Guide

Stressed and worn out

From the outside you keep everything going. Inside, you are running on empty, and rest does not seem to refill you.

Reviewed by Laurentiu Nicolae Costrut, psychologist (OPP 32887) · 2 November 2026 · Sources

What therapy does

You look at the pressure you put on yourself and what keeps you pushing, and practise ways to slow down and recover.

How to start

A free 25-minute conversation by video.

How exhaustion can feel

Running on empty

You feel tired all the time, even after rest. You feel overwhelmed, and it is hard to concentrate or decide. Work you used to care about can start to feel distant, or you become cynical about it. You snap more easily, and you may sleep or eat too much or too little.

You are not the only one

In an EU-wide survey of more than 27,000 workers, 46% said they face severe time pressure or too much work, and 37% said work had caused or worsened tiredness in the past year. You do not need a diagnosis to talk about it.

Why exhaustion can last

Two ways of understanding exhaustion

The World Health Organization describes burnout as the result of long-term work stress that has not been managed: exhaustion, distance from your work, and a sense of doing less well. It is not classed as a medical condition.

Research links it to a long-running mismatch between a person and their work, such as workload, control, reward and values. Both approaches look at what keeps you going at this pace, not only at the tiredness.

Compassion Focused Therapy

Exhaustion is seen as the systems for pressure and striving taking over, while the system for rest and feeling safe gets little room.

Internal Family Systems

Hard-working sides of you are seen as keeping everything together to prevent what they fear, often at the cost of rest.

What can help

How therapy works with exhaustion

Exhaustion often has to do with your circumstances as well as with you, and both can be looked at in sessions. Below are the two approaches we use.

In Compassion Focused Therapy, you look at the pressure you put on yourself and how you treat yourself when you fall short, and practise ways to slow down and recover.

In Internal Family Systems, you get to know the sides of you that keep pushing: what they fear would happen if they stopped, and what they need in order to rest.

How both approaches are used in a session

Nothing is forced. You can slow down or pause at any point.

Book a free consultation

Urgent help

When to seek urgent help

If you are in danger, or thinking about ending your life, call 112 (or your local emergency number) now, or go to the nearest emergency department.

findahelpline.com lists free helplines in every country.

Limits

Who this is not for

Your psychologist offers talking therapy by appointment. Some situations need other care first: a crisis, hearing or seeing things others do not, extreme mood swings, eating that affects physical health, alcohol or drug use that has become hard to stop, or a need for medication or a hospital stay. Your family doctor can refer you to the right specialist care.

If you are unsure, mention it in your request. The initial consultation is also there to check this together.

Research on treating burnout is limited for every kind of therapy: reviews find small or mixed effects, and no therapy is clearly the first choice. The most promising signs come from self-compassion training, which improved wellbeing at work in studies of medium quality with people in caring professions.

For the two approaches we use there is no direct research yet: no published trials of Compassion Focused Therapy for burnout, and no studies of Internal Family Systems. What research does show, across every kind of therapy, is that how well you and your psychologist work together matters for the result.

General information, alongside an individual evaluation by a psychologist.