Career
Weekends don't fix it and vacations don't fix it, and you're starting to suspect rest isn't what's missing.
You wake up tired. The two-week vacation you took helped for the first three days back and then everything was the same. The hobbies you used to enjoy feel like another thing on the list. You’ve stopped responding to texts because responding is work. You’re functioning at work badly and you can tell your output is dropping.
You’re not tired in a way rest can fix. You’re depleted in a way rest doesn’t reach.
The exhaustion was back the day you returned.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
© The Institute for Applied Strategic Therapy. All rights reserved.
You very likely came out of childhood with a relationship to effort that doesn’t have a sustainable setting. You may have learned that your value depended on what you produced and never built the muscle for slowing down. You may have grown up in a household where the adults around you ran on fumes and you absorbed that running on fumes was normal. You may have spent years saying yes to things that cost more than they paid because saying no felt like failure or selfishness or weakness.
Burnout is what happens when the demand on you has been chronically higher than your capacity for so long that your capacity itself has shrunk. You can’t rest your way out because rest doesn’t address the demand or the shrinkage. The advice that tells you to set boundaries assumes you can set them at no cost, and often you can’t.
If you also can’t focus, see I can’t focus at work . If you’ve started thinking about quitting, see I’m afraid to quit .
You’re carrying a load that’s been growing for years. We work on the daily habits that keep the load growing.
What strategic therapy does is address the daily inputs that have been producing the burnout, not the symptoms of it. Some of it is what you keep saying yes to. Some of it is the way you do the work itself. Some of it is a single decision you’ve been postponing for years that has been quietly costing you everything.
You’ll have energy on weeknights. You’ll recover on weekends.
Write to us and we'll get back to you personally. A qualified practitioner answers every inquiry, usually within two business days.
Message received. We'll be in touch at the address you provided.