Work stress and burnout therapy at Here & Now Psychology helps adults who are running on fumes, stuck in a cycle of overworking, or quietly falling out of love with a career that used to feel meaningful. I work with adults across California via telehealth, using an approach rooted in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
Burnout rarely shows up as one bad week. It builds slowly, through months or years of pushing past your own limits because the deadline mattered, or the team was short-staffed, or you told yourself you'd be able to rest once things calmed down. Then one day you notice you're exhausted in a way that a weekend off or vacation doesn't fix, and the job that used to give you energy now just takes it.
A lot of people try to solve burnout by working smarter: better time blocking, a new productivity system, an earlier bedtime, more coping skills. Sometimes that helps at the margins. It rarely touches the deeper pattern underneath it, which usually has more to do with your relationship to achievement, control, and the uncomfortable thoughts in your mind that show up when you don't meet your continually higher expectations.
Chronic exhaustion that doesn't lift with rest. Feeling cynical or checked out at work when you used to care. The sense that you're running on willpower alone, and the tank is close to empty. When this becomes prolonged, it starts affecting your life outside of work: your relationships, your family, your friendships, and anything else you might find meaningful in life.
An internal standard that's always just out of reach, so nothing ever quite feels like enough. Redoing work that was already fine. Difficulty starting things because they might not turn out right the first time. Trying to carry the load for everything instead of delegating to others because you know it won't be done "your way."
Hitting a goal feels good, for a while. The promotion, the score, the recognition from people whose opinion matters to you. Then the glow fades faster than it used to, and there's already a new target waiting. For a lot of high achievers, this pattern started early: praise came from performing, so performing became the plan. Family or culture may have reinforced it further, tying your worth to a scoreboard you didn't design. Chase enough goalposts and the whole thing starts to feel less like ambition and more like a treadmill, especially once you notice what you gave up to keep running.
Deciding whether to stay, leave, pivot, or start over, often while still fully employed and exhausted, which makes clear thinking about it that much harder.
We start by mapping the actual pattern: what a typical week looks like, where the pressure is coming from, and what you're telling yourself about what will happen if you slow down. From there, the work often involves getting honest about what "enough" would actually look like for you, separate from whatever standard you inherited from a boss, a family, or your own younger self. It also means practicing sitting with the discomfort that occurs when you don't cross your boundaries, since for a lot of people avoiding that discomfort is exactly what's been driving the burnout in the first place.
If perfectionism shows up alongside anxious spiraling rather than just overworking, anxiety and panic therapy may be the more direct fit.
Most of the people I work with on burnout are genuinely excellent at their jobs, and have been for most of their lives. That's part of the problem. Being competent means you can keep pushing well past the point where you should have stopped, because you're capable of it, not because it's sustainable. I'm not going to tell you to just set better boundaries or take more vacation days, since if that advice worked, you probably wouldn't be here. What I'm interested in is what's underneath the overworking: what you're afraid will happen if you're not the person who always delivers, and whether all the time and energy devoted to avoiding that fear is worth the cost. That's usually where the real work starts.
You can read more about how I approach therapy generally on my about page.
High achievers who've built a career on being reliable and are now paying for it. People who've read the articles about burnout, tried the tips, and are still exhausted. People who suspect the problem isn't really about time management, even if that's how it shows up on the surface. People who feel like they're unable to enjoy the life they've worked this hard to build.
Schedule a free 20-minute consultation. No pressure, no commitment. Just a conversation.
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