Burnout Therapy Midlothian, VA
Burnout Therapy in Midlothian, VA
Therapy for professionals who feel the weight of the world on their shoulders and need something to change.
55%
of the U.S. workforce is experiencing burnout with Gen Z reporting the highest rates.
It often hits you before you even knew it was coming. You had all the balls up in the air. Things were still getting done. Maybe not perfect, but doing okay, and then one day, it just hits you. You can’t do this anymore.
Burnout is when when you’ve been working in overdrive for just too long and you just can’t do it anymore. The emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion or fatigue of your situation overtakes what your mind and body can handle and things start to crack.
Others may not notice. They see you as confident, organized, and successful. But on the inside, it’s like the weight of the world is crashing down on you. And the fact that your burnout and stress is so invisible to others actually kind of makes it worse. It feels like the people around you don’t see you — I mean, really see you.
I see you. I want to help.
From my practice
A lot of professionals I see just want to get through it. They say, “I’m being pressured to pick up more and more tasks but it will die down soon.” or “If I can just hold on until retirement.” But burnout can make it feel impossible to hang on anymore. In Virginia, where the changing job landscape often means the stress at work is continuing to rise, more and more people are experiencing chronic burnout.
Research
A 2025 Eagle Hill Consulting survey found that 55% of employees reported experiencing burnout — with CBT to be highly effective in treating burnout.
Han et al, 2025; Michelsen & Kjellgren, 2022
Burnout Therapy Specialist
Virginia Counseling has been helping professionals with burnout since 2015 with evidence-based therapy.
Ready for Work to feel Lighter?
Burnout therapy can help you understand both the individual and environmental factors that are triggering the extreme exhaustion — and move forward in building a professional life that actually energizes you.
What Is Burnout Therapy?
Burnout therapy is talk therapy that is focused on understanding what is behind your exhaustion and rebuilding your relationship with work in a way that doesn’t feel like just getting by.
Completely exhausted and not fathoming being able to take on another task or responsibility — even if it’s just temporary.
The feeling like nothing you could possibly do could reasonably help your situation improve.
Things that should be easy are way harder than they used to be.
Feeling like every little thing is going to put you over the edge and you just can’t even get to a point to change anything.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Everyone experiences burnout differently and it can hit you before you realized you were at your limits.
Burnout is Wide Spread
You are not alone in feeling burned out. Across all sectors and generations, people are feeling more burned out now than every before.
“Employee burnout rose 12–43% across every dimension between 2022 and 2026.”
~ WebMD Health Services 2026 Workplace and Employee Survey
74%
of employees have experienced burnout
Spring Health’s 2026 Workplace Mental Health Annual Report
74%
of Gen Z is experiencing at least moderate levels of burnout
2025-2026 AFLAC Workforces Report
66%
of Millennials is experiencing at least moderate levels of burnout
2025-2026 AFLAC Workforces Report
59%
of professionals say they feel burned out at work
Robert Half survey of professionals
58%
of nurses report feeling burned out most days
AMN Healthcare’s 2025 Survey of Registered Nurses
4.5 x
higher is the burnout risk for the most productive AI users
WebMD Health Services 2026 Workplace and Employee Survey
How I Treat Burnout
Burnout is a real problem but what can we do about it? Let’s get to the more important question of what how to recover from burnout. I specialize in burnout therapy; here is how I can help you recover.
My Approach for Burnout Therapy
When we start working together, we start with taking a deep dive into contributing patterns. And we work to address both individual changes and external changes.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT helps you understand how your thoughts and behaviors affect your emotional state — including burnout. We talk about the underlying patterns that contribute to this including worst case scenario thinking, catastrophizing, and perfectionism. Together we will work towards build lasting positive changes with tools such as setting boundaries, and practicing gratitude to help create a work life that is energizing instead of draining.
Mindfulness & Meditation
Mindfulness helps you identify the moment that you slip into an unhelpful train of thought the moment it happens, instead of ruminating on unhelpful thoughts. You learn and hone in on the skill to observe your work environment with out immediately reacting. This helps create the space to choose your response without immediately going into stress mode.
Philosophy & Socratic Questioning
We can use Socratic questioning to dive deep into identifying underlying patterns that are leading to your burnout.
What to Expect From Burnout Therapy
1
Assessment & Identifying Patterns
First we will take some time to understand your specific situation and how burnout came about. This includes talking about your workplace, your role at work, and things that may have changed recently and some time ago. We will take a look at underlying causes. Has your workload become unrealistic? Has your responsibility level changed? Do the companies values not align with your own?
2
Learning New Skills
You will learn tools and skills that can be applied to your specific situation — ways to establish and hold boundaries, how to say no without jumping to the worst case scenario, how to identify your role without projecting what people may think of you. We spend time working through real skills that can help protect your capacity in your specific situation.
3
Resolving Root Causes
Going deeper, we will talk about what your beliefs are and what you really want out of life. What got you to the place where you are burned out with work, what fear around responsibilities are contributing, how your self worth is tied to your work identity.
4
Preventing Future Burnout
You are able to prevent future burnout by developing new ways to identify the warning signs of early burnout, and making choices that better match what you want in life, your values and capacity.
