Burnout therapy for when rest stops working.
For reflective adults whose exhaustion sits deeper than tiredness, and for whom a holiday no longer touches the bottom of it.
Burnout has become a fashionable word, and that has not helped. The version that fills magazine articles and HR guides is real, but it is rarely the version people bring into therapy. They bring something quieter and more confusing.
The clients I see for burnout are usually high-functioning, conscientious adults who have been carrying a great deal for a long time. They have already tried the obvious things: more sleep, less email, weekends away, supplements, retreats. Some have tried therapy briefly, found it superficial, and given up. They arrive in my room because none of it has reached the layer underneath, and because the layer underneath is starting to make itself felt.
Burnout doesn’t always announce itself. Often it whispers, slowly, that you are no longer quite yourself.
How burnout shows up
The signs are often quiet.
By the time someone comes for therapy, burnout has usually been quietly assembling itself for months or years. These are the textures most often present.
- Exhaustion that does not lift with rest, sleep, or weekends off
- A flatness around things that used to feel meaningful, including work that you chose carefully
- Difficulty making decisions, even small ones, where decisions used to come easily
- A sense of going through the motions, performing competently while being absent inside
- Quiet shame about not coping, or guilt that other people have it harder
- Body symptoms that have appeared and not resolved: tension, sleep disruption, recurring illness
- A loss of joy in relationships, or in things you used to love
- The sense that you have stopped recognising yourself
The deeper layer
What burnout is really asking.
Workload alone rarely produces the kind of burnout that brings people into therapy. The clinical version usually has deeper roots: long-standing internal pressure, perfectionism, invisible emotional labour, the habit of putting other people’s needs first, an identity that has quietly become inseparable from achievement.
That is why rest alone does not fix it, and why coaching, productivity systems, and self-help books often run aground at a particular point. They address the surface. The surface is exhausting, but the surface is rarely where the difficulty lives.
What burnout is often asking, very quietly, is whether the way you have been organising things internally is still serving you. Whether the unspoken contract you have been keeping with yourself is one you would still sign now. Whether some part of you has been waiting, for years, to be heard.
How the work tends to go
Slow, relational, and tailored to you.
Burnout therapy with me is not a technique applied to a problem. It is a relationship in which the patterns underneath the burnout become visible, slowly, and become workable. We meet weekly. Sessions are 50 minutes. The pace is unhurried because the layer that needs attention does not respond to being pushed.
In the early phase, the work is often about the body and the nervous system: helping you settle enough that thinking becomes possible again. Burnout depletes the very capacities you would need to address it, so we begin with what is depleted. From there, the work moves toward the patterns that produced the burnout in the first place: the inherited rules, the relational templates, the parts of you that have been carrying things they should not have had to carry.
I draw on contemporary relational psychoanalytic thinking, attachment and regulation theories, body-based and sensorimotor approaches, mindfulness, and the underpinning neuroscience and neurobiology. The combination is tailored to what you bring. There is no formula and no jargon.
Common questions
Things people often ask.
How is burnout different from stress or depression?
Stress is acute and episodic. It rises in response to a demand and falls when the demand passes. Burnout is what happens when stress becomes chronic and the falling-back-down stops happening. Depression overlaps with burnout in important ways: low mood, loss of pleasure, exhaustion. The clinical distinction matters because burnout often responds to a relational, depth-oriented approach where it has not responded to other forms of help. If there is depression as well as burnout, that gets attention too.
I’ve tried coaching, mindfulness apps, and time off. Why would therapy be different?
Coaching, apps, and rest can all help with the surface of burnout. They often stop helping when the difficulty is rooted in deeper patterns: relational history, perfectionism, identity, the habit of being the one who copes. Therapy works at that layer because it works inside a real relationship, where those patterns can become visible and start to shift. The relationship itself is the medium.
How long does burnout therapy take?
It varies. Some clients do focused work over six to nine months and find that enough. Others, particularly where burnout has been building for years and is woven into longer-standing patterns, want a longer course. We talk about it as we go, and you are always free to end whenever you choose. The depth of the work is part of what makes it useful for difficulties that have not shifted with shorter approaches.
Can we work online if I’m not in London?
Yes. I see clients online by secure video across the UK, in English or Deutsch. Online therapy is broadly as effective as in-person therapy for burnout work, and many clients find it suits them better because it removes the friction of travel at a time when energy is already short. In-person sessions are also available at my Wimbledon practice.
Related reading
Pieces from the Library.
Get in touch
Curious if we’d be a good fit?
I offer a free 15-minute initial conversation, online or by phone. A chance for us both to think together about whether my way of working would suit what you’re looking for.