Therapy for Burnout and High-Functioning Anxiety

You’re productive, reliable, and still exhausted in a way rest doesn’t fix. High-functioning anxiety often shows up as overthinking, self-monitoring, and never feeling good enough, even when you’re doing everything right.

Burnout and overfunctioning are often rooted in chronic responsibility and survival patterns. In therapy, we focus on building nervous system balance, boundaries, and self-trust so you don’t have to earn rest.

I provide trauma-informed online therapy for burnout and high-functioning anxiety in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, and Massachusetts. I also work with neurodivergent adults, including ADHDers, autistic people, and AuDHDers, whose overfunctioning developed as a survival strategy.

You’re still functioning, But it’s costing you more than it used to.

You get things done, you show up, you anticipate problems before they happen, and still, you feel tired in a way that rest doesn’t fix.

This isn’t laziness or a lack of resilience. It’s what happens when a nervous system has been living in responsibility mode for too long.

Burnout is not only about workload. It can look like competence, preparedness, and productivity, while internally you feel tense, exhausted, or numb.

When Being Capable Becomes Exhausting

Stress and stressors are not the same.

Stressors are the things happening around you:

Deadlines
Family expectations
Caretaking
Financial pressure
Masking neurodivergence
Racism
Sexism
Immigration stress/ Model minority myths
Code-switching
Relational conflict

Stress is what happens in your body.

Your nervous system mobilizes.
Your heart rate rises.
Your muscles tense.
Your system prepares to act.

If the cycle completes, your body returns to baseline.

But when stressors are chronic, or when slowing down feels unsafe, the stress response doesn’t fully finish. Your system stays activated, and that is where burnout grows.

The Burnout Cycle

For many high-achieving women, the cycle looks like this:

You push through.
You override exhaustion.
You tell yourself you’ll rest later.
When you finally slow down, guilt floods in.
So you speed back up.

Over time, your nervous system stops trusting rest.

Achievement becomes regulation.
Productivity becomes identity.
Responsibility becomes worth.

You may still look “fine” on the outside, but inside, you feel on edge, numb, irritable, disappointed in yourself, isolated, and never enough.

If your burnout is rooted in chronic responsibility, you may resonate with my Eldest Daughter Syndrome page. If guilt drives your overworking, you may also relate to my Shame and Guilt Therapy page.

When Being Capable Becomes Exhausting

Burnout is not just about work.

It can come from:

Being the emotional anchor in your family
Translating across generations
Masking
Trying to be “low maintenance” in relationships
Navigating microaggressions
Carrying invisible labor
Trying to prove you belong

For many BIPOC, immigrant, and neurodivergent people, overfunctioning was never just ambition. It’s relational, it’s about safety, and tied to self-worth.

The context matters, so we do not treat burnout as a personal failure, but look at the system around you and the system inside you.

How I Work With Burnout

We do not add more productivity tools.

Together, we explore:

The stressors in your life, including systemic ones
How your body responds when pressure rises
What happens internally when you try to rest
How guilt keeps you in the stress cycle loop
Where perfectionism became necessary
Which protective patterns feel afraid to slow down

We work with your nervous system gradually. We explore what feels unsafe about rest, what collapse protected you from, and how to build internal safety without earning it through performance. Healing does not remove ambition. It removes compulsion.

It’s OK to feel Tired

If you are high-achieving and exhausted, that makes sense.

If part of you feels scared to slow down, that makes sense.

If you’re still functioning and wondering whether your pain is “bad enough,” that makes sense.

I offer online therapy for burnout, anxiety, and responsibility-driven survival patterns for women in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, and Massachusetts.

You don’t have to keep running this cycle alone.

Schedule a free 15-min consult

Frequently Asked Questions for Burnout and Over-Functioning Therapy

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and nervous system exhaustion that develops when stress becomes chronic and the body doesn’t get to complete its stress response. It often shows up as fatigue, irritability, anxiety, numbness, self-criticism, and loss of motivation, even in people who are still highly functional.
Burnout is often tied to chronic stress and over-responsibility. Depression can include persistent low mood, loss of interest, and changes in sleep or appetite across contexts.
There can be overlap. Part of our work is gently understanding what your system is experiencing rather than jumping to labels.
For many high-achieving women, rest triggers anxiety because productivity became tied to worth. If your nervous system learned that being useful kept you safe or loved, slowing down can feel risky, even if you logically know it isn’t.
Yes. Burnout isn’t about whether you care. It’s about whether your stress cycle has space to complete. You can deeply value your work and still be exhausted by chronic pressure.
Burnout doesn’t always look like collapse. Some people accelerate instead. You may still be achieving while feeling internally depleted. High-functioning burnout is common, especially among women who learned early to overperform.
Therapy helps by:
• Identifying stressors
• Understanding your nervous system patterns
• Untangling guilt and perfectionism
• Building capacity for rest and boundaries
• Supporting parts of you that feel unsafe slowing down
We move at a pace your system can tolerate.
Yes. Many neurodivergent women experience burnout related to masking, sensory overload, and chronic self-monitoring. Therapy is affirming and does not frame neurodivergence as something to fix.
No. Burnout is physiological, relational, and often systemic. While thoughts play a role, we do not reduce burnout to “thinking more positively.” We work with your nervous system, context, and protective patterns.
- Not living in quiet anticipation of getting it wrong
- Recognizing stress sooner
- Resting with less guil
- Holding ambition without self-punishment
- Having more internal space
Not perfection. More choice.