“Many people think therapy is about achieving some specific thing and then your done. But I think therapy is about developing a process of thinking that helps you feel happy along the way.”
Individual changes and the four table legs of well-being
I refer to diet, sleep, exercise, and relationships as the four table legs of well-being (with spirituality as an optional fifth). If one leg falls away, the table may still be able to stand, though it will be wobbly. But if two or more fall away . . . watch out!
If you’re burnt out, it’s likely that many of your table legs are worn and rickety.
Sleep
There are a number of well-known tenets of good sleep hygiene, including: keeping a consistent sleep schedule, keeping healthy boundaries around alcohol and caffeine intake, creating a relaxing routine before bed, and others (Harvard Health Publishing, 2025). These are best practices, not ironclad rules. For example, ideally you will find a consistent 8-hour block that you can commit to 7-days a week (e.g. 11pm-7am) even on weekends. Of course, this is the ideal and we don’t live in a perfect world. In reality, there may be the odd late-night or early-morning event(s) you want to enjoy, and that is fine. It isn’t all or nothing. The principle is: the more consistent your sleep schedule, the better. This goes for all of the tenets of sleep hygiene.
Diet
We all know what a healthy diet looks like, more or less. Research suggests that eating a diet heavy in low-fat dairy products, fruit and vegetables, and white meat while limiting unhealthy foods is associated with lower levels of burnout (Penttinen, 2021).
Exercise
Physical exercise has been found to reduce exhaustion in workers experiencing burnout. And, it may not take a whole lot of it. Research suggests that one hour of high-intensity (e.g. running) workout a week can reduce burnout-related exhaustion, as well as one-hour moderate (e.g. swimming) and lower-intensity (e.g. walking) workouts (Naczenski et al., 2017). Aerobic, strength, and flexibility exercises have all been demonstrated to have this potential.
Social support
Increasing the quality of our social support has been found to alleviate burnout symptoms (Cao et al., 2024). According to Cao et al., social support can include many things including instrumental and informational support (e.g. providing resources and tools) and also emotional support (e.g. care and compassion) and companionship
In my practice experience, I find emotional support to be one to be one of the most effective ways to help my clients recover from burnout. Therefore I put a high emphasis on genuine dialogue as a means of compassion and connection – sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to improve our ability to hold a caring conversation, whether with others or with ourselves. I draw on the work of Martin Buber, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Socrates to inform what exactly genuine dialogue is and why it is so crucial to well-being. I offer therapy for burnout in Richmond, VA and online therapy for burnout for all of Virginia.
Environmental changes
Research suggests that while individual changes can help to reduce burnout, they may not be enough if the environment you find yourself in is simply too unhealthy (De Simone et al., 2021) .
Think of it like this: if someone is following you around and stepping on the heels of your shoes over and over and over again, there will be some individual things you can do to cope with this very annoying situation. You may be better able to deal with it if you are well-rested, for example, or if you have someone available who will validate your frustrations with this person. But you may find that there is a limit to how effective those things will be. These things alone won’t, after all, stop that person from stepping on your heels. And ‘drip-by-drip’ impositions are the things that often lead to burnout – it’s the accumulation of things that aren’t unbearable as a one-offs, but add up to something greater than the sum of their parts.
So, tackling burnout often may require a willingness to be assertive, to ask for changes, to delegate tasks, or perhaps to make even bigger changes. Panagioti et al. (2017) suggest that organizational changes like addressing schedule issues (e.g. intensity and frequency of the work) or the size of the workload itself are among the most impactful, while making positive changes to the organizational social culture can also help to alleviate burnout symptoms.
Therapy for burnout Richmond, VA and online across Virginia.
I primarily draw on cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which has been shown to be highly effective in treating burnout (Han et al, 2025; Michelsen & Kjellgren, 2022). I offer in person therapy for burnout in Richmond, VA area and online therapy for burnout for all of Virginia.
I find that, generally speaking, a good guideline to follow for treating burnout is to work inside-out. Start on the inside, with internal change, and progressively work your way out to bigger and bigger change. This means, as one example, prioritizing self-care before talking with your boss about how to take a task off your plate and talk with your boss about how to get a task off your plate before putting in your resignation! Start inward, work your way outward to bigger and bigger changes. This is a guideline, not a rule, as everyone’s circumstances vary and sometimes the script needs to be flipped.
Internal changes
This includes exploring your own beliefs and attitudes about your burnout and its causes and gaining insight into your own responses and reactions to your environment. From there we will explore whether any cognitive distortions may be exacerbating your burnout and draw on the CBT triangle to look at how these thoughts and attitudes may be impacting your emotions and behaviors.
Individual external changes
Once we have begun to connect dots between the ways in which your thoughts and behaviors are influencing each other, we will start looking at which individual behavioral changes may be helpful. This includes things like diet and exercise habits, social and community engagement, and things like that.
Environmental changes
When you have begun to find relief from your burnout from internal and individual external changes, we will then start to look at what can be the most difficult or intimidating changes to make: environmental changes. This may involve having conversations with coworkers or supervisors, or other support staff at work to advocate for healthy change.
In laying out these steps, it’s important to reiterate that this is just a rough guide. Everyone’s circumstances are unique – one person may not need to make any environmental changes, whereas one person may not need to make any individual external changes. One person may want to prioritize individual external changes over internal changes. Often, we will work on internal and individual external changes at the same time.
What is the definition of burnout?
Burnout is the experience of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion or fatigue. The World Health Organization (2019) defines burnout as a specifically workplace phenomenon, though in reality it is as something we can experience in any domain of life – at work but also in college, in household and family obligations or anything else we spend significant amounts of our time engaging with.
A more complete list of symptoms of burnout includes:
- Helplessness
- Hopelessness
- Powerlessness
- Low self-esteem
- Cynicism
- Distress
- Performance difficulties
- Sleep impairment (Khammissa et al., 2022)
What causes burnout?
Burnout can be caused by many factors. Some of the more common ones include: workload, lack of control, lack of connection or community, and emotional labor (Leiter & Maslach, 1999; Hochschild, 1983). Let’s take a look at each one of these in a little more detail.
Workload
Work can be a surprising source of satisfaction – when the challenge it presents is proportional to our ability to meet that challenge (Wang et al., 2023). That is, when the challenge of work tasks fall in a sweet spot between ‘too great’ and ‘too small’. But when the challenge falls out of that sweet spot, we may come to feel helpless, powerless, and cynical about being thrown into a position with unrealistic expectations.
Maybe things had been going well, but the office structure got shuffled around and now you’re doing two (or more!) full-time jobs. Or, maybe a new project was dropped on your plate minus the training or support you actually need to do the job well. There are any number of reasons why your workload may be out of sync, and they can each lead to burnout.
This extends beyond the workplace, too. Maybe the workload of running a household or raising kids has gotten disproportionate to your ability to keep up with it. The laundry, which used to sit neatly folded in drawers, is now in a permanent pile on the spare couch in the corner.
And then there is the problem on the other extreme: if your work challenges are too low, that’s not helpful either. This can lead to boredom, restlessness, dissatisfaction. And, again, burnout. This is the burnout from trudging to a job day after day that bores you to tears, where every hour feels like a day. This burnout arises from feeling like there is no room to grow, no hope of reaching your potential.
Lack of control
We enjoy our work more and are more productive when we have some freedom, flexibility, and autonomy to solve problems (Johannsen and Zak, 2020). Call this creative freedom. But workplace culture often constrains creative freedom. We live in an “age of metrics” where it can feel like every little thing we do is tracked and quantified. The feeling of lack of control that arises from being micromanaged and excessively monitored at work can be a contributing factor to burnout.
But that’s not the only way we can feel a lack of control. Maybe you just aren’t given a choice about your work projects or goals, or about your work hours or travel schedule. Maybe you’re often asked for input, but you know no one is actually listening.
Emotional labor
Emotional labor occurs when employers commercialize their employee’s emotions (Hochschild, 1983). Feigning positive emotion in this way is correlated with emotional exhaustion and burnout (Gabriel et al., 2015; Li et al., 2024). Burnout from emotional labor is very common with jobs that involve “people work” such as customer service or other direct client services (Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002), though recent research has suggested that even jobs with minimal “people work” can lead to burnout (Li et al., 2024). Sometimes, this can involve seemingly innocuous stuff, like feeling pressured to act enthused about an idea you actually dread, or even to laugh at the boss’ unfunny jokes (Hu et al., 2024).
The slow build
Burnout doesn’t happen in a day, and it often doesn’t happen as a result of one single factor. More likely it’s the result of the cumulative effect of multiple issues (like the above) over an extended period of time.
Is it burnout or something else?
Burnout is distinct from depression and anxiety, though there is considerable overlap between them (Bianchi et al, 2016). Sometimes clients seek me out for help with burnout when in reality it may be anxiety or depression (or both). Other times they seek me out for help with anxiety or depression when in reality their symptoms more closely align with burnout. If you’re not sure what it is, but you’re sure you don’t feel how you want to feel, that’s okay.
Ready for Things to feel easier?
Schedule Your First Therapy Session Today
You don’t have to figure it all out on your own. When you’re ready, I’ll help you sort through the heavy things and move toward real, positive, and lasting life change.
10+ Years Helping Clients | Therapist Midlothian, VA | Online Across Virginia
References
AFLAC, 2025-2026 Workforces Report
AMN Healthcare’s 2025 Survey of Registered Nurses
Bianchi R, Schonfeld I., Laurent E. (2017). Physician burnout is better conceptualized as depression. Lancet 389: 1397–1398. DOI: 10.1016/s0140-6736(17)30897-8
Brotheridge, C. M., & Grandey, A. A. (2002). Emotional labor and burnout: Comparing two perspectives of “people work”. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 60(1), 17-39. https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.2001.1815
Cao, B., Hassan, N. C., & Omar, M. K. (2024). The Impact of Social Support on Burnout among Lecturers: A Systematic Literature Review. Behavioral Sciences, 14(8), 727. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14080727
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Sleeping man by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
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