My Story

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For over a decade I worked in the corporate sector, open-plan offices, quarterly targets, performance reviews all a normal part of the rhythm. Answering emails late at night was just what people did, and it was often called commitment rather than anxiety. I left that world not because of one clear breaking point, but because I kept seeing people around me slowly lose a bit of themselves.

Burnout doesn’t usually look like someone falling apart. It tends to look like someone still functioning, even improving in some ways, but feeling less and less connected to what they’re doing. People get quicker, more efficient, but the meaning drops away. The early signs are easy to miss, Sunday dread starting earlier and earlier, a body that never really relaxes, small irritations building up.

One colleague stays with me. She was the kind of person workplaces really value, reliable, always available, never making things difficult. At first she would joke about being tired. Then she stopped joking. Then she stopped really mentioning it at all. Everything became urgent. Rest started to feel like something she had to earn or justify.

One day she said, “I think something’s wrong with me because I can’t do this at the same level anymore.” That kind of sentence is more common than people think.

Burnout often gets turned inward, like it’s a personal failure rather than just too much for too long. She wasn’t really asking how to rest, she was asking if she was still okay if she couldn’t keep going in the same way.

We started with language. Just naming what was going on. Chronic stress narrows things down so everything outside work feels far away or unimportant. Burnout isn’t just being tired, even though it gets talked about like that.

What changed first wasn’t the workload, but how she understood it. It was more about realising it wasn’t just “too much work”, it was too much without enough recovery being treated as normal or allowed.

She did start to make small changes, setting clearer boundaries, not replying straight away, actually taking her leave. The organisation didn’t really change much. Most don’t. They adjust just enough for things to keep running.

Now, as a psychotherapist, I don’t really start with fixes or tips. I start more simply, by helping people feel understood, especially when they’ve been carrying burnout and start to think it says something bad about them.

A lot of the work is just making space for that to be named properly, and helping people see that what they’re feeling actually makes sense in the context of what’s been going on.