Who I work with · Burnout
Counselling for burnout
Not tiredness. The kind of depletion that sleep doesn't touch, that rest doesn't fix, and that trying harder makes considerably worse.
You have probably been telling yourself it isn’t that bad
Burnout rarely announces itself. It arrives so gradually that by the time you notice, you’ve already recalibrated what normal feels like.
You get through the working day and have nothing left for anyone afterwards. Tasks you could once do without thinking now take an enormous run-up, or don’t get done at all. You’re irritable in a way that doesn’t suit you, and then guilty about being irritable. Sunday evenings have a physical quality. You sleep, and wake unrefreshed. You’ve possibly started to wonder whether you’re simply less capable than you used to be, or whether you were ever as capable as people thought.
Meanwhile you’re still going. That’s the part people miss about burnout — most people in it are still turning up, still delivering, still being described as reliable. The collapse is happening underneath a functioning surface, which is exactly why nobody intervenes. Including you.
What burnout is, and what it isn’t
Burnout isn’t a medical diagnosis. The World Health Organization describes it as an occupational phenomenon — the result of chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed — rather than a condition in its own right. That’s worth knowing, because it means there’s no test for it, and it means “there’s nothing wrong with you” from a GP is not the reassurance it sounds like.
It’s usually described as having three parts: exhaustion, a growing distance or cynicism about the thing that’s draining you, and a sense that you’re no longer effective at it. You may recognise all three, or one of them very sharply.
It also isn’t a character flaw or a failure of resilience. Burnout doesn’t happen to people who aren’t trying. It happens, most often, to people who cared and kept going — in the NHS and caring professions, in teaching, in social work, and in unpaid caring at home. Conscientiousness is a risk factor, not a protection.
Please don't skip this part
Exhaustion of this kind overlaps with depression, and with physical causes including thyroid problems, anaemia, sleep disorders and post-viral illness. Do see your GP as well as considering counselling. Ruling things out is part of taking yourself seriously, not an alternative to it.
Two kinds of burnout — and I work with both
This distinction matters, and it gets missed constantly.
Occupational burnout
Comes from prolonged demand without adequate recovery — too much work, too little control, unfair treatment, values that clash with what you're asked to do, or caring that has no natural end. Rest helps, but only if something about the conditions changes too.
Autistic and ADHD burnout
A different thing wearing similar clothes. It comes from years of masking, from sensory and social demands that never let up, and from running an entire life on strategies designed for a brain unlike yours. It tends to bring loss of skills you previously had — speech, executive function, tolerance for noise and light — and it doesn't respond to a fortnight off. It responds to demands being genuinely reduced, and to being allowed to be as you are.
A great many people are handed advice designed for the first kind while experiencing the second, and conclude that they’ve failed at recovery. They haven’t. They were given the wrong map.
If you’re not sure which you’re dealing with, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to bring, and working it out may be a good deal of the early work. More on late diagnosis and neurodivergence →
What counselling for burnout involves
Let me say what it can’t do first. Counselling cannot give you more hours in the day, reduce your caseload, or make an unreasonable employer reasonable. Where your circumstances are the cause, they remain part of the answer.
What it can do is give you fifty minutes a week in which you don’t have to perform, and help you work out what is actually happening and what is actually available to you.
- Slowing down enough to see it. Burnout is very hard to assess from the inside. Often the first genuinely useful thing is naming it accurately.
- Understanding why you kept going. There’s usually a reason you overrode the signals for so long — a belief about what you owe people, about what happens if you stop, or about who you are if you’re not the capable one. That’s frequently the real material.
- Boundaries, and the guilt that arrives with them. Setting a limit is straightforward. Tolerating how it feels to have set it is not.
- Recovery that fits your actual circumstances. Not a prescription. What can realistically change, what can’t, and what to do about the gap between them.
- What comes next. For some people burnout turns out to be a signal that something needs to change more fundamentally — a role, a career, the shape of a life. That’s a large question and worth having company for. It was mine.
I’ve been where you are
I burned out of a long NHS career, and it’s the reason I retrained as a counsellor.
I mention it not because my experience is a template for yours — burnout is particular to each person, and I’d be no use to you if I assumed I already knew your version. I mention it because when you tell me rest hasn’t helped, I won’t suggest a holiday. When you say you’re ashamed of not coping, I won’t be surprised, and I won’t rush to talk you out of it. And when you can’t yet put words to what’s wrong, I’m comfortable staying in that with you rather than hurrying to define it.
Getting in touch is a demand too. I know that
If writing an email feels like more than you can manage today, that in itself is worth noticing. The form takes a minute and one sentence is plenty. The first call is free, twenty minutes long, and asks nothing of you but turning up.
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