Insights into the Mind

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I almost didn’t catch it. That’s the part that still bothers me.

I have spent sixteen years sitting with people in burnout — watching it hollow them out, helping them name what was happening, guiding them back to themselves. I know the clinical criteria. I’ve read the Maslach Burnout Inventory studies. I’ve taught the three-stage model to trainees. And still, in the autumn of my fourteenth year of practice, burnout crept up on me so quietly that I almost missed it entirely.

What finally tipped me off wasn’t exhaustion. It wasn’t cynicism. It was the moment I realised I had started dreading Tuesdays. Not all of my work — just Tuesdays, which happened to be my heaviest client day. That tiny, specific dread was the thread I pulled. And when I pulled it, quite a lot unravelled.

I’m writing this partly because I think therapists and other helping professionals need to hear an honest account, not a polished one. And partly because the signs of burnout — for therapists and non-therapists alike — are often far more subtle and strange than the usual lists suggest.

What Burnout Actually Looked Like for Me

The textbook signs of burnout are well-documented: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, reduced sense of personal accomplishment. The research — particularly Christina Maslach’s foundational work — is solid. But clinical descriptions often flatten the lived experience into something almost unrecognisable.

Here is what mine actually looked like:

• Hypervigilance after sessions. I was going over conversations compulsively in the evenings. Not out of professional care — out of a kind of anxious second-guessing I hadn’t experienced since my first year of practice.
• Shrinking capacity for my own emotions. My husband would tell me something difficult and I would feel myself go slightly blank. Not deliberately. Just — nothing came. I was rationing myself without knowing it.
• Physical flatness. Not tiredness. Flatness. Like someone had turned the contrast down on everything.
• A growing impatience with complexity. I noticed I wanted clients to get better faster. Not because I stopped caring — I cared desperately. But I had less internal room to hold ambiguity.
• Resistance to my own supervision sessions. I was showing up, but barely. I was reporting rather than exploring. That, in hindsight, was the clearest sign.

None of these individually would have alarmed most people. Together, they were telling me something important.

Why Therapists Are Particularly Vulnerable — And Particularly Bad at Spotting It

The signs of burnout in therapists often go unrecognised for longer than in other professions, and I think I understand why. We are trained to hold our own experience lightly in the room. We learn, correctly, not to centre ourselves. Over time, that skill can bleed into life outside the consulting room, until you genuinely struggle to notice your own internal states with any accuracy.

There is also the identity layer. Being a therapist often isn’t just a job — it is part of how you understand yourself. When your capacity to do that work starts to erode, it can feel like something is wrong with you, not with your situation. Shame gets in the way of honest self-assessment.

I have spoken to colleagues who went two or three years in a state of what I would now call chronic low-grade burnout, managing it with the same adaptive strategies they might once have recommended to a client: more exercise, better sleep hygiene, the odd weekend away. None of it wrong. None of it enough.

What I Actually Did

I want to be specific here, because vague advice about “rest” and “self-care” is part of what makes burnout literature so frustrating to read when you are actually in it.

First, I reduced my caseload by four clients. I went from twenty-two to eighteen weekly sessions. That sounds small. It was not. The psychological relief was disproportionate to the change. I think it was partly the act of decision-making — asserting that my limits were real and valid — as much as the actual reduction in hours.

Second, I returned to personal therapy. I had not been in regular therapy for about three years. I went back. I stayed for eight months. This was not optional for me — it was necessary. If you are a therapist reading this and you are not currently in your own therapy, please take that seriously.

Third, I restructured my week architecturally. I stopped scheduling back-to-back client sessions. I built in fifteen-minute gaps — not to catch up on notes, but to transition. To step outside briefly. To drink water like a human being.

Fourth, I worked with the stress cycle, not against it. This is something I’d already taught clients, but hadn’t applied to myself with any consistency. Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s work on completing the stress response cycle — through physical movement, breath, or connection — became something I actually practiced rather than just referenced. I started ending my working day with a twenty-minute walk, regardless of weather. Not for fitness. To signal to my nervous system that the threat had passed.

Fifth, I went back to nature — deliberately. This sounds softer than it was in practice. I have a background in some ecopsychology reading, and I began taking that more seriously. There is growing evidence that time in natural environments reduces cortisol, improves attentional restoration, and has real regulatory effects on the autonomic nervous system. I started spending at least one half-day per week somewhere genuinely green. Not hiking dramatically. Just being outside, unscheduled.

An Honest Caveat

I want to say clearly: none of what I did was quick. It took approximately seven months before I felt genuinely restored — not just functional, but actually present in my work again. And I had advantages many people don’t: a flexible schedule, financial stability, a supportive partner, access to good supervision and therapy. Burnout recovery advice that ignores structural and systemic realities is incomplete. If your burnout is being driven by organisational factors outside your control, individual coping strategies will only take you so far. That is not a failing on your part — it is a feature of the problem.

What I Use and Recommend

These are resources I have found genuinely useful — either personally or in recommending to clients navigating burnout recovery.

For understanding and completing the stress cycle: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski is, in my view, the most practically useful book on burnout currently available. It is scientifically grounded without being dry, and it addresses the particular ways burnout operates differently depending on gender and social context. I have recommended it to more clients than I can count.

For a more depth-oriented, neurodivergent-inclusive approach: Burnout Recovery: A Neurodivergent-Friendly Guide to Healing Burnout Through Nature’s Wisdom takes an ecopsychology and depth psychology lens that I find refreshing. If you have found conventional advice too linear or too focused on productivity recovery rather than genuine restoration, this offers something different. It resonates particularly with clients who feel disconnected from themselves at a deeper level.

For physiological support during recovery: I am not a nutritionist, and I always recommend clients speak with their GP. That said, I have found Nature Made Magnesium + Ashwagandha Capsules a reasonable adjunct during periods of high stress. Magnesium deficiency is common under chronic stress, and the evidence for ashwagandha’s effect on cortisol is modest but real. I used these during my own recovery period alongside the structural changes described above — not as a fix, but as part of a broader approach to supporting my nervous system.

What I Would Tell Myself Earlier

The signs of burnout — in therapists, in caregivers, in anyone doing emotionally demanding work — are rarely the dramatic collapse people expect. They are quiet. They are easy to rationalise. They often look like professionalism from the outside.

If you are reading this with a growing recognition of something familiar, I would ask you to take that seriously. Not to catastrophise ��� but to investigate. Talk to someone. Look at your week honestly. Notice what you are dreading.

Burnout is not a character flaw and it is not inevitable. But it does require honest attention. And in my experience, that attention is the hardest and most important part.