By the time David walked into my practice, he was running on fumes. He was thirty-seven, a project manager in a large tech company, and he looked like someone who hadn’t rested in months. The kind of exhaustion that no weekend could fix had settled into his body. “I can’t think straight anymore,” he said quietly. “It’s like I’ve forgotten how to be me.”
He hadn’t always been like that. A few years earlier, David had been the man everyone turned to when things fell apart — competent, fast, reliable. He thrived on pressure, or so he believed. His calendar was a grid of overlapping deadlines; his phone vibrated like a nervous system. When the company restructured, he took on even more, convinced that saying no meant weakness. His self-worth became fused with his output. When he finally crashed, it wasn’t a single event but a slow, steady disintegration — sleeplessness, irritability, forgetting simple things, and a creeping sense of futility that frightened him.
He came to therapy after one of his colleagues asked if he was “burning out.” He laughed it off at first, but a week later, he found himself crying in the car park before work. That moment — messy, unplanned, humiliating to him — became the beginning of our work together.
In our first sessions, David spoke in the same clipped tone he used at work. “I just need to get back to being productive,” he told me. The word productive came up so often it felt like an incantation. I recognised the pattern: his distress framed as a technical failure rather than emotional collapse. We spent weeks circling the idea that something was fundamentally off balance — not just in his schedule, but in how he measured his value as a person.
I introduced the idea of burnout not as a weakness but as a form of system overload, both psychological and physiological. His nervous system had adapted to chronic stress until it simply couldn’t anymore. We spoke about sympathetic dominance, how the body can remain in fight-or-flight long after the threat has passed. But what reached him wasn’t theory — it was when I said, “It’s as if you’ve been sprinting for years in a marathon that never ends.” He nodded, tears finally spilling out. “That’s exactly it,” he whispered. “I don’t know how to stop running.”
That became our shared metaphor: learning how to stop running.
Burnout recovery is rarely dramatic. It’s slow, uneven, and profoundly humbling. At first, David wanted techniques — mindfulness, breathing, productivity hacks disguised as self-care. I resisted giving him ready-made solutions. We began instead with noticing. Each session, we tracked how exhaustion lived in his body — the heaviness behind his eyes, the tightness in his chest, the numbness that would suddenly take over.
When he described feeling “blank,” I asked what that blankness protected him from. After a pause, he said, “Anger. I’m furious all the time but can’t show it.” Gradually, we uncovered how his exhaustion masked a deeper emotional conflict: the impossibility of meeting everyone’s expectations — his bosses’, his partner’s, and his own. He had been performing competence for so long that authenticity felt dangerous.
We experimented with small acts of rebellion: leaving work on time, saying “I’ll think about it” instead of “I’ll do it.” Each small boundary felt enormous to him. The guilt that followed these experiments became another focus of our work. He realised how much of his energy was spent suppressing guilt — guilt for resting, for disappointing people, for not being endlessly useful.
One day, several months in, he came into the session with a quiet smile. “I turned off my work phone this weekend,” he said. “For two days.” He looked both terrified and proud. “Nothing collapsed,” he added. That was the moment I knew something had shifted — not in his workload, but in his belief that his worth depended on constant vigilance.
Burnout isn’t just an individual failure of resilience; it’s a relational and systemic problem. David’s story exposed how modern work cultures exploit conscientiousness — rewarding overextension until the person breaks. But therapy can offer something that workplaces rarely do: a place to stop, to re-enter one’s own rhythm.
As our work continued, we moved from survival to meaning. I asked what, beneath all the noise, he actually cared about. The question startled him. Over time, he discovered that what once drove him — the thrill of mastery, recognition — had faded. What he wanted now was simplicity: time with his daughter, space for creativity, mornings without panic. We began to imagine a different kind of success — one that didn’t require self-sacrifice.
Six months later, David reduced his hours. It wasn’t an impulsive escape but a deliberate act of rebalancing. He started cycling again, something he hadn’t done since university. His voice, once brittle, softened. “I still get tired,” he said, “but it’s the kind of tired that comes from living, not from dying slowly.”
When I think about David now, I think about how easily driven people mistake depletion for purpose. Burnout is seductive because it often looks like dedication. Yet underneath it lies the quiet terror of not being enough. Therapy, at its best, becomes a space to remember that being human is not a performance.
Before we ended our work, David said something that stayed with me: “I used to think rest was the reward for finishing everything. Now I see it’s what allows me to live at all.”
That’s the real recovery — not just returning to work, but reclaiming the right to exist without constant justification.