Therapy for Stress and Burnout
Stress is inevitable, but burnout isn't.
What's stressing you out? You could probably identify a few things.
But can you identify (quickly) what daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly activities help you to rest and recover so that you can be resilient (bounce back) after stressful experiences? For many, this is harder.
What do you imagine that a therapist would tell you about your stress? Get rid of it? Avoid it?
Unfortunately, stress is a part of life. We can't avoid it without avoiding life.
While we can't realistically avoid stress, we can increase our resilience and prioritize effectively to decrease the negative impact of stress and increase feelings of contentment and well-being. Working with stress often involves an exploration of values and practical realities. Many who struggle with stress and burnout are either unclear about their values or unable to say "no" to people or activities.
Adequate rest and recovery is critical to reduce the potentially damaging impact of stress on overall health and well-being. Burnout is typically associated with work (particularly when a person is asked to do more than is possible with limited resources), but a similar experience can also arise from consistently dipping into your energy reserves without sufficient refueling.
Many people value other-centeredness and service. If you're one, I'll encourage you to live out your values, but I'll also help you to reflect on ways to set appropriate boundaries and life rhythms to refuel so that, if you need to dip into your energy reserves from time to time, there's something there to draw from. If you're going to be sacrificial in helping someone, it'll be because you intentionally opt in, not because you aren't free to make a different choice.
Potential topics for therapeutic conversations about stress:
- What are your needs, values, and preferences?
- How would you prioritize the major aspects of your life?
- How comfortable do you feel saying "no" to things? To people?
- Do you feel overextended?
- Are you getting sufficient rest and recovery?
- What are your typical coping strategies? Would you consider them to be healthy ones?