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There isn’t one best therapy for burnout—there are a number of good options and the best one for you will depend on your specific needs, situation, reasons for burning out and severity of your symptoms. I’m a licenced psychologist and in this article I outline five evidence-based therapies and how each one could help.
If you are in functional burnout, it means you are struggling with the symptoms but managing to push through somehow. You might feel exhausted, disconnected, and stretched too thin, yet you don’t know how to address this or are in denial that this could be burnout.
You know you’ve hit clinical burnout however, when your body cannot push through anymore, forcing a stop for you. Someone in this stage might be off work sick, struggling to get out of bed, have physical ailments, panic attacks and so on.
Therapies to get stable again
If you are struggling to function then you need to start with a therapy that is less analytical and more practical so you can:
1) get the basic building blocks back into your life that are essential for wellbeing – social support, eating a balanced diet, moving your body, a strategy in place for caring for dependents or paying bills and so on whilst you are out of action.
2) get appropriate support or advocacy in place at work.
Helpful therapies at this point are behaviour therapies – both Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (the skills training in DBT) can help to increase healthy behaviours (structuring your day, eating well, exercising, seeing friends) and decrease the problematic behaviours (the escapism behaviours that feel good in the moment but are actually making things worse, such as doom-scrolling, drinking alcohol more heavily, or impulsive online shopping).
Therapies to tackle deeper burnout patterns
If you are feeling stable enough then therapies that can help you tackle the underlying psychological pressures are a good option.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)
This therapy can help you identify the beliefs that keep you stuck in patterns of over-working, perfectionism or people-pleasing – all behaviours that can exacerbate burnout. Common beliefs I see in therapy include: “I mustn’t let people down” or “If I say No, everything will fall apart.”
A properly accredited CBT therapist will not provide a one-size-fits-all approach to challenging thoughts and behaviours. We are trained in the specialist CBT models for perfectionism, self-esteem, health difficulties and generalised anxiety. Early therapy sessions identify which of these underpins your burnout, and then offers a roadmap for understanding long-standing beliefs and rules you apply to yourself, before working to unpick any unhelpful thinking styles, and test out alternative strategies to the ones that have kept you stuck.
CBT can help you manage excessive worrying and social withdrawal as well. It is a structured and collaborative approach, paced weekly and with practical homework and accountability which is ideal when you need certainty and clear steps forward.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT is all about living a meaningful life – something that has often gone awry in burnout. An ACT therapist will help you to reconnect to your personal values (the aspects of life that feel most meaningful to you) within domains in your life beyond work, like your relationships, health and hobbies.
ACT can then support you to navigate the discomfort (typically guilt or anxiety) that prevents you from living life according to these values helping you to become more balanced again. Even in work-places where you have less agency to make changes, you and your therapist will work together to find value-aligned actions that can improve your wellbeing. This therapy coaches you to respond differently to ‘sticky thoughts’ – the type that keep you trapped in the same burnout loops. My clients who finish therapy often report that these thought techniques become helpful life-long skills.
Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT)
In CFT we identify the imbalance within your emotional systems which are keeping you stuck in overdrive. We identify any fear-based motivations that make you feel like you cannot pause or lean on support, such as a fear of criticism or of falling behind our peers. CFT helps you to re-connect to your positive motivations instead (your passions and relationships), and how to understand and tend to your emotions rather than just ‘push them down’ or criticise yourself. This therapy teaches about the neuroscience of emotions, uses visualisations to embed compassion-skills, and gradually you learn how to take compassionate actions to build up your stress-resilience.
Eye Movement Desenitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)
This therapy is helpful if you have very long-standing patterns of behaviours, or responses that feel excessive for the present- moment. The EMDR therapist will help you to identify when this pattern began and see if it traces back to any big or little traumas. This could be a recent event – such as being publicly humiliated by your boss, or being bullied by colleagues. Or it could stem from your early life, such as being forced to do something you didn’t want to do by a teacher, or criticised by a parent for poor grades, for example.
Such negative incidents can stay with us more than we realise, leading us to subconsciously behave in a way that prevents it from happening again – such as over-working to avoid being told you’re lazy; going above and beyond for your team to avoid letting others down. In EMDR we identify the associated memories and use bilateral stimulation (left and right eye movements) to update how this is held in the nervous system. This synthesises the trauma networks and frees you up to let go of the old behaviour patterns.
Next Steps
There are of course other good therapies available and you don’t need to figure it all out on your own. Psychologists have training within several models, so a good starting point is to arrange an extended assessment with one and ask for their recommendations on which approach would be the best fit for you right now.
To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Directory.
