Therapy for Burnout

Burnout Does Not Always Look Like Failure

Many of the people I work with are doctors, lawyers, professors, college and graduate students, finance professionals, caregivers, and activists. They are still functioning. They are still showing up. But something feels brittle inside.

Burnout can look like:

• Exhaustion that sleep does not fix

• Irritability or emotional numbness

• Increased self-criticism

• Anxiety that never fully turns off

• Disconnection, isolation, and loneliness

• Guilt when resting

• Feeling frozen and calling yourself lazy

• Losing interest in things that once mattered

You may still be performing well. But the cost keeps rising.

Burnout often develops slowly. It grows in systems where responsibility became identity and worth became performance-based.

If chronic responsibility shaped your identity early, you may also resonate with my page on Eldest Daughter Syndrome.

When High Achievement Becomes a Survival Strategy

Burnout is not just about workload. It is about nervous system patterns shaped by family expectations, cultural pressure, immigration survival, patriarchy, racism, and early relational roles.

You may have learned:

• Being helpful keeps you safe

• Being exceptional prevents criticism

• Being low-maintenance protects connection

• Being strong avoids burdening others

Over time, achievement becomes regulation.
Productivity becomes proof of worth.
Rest feels threatening instead of restorative.

If shame or guilt intensifies when you slow down, you may also relate to my Shame and Guilt Therapy page.

High-Functioning Anxiety and Burnout

High-functioning anxiety often fuels burnout.

You anticipate problems before they happen.
You replay conversations.
You overprepare.
You rarely feel finished.

Your nervous system may be living in chronic activation.

When slowing down triggers guilt or fear, it is often because your body associates rest with loss of control, loss of belonging, or moral failure.

This is not laziness.
It is a protective system that has been overused.

Burnout in Neurodivergent Adults

For Neurodivergent people, burnout can develop from years of masking, overcompensating, and trying to meet environments that were not designed for their systems. You may appear high functioning while internally managing sensory overload, executive dysfunction, social monitoring, and chronic self-correction. What looks like ambition from the outside may actually be hypervigilance. What looks like laziness during shutdown may be nervous system exhaustion.

Many neurodivergent adults learned early that being competent reduced criticism. You may have overprepared to avoid mistakes, people-pleased to prevent rejection, or pushed through fatigue to prove capability. Over time, this constant adaptation can lead to autistic burnout, ADHD burnout, or what simply feels like total depletion. Rest alone does not resolve it because the root issue is not just workload. It is the long-term cost of survival in environments that require you to override your natural rhythms.

Therapy for burnout with neurodivergent adults includes understanding masking, untangling internalized shame, building regulation that work for your brain and body, and separating productivity from worth. Burnout recovery for neurodivergent people requires both nervous system support and identity repair.

Burnout in Asian American and Immigrant Women

For many Asian American and immigrant women, burnout is layered with additional pressures:

• Model minority expectations

• Filial responsibility

• Parentification

• Translating across generations

• Saving face

• Academic and career pressure

• Emotional suppression

• Intergenerational trauma

Immigration survival, economic instability, and historical trauma often intensify achievement pressure rather than replace it.

Burnout in this context is not a personal weakness. It is a systemic and relational pattern.

If cultural pressure is central to your experience, you may want to explore my page on Therapy for Asian American Women Navigating Cultural Pressure.

How Therapy for Burnout Helps

Therapy for burnout is not about becoming less ambitious. It is about separating ambition from compulsion.

Our work may include:

• Understanding how burnout developed

• Tracking how stress lives in your nervous system

• Exploring the parts of you that fear slowing down

• Untangling performance from identity

• Working with guilt that activates around rest

• Examining intergenerational and systemic context

We move at a pace that respects your history.

Healing does not remove your drive. It removes the fear underneath it.

What Healing from Burnout Can Look Like

Healing is not instant calm.

It may look like:

• Recognizing activation before it escalates

• Feeling tired without calling yourself weak

• Resting without spiraling into shame

• Choosing responsibility rather than defaulting into it

• A sense of worth that is not entirely tied to achievement

Over time, productivity becomes a choice, not a survival requirement.

Online Therapy for Burnout

I provide trauma-informed online therapy for burnout and high-functioning anxiety in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, and Massachusetts.

If you are exhausted from carrying competence alone, therapy for burnout can offer a steady space to untangle the survival patterns underneath burnout.