally "drained".

An emotional hangover refers to the symptoms associated with a prolonged state of emotional exhaustion, which might occur following a highly emotional event, traumatic event or a stressful conversation or situation due to cognitive dissonance and emotional processing, that may last for hours or days. They can also arise following intense emotional experiences such as a move or a large financial purchase.

There are various ways in which burnout can occur such as: impacting an individual's physical, emotional, and behavioral aspects. Emotional exhaustion research has been guided by Christina Maslach's and Susan E. Jackson's three-component conceptualization of burnout. Which results from ongoing stress and poor stress management, has been defined as “a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a sense of low personal accomplishment that leads to decreased effectiveness at work” by the National Library of Medicine. This model suggests burnout consists of three interrelated parts: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished personal accomplishment. Diminished personal accomplishment refers to negative evaluations of the self.

Some new perspectives on how to prevent burnout, also suggested by Christina Maslach, include two approaches. These two go about burnout differently in how they do not directly address stress, but rather the situation. The first approach includes recognizing how the relationship between person and situation are interacting. There may be some adjusting required to decrease the likelihood of burnout. Second, this approach takes burnout from a different standpoint and causes the person to evaluate their control over their situation. If the person has a better sense of their current situation and their ability to make decisions, they are less likely to get burned out.

The level of emotional exhaustion which is experienced by an employee is influenced by a variety of determinants, such as: personal resources, coping strategies, emotional culture, and supervisory regulation of display rules.

Personal resources, such as status, social support, money, or shelter, may reduce or prevent an employee's emotional exhaustion.

According to the Conservation of Resources theory (COR), people strive to obtain, retain and protect their personal resources, either instrumental (for example, money or shelter), social (such as social support or status), or psychological (for example, self-esteem or sense of autonomy). The COR's theory suggest that people must invest resources in order to protect against resource loss, recover from losses, and regain resources. Therefore, those with greater resources are less vulnerable to resource loss and more capable of orchestrating resource gain, whereas, for those with fewer resources, ongoing resource loss may result in a rapid influential loss spiral.

In a field study, those experiencing higher levels of job autonomy (the freedom to take initiative and exercise discretion in decision-making), low task complexity, supervisory support, and the internal locus of control (a tendency to attribute events to one's own control; such as the tendency to attribute a success to internal causes, like one's ability or effort, rather than external causes, such as good luck), tend to experience lower degrees of emotional exhaustion.