Stress & burnout counselling

Burnout is not weakness or failure. It is what happens when stress accumulates for long enough without sufficient recovery. The body and mind have a limited capacity for sustained demand, and when that capacity is exceeded consistently, often over months or years, the result is a kind of depletion that ordinary rest does not fix.

It tends to arrive gradually. There is often a point where you can no longer remember what it felt like to not feel this way.

• Exhaustion that persists no matter how much you sleep
• Losing interest in work or responsibilities that used to feel meaningful
• Going through the motions without really being present
• A growing resentment, of your job, your commitments, the people you care for
• Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
• Feeling emotionally flat, or disproportionately reactive to small things
• Physical symptoms, headaches, illness, tension, that keep recurring
• Dreading Monday on Friday afternoon, or dreading the next day before the current one ends

Work stress is probably the most common. But stress also comes from caregiving, financial pressure, relationships, family, parenting, and the accumulation of ordinary life. Often it is not one big thing, it is many smaller things, held for too long, with nowhere to put them.

Sometimes it builds slowly across years, until something tips. And sometimes the thing that tips it seems small, which can make it harder to take seriously.

Counselling does not reduce your workload or change your circumstances. But it gives you something that is often missing when people are burning out: a space that is entirely yours. No agenda, no deliverables, no one to manage or reassure.

In that space, it becomes possible to look at what has been driving the pattern, what you believe about yourself that makes it hard to stop, what you are afraid of if you do, what you might actually need. Burnout is often connected to deeper things: a sense of responsibility that goes beyond what is reasonable, a fear of failure, a difficulty saying no, a life that has drifted away from what matters.

Understanding that does not fix everything overnight. But it is often the beginning of something different.

Sessions are fifty minutes, weekly or fortnightly. There is no structure and no homework. You do not need to arrive knowing what you want to say. Often the most useful thing is simply having a space that does not ask anything of you beyond showing up.