Burnout Therapy
You are playing Tetris with your schedule, optimizing every minute to be productive. Your mornings are greeted with needs coming in from everywhere - including yesterday’s “undones.” You long for rest, but can’t figure out how to work it in.
You are lacking energy and margin yet somehow find the strength to keep going. You must. You are the dependable one, though nobody else seems to notice the weight you carry.
Then the collapse comes. Your mind races with everything that needs to be done, but you are frozen - exhausted from quietly carrying too much.
Is it anxiety? Is it depression? You aren’t sure. Who knew competence could be so lonely?
Through counseling, we can reclaim your ability to live life, rather than life living you.
Understanding Burnout
Why Does Burnout Happen?
With burnout, you often feel guilty when you rest. Your mind races with everything that is undone and everything else that is coming. Maybe you feel responsible for someone else’s life, success, etc.
So, what causes burnout? First, hyper-responsible individuals are often rewarded. This is not a bad thing. Responsibility is key to successful lives, homes, and society. Burnout happens when your responsibilities become bigger than you were intended to carry for a sustained period.
And what’s more confusing? This is often rewarded in society, which can rewire our brain. Over time, our brains associate responsibility with accomplishment, approval, purpose, and identity. Increasingly, responsibility becomes more rewarding than balance, rest, or space for ourselves.
Therapy Approach
What Burnout Therapy Looks Like with Christin
Burnout therapy begins with having a space to slow down - even if just for an hour. Clients don’t leave the first session with fewer responsibilities. They often leave feeling as though something that was tangled and overwhelming has finally begun to make sense. There is something powerful about being able to say, “I’m not sure I can keep carrying it all.”
From there, we will examine your relationship with responsibility and the dynamics that shape that. Burnout doesn’t present the same for everyone, and so the healing experience can vary by individual. Professional burnout can differ from life or family burnout. Some clients find their identity is tightly tied to being the dependable one - so much so that in a strange sense - they have lost a part of who they are. Some clients discover a sense of responsibility to themselves. Not in a way that becomes selfish, but in a way that allows them to balance the responsibility to others with themselves. Some clients find that allowing themselves space improves their performance for their other responsibilities.
Whatever the outcome is for you, our goal will be to understand how your relationship with responsibility shapes you.
FAQs
Questions About Bournout Counseling
Normal stress can be traced to a specific stressor. When that stressor resolves, the symptoms resolve as well. Often, if we are experiencing symptoms related to a stressor, we have the sense that the symptoms are appropriate, and we typically can see the symptom onset align with the stressor onset.
People experiencing burnout often feel like they need a few days off. But often, they may feel even more exhausted after. When we are experiencing normal stress and tiredness from life, a few days off allows our minds to clear and our bodies to rest. This generally gives us a reset.
During burnout, the nervous system may interpret rest as danger. Therefore, it stays activated during intended rest times. You might find that you can’t quiet your brain during that time, or that it seems to race even more than usual. This is because the nervous system is maladaptively responding to rest - maintaining an active state, leading to more exhaustion.
Burnout therapy can help support a more regulated response to rest and a healthier relationship with life balance.
Feeling anxious when nothing is wrong — or overly anxious over menial things — is a nervous system disruption. Something in your life has taught your nervous system that being hypervigilant, analyzing every possible outcome, and always putting forth 100% is the only way to stay safe.
This is where brain training and EMDR can be powerful. They help both the surface level and deeper levels of the brain reprocess memory and experiences in a more adaptive way — calming your nervous system and allowing you to experience life as it is meant to be.
Often, the same factors that contribute to success and responsibility lead to burnout when they are overused. If you are successful and responsible, you likely think two to three steps ahead. You think of things others would not. You are willing to sacrifice time and energy to make sure a job is done on time and the right way.
As a result, people around you begin to see you as the dependable one, unaware of what you are really carrying. Before long, it becomes expected that you will just handle it. And because your core ethic around work, responsibility, quality, and/or integrity is strong, you meet the challenge every time. Slowly, you start to lose yourself and begin wondering if anyone sees the actual benefit you bring. Somewhere along the way, responsibility stops feeling meaningful and starts feeling heavy.
