Licensed psychotherapist · 10+ years · EMDR · Lifespan Integration · Certified HeartMath trainer · English, German, Hebrew · Online, worldwide
Licensed psychotherapist · 10+ years · EMDR · Lifespan Integration · Certified HeartMath trainer · English, German, Hebrew · Online, worldwide
Who I work with
For people who are still switched on when there's nothing left to switch on for — and who've figured out that rest, on its own, isn't restoring anything.
Book a first session50 minutes, no commitment beyond it
You took the time off. You slept. You may well have done it properly — no laptop, real disconnection, the whole thing.
You came back and within four days it was as though you'd never left.
Weekends don't reset you. You're irritable in a way that doesn't match the provocations, and then guilty about being irritable. Small decisions feel disproportionately heavy.
And underneath it, something is still braced. Still scanning. Even at 10pm on a Sunday with nothing on the calendar.
Rest doesn't fix burnout, because burnout isn't tiredness. Tiredness responds to rest — that's what makes it tiredness.
What you're describing is different: a nervous system that has been running in a mobilised state for long enough that it no longer stands down when conditions change. The threat is gone; the setting hasn't moved.
This is why the holiday doesn't work, and why being told to rest more is both well-meant and useless. You can't rest your way out of a state that no longer responds to the absence of demand. The setting has to be changed deliberately — and that's a trainable capacity rather than a matter of willpower or better boundaries.
It helps to think of resilience as a battery rather than a personality trait: the energy you have available to draw on, physically, mentally and emotionally. Recovery isn't only about how much you put back in. It's about what's quietly draining out.
It isn't the big things that flatten the battery. It's the quiet ones, running all day.
A genuine blow-up is like flooring the accelerator — dramatic, expensive, over. What actually empties you is the accumulation of small drains running in the background. Low-level impatience. Irritation you didn't voice. Frustration at an email. The meeting you're already dreading at 9am.
Individually unremarkable, and collectively the reason you finish an ordinary day with nothing left and can't explain why.
That's also why "I'm not doing enough self-care" so often misses. You may be renewing perfectly adequately. The leak is the problem.
This is the one that decides whether burnout comes back.
For most people who burn out repeatedly, rest isn't neutral — it's exposed. Somewhere there's a history in which being still, or unproductive, or ordinary, carried a cost.
If that's left intact, a recovered nervous system will simply be redeployed on the same terms. Which is why the work doesn't stop at regulation.
What makes stopping feel unsafe
Regulate → Integrate → Consolidate.
We start with the physiology, because that's what's actually stuck and it's the fastest thing to move. Using HeartMath coherence training, your autonomic state becomes visible in real time — activation, shutdown, settled engagement — and you learn to shift it deliberately rather than waiting for circumstances to permit it.
Early on we also map where your energy actually goes: which situations drain, which renew, and which of the small persistent leaks are costing you more than the obvious stressors. Most people are surprised by what turns up. The things they'd have named as the problem are rarely the expensive ones.
Then the material underneath: what makes stopping feel dangerous. EMDR and Lifespan Integration work on that directly