What burnout can feel like.
- You wake up tired, even after eight hours, and Mondays feel like the hangover starts on Sunday afternoon.
- The work you used to be good at suddenly feels foreign — like you're guessing where you used to know.
- Small requests at work feel personal. Small mistakes feel catastrophic. Both feelings are exhausting.
- You're going through the motions of caring about people, then privately wondering if you still do.
- You snap at the people who love you most and apologize, then snap again.
- The thing that used to recharge you — exercise, friends, a long weekend — doesn't recharge you any more.
- You have a low-grade headache or stomach ache that's been there for months and doesn't fully go away.
Burnout is not weakness. It's the predictable result of long-term overexposure to demand without recovery. The body adapts to chronic stress by shutting things down — energy, motivation, even feelings — to conserve resources. That isn't a moral verdict. It's biology.
How therapy actually helps.
Burnout doesn't get fixed by sleep alone, and rarely by a vacation. The work is in recalibration: rebuilding the recovery half of the cycle, shifting how you respond to demand, and finding which of your patterns made the cliff edge sneak up on you.
In group therapy — our specialty — you'll find people in a similar place, who get it without a long preface. The format is small (usually 6–10 people), the same people every week, with a trained clinician guiding the conversation. We use elements of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for the loops the mind is stuck in, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for what cannot be argued away, and a fair amount of plain practical work on sleep, boundaries, and energy.
Many people pair group with weekly individual sessions, especially in the first few months. There's no formula — your clinician will help you decide what makes sense.
Things we work on, concretely.
- Renegotiating commitments at work without burning the bridges you still want.
- Rebuilding the small daily recoveries that the year stripped out — sleep, food, ten minutes outside.
- Untangling the inner narrator that makes resting feel like failing.
- Locating the difference between burnout and depression, since they often overlap.
- Looking honestly at whether the job, role, or rhythm needs to change — and if so, how, on what timeline.
The goal isn't to make you a more efficient version of someone who's burning out. It's to help you stop burning out, and to build a life that doesn't keep producing it.
