Burnout & high-pressure careers
Burnout therapy in NYC, for jobs that don't slow down.
There's a kind of tired that a weekend doesn't touch. You take the vacation, sleep ten hours, drink the water — and by Tuesday you're right back where you were: flat, irritable, watching yourself do a job you used to care about from somewhere slightly outside your body.
Burnout is more than exhaustion
The researchers who first mapped burnout found three strands, and tiredness is only one of them. The second is cynicism: a creeping distance from work that used to mean something, an eye-roll where the interest used to be. The third is a quiet erosion of confidence — the growing suspicion that you're not actually good at this anymore. If you have all three, more sleep won't fix it, because sleep only treats the first.
Most burnout advice assumes the problem is pace, so it prescribes rest. But for the people I work with, the deeper problem is the operating system: treating yourself like infrastructure. Rest becomes another metric to hit. Recovery gets scheduled and graded. The part of you that wants things — not achieves things, wants them — goes quiet. That silence is the real emergency.
How I work with burnout
There's a practical track and a deeper one, and we run both. Practically: an honest audit of what's draining you, what's recoverable, and which boundaries would actually survive contact with your real job — not the ones that sound nice in a listicle.
Underneath: why "enough" keeps moving. What you're afraid happens if you stop. Who taught you that your worth is your output, and what it would mean to be wrong about that. Before I was a therapist I worked in venture capital, so I know the physics of jobs with no off switch. I'm not going to hand you a bubble-bath checklist.
What tends to change
Wanting things again is usually the first sign — small things at first, an appetite for a book, a walk with no podcast. Then boundaries that hold. And eventually the discernment call burnout always forces: whether the problem is this job or the way you do every job. Sometimes it's both. It's usually the pattern first.
Common questions
Do I have to quit my job?
Not as a precondition, no. Some people eventually leave; more people change how they work where they are. Quitting the job without changing the pattern mostly relocates the burnout, and I'd rather you not learn that the expensive way.
Is it burnout or depression?
They overlap, and the honest answer is that we watch it together. Burnout tends to be tied to work and shifts when the conditions do; depression follows you everywhere. If what I'm seeing looks like more than burnout, I'll say so plainly and we'll talk about what to add — which can include a medication consult alongside our work.
How long does it take?
Some relief comes early, often just from naming things precisely. The lasting version takes longer, because we're renegotiating how you work — not just how you rest.