Stress and burnout

What are stress and burnout?

Stress is the body’s short-term response to pressure, while burnout is a state of physical and emotional exhaustion that builds when stress continues without enough recovery time. The ICD-11 classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon linked to chronic, unmanaged workplace stress, not a medical diagnosis in its own right.

Stress on its own isn’t unusual. A demanding week at work, a house move or a family illness can all raise the body’s alarm system temporarily, and most people recover once the pressure eases. Burnout is different. It tends to build slowly, often across months, and shows up as a persistent flatness or exhaustion that doesn’t lift with a weekend off. Many people describe reaching burnout without noticing the point where ordinary pressure turned into something harder to shift.

Signs of stress and burnout

Stress and burnout show up differently from person to person, but some patterns are common. Physically, this can include disturbed sleep, headaches, muscle tension, a churning stomach or a weakened immune system that leaves you catching every cold going round. Emotionally, people often notice irritability, a short temper, low mood or a sense of dread before the working day starts. Burnout adds a further layer: a numbness or detachment from work that once felt meaningful, a drop in the sense of achieving anything and cynicism about colleagues, clients or the job itself. Concentration and memory often suffer too, so tasks that used to take an hour stretch out, and decisions that were once straightforward start to feel overwhelming.

Common causes

Workplace pressure is the most familiar driver of stress and burnout: long hours, unclear expectations, a lack of control over your own workload or a job that asks for more than the role or resources allow. Caring for children, ageing parents or a partner with health needs adds a different kind of load, one that rarely has an end date. Financial pressure, health problems, bereavement, relationship strain and periods of major change, such as redundancy or a house move, can all contribute on their own or stack up together. For many people it isn’t one single event but an accumulation of demands that never quite eases off, leaving little room to recover between one pressure and the next.

How therapy can help

Therapy for stress and burnout usually starts with a proper look at what’s driving it, since the right approach depends on the person and their situation, not a one-size response. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which NICE recommends for a range of stress-related and anxiety difficulties, helps identify the thoughts and behaviours that keep stress cycling, such as all-or-nothing thinking about work, or patterns of overcommitting and then crashing. Alongside this, therapy can build practical skills: recognising early warning signs before they escalate, setting boundaries that hold, and structuring rest so it actually restores rather than just filling time between demands. Where stress has tipped into low mood or anxiety, therapy addresses those difficulties directly rather than treating stress as background noise.

Our approach

We are clinical psychologists for Maidstone and Kent, working online with adults, so sessions take place by secure video call rather than in a consulting room. This suits stress and burnout work well, since it removes a commute or a further demand on a diary that may already be full. Assessment comes first: understanding your history, your current circumstances and what stress or burnout looks like for you, before agreeing what therapy will focus on. From there, sessions are structured around clear, collaborative goals rather than an open-ended conversation, so progress is something you can track rather than take on faith. Local awareness matters too. A working week built around a commute from Maidstone East or Maidstone West looks different from one spent working from home in Bearsted or Barming, or from a job based in the town centre near Fremlin Walk, and sessions take that difference into account.

What does therapy involve?

A typical course of therapy begins with one or two sessions focused on assessment, gathering a clear picture of your circumstances, your stress history and what has helped or not helped before. From there, sessions usually run weekly, each lasting around fifty minutes, with an agreed structure that might include reviewing the week, working through a specific technique such as thought records or graded activity and setting a small task to try before the next session. The number of sessions varies depending on the person and how long the stress or burnout has been building, and this is something to discuss and review as therapy progresses. Between sessions, most people are asked to notice patterns, such as what precedes a bad day or what helps recovery, since this information shapes the work as much as anything discussed in session.

When to seek help

It’s worth seeking help when stress stops responding to the things that used to help, such as rest, a change of pace or a conversation with someone close, and instead keeps building regardless. Burnout is worth addressing directly once exhaustion becomes the default state rather than an occasional low point, or once cynicism and detachment start affecting how you treat colleagues, family or yourself. If stress or burnout is accompanied by low mood, panic, or thoughts of harming yourself, this needs a more urgent response than a course of weekly therapy, and a GP or a crisis service should be the first call. For everything short of that, earlier support tends to be more straightforward than waiting until a crisis point, since patterns that have been in place for years take longer to shift than ones caught early.

If you are having thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life, please don’t wait for a therapy appointment. We are not a crisis service. If you need urgent help, call NHS 111 (option 2), contact your GP, or call Samaritans free on 116 123, any time. In an emergency, call 999.

At the moment all our sessions are online by secure video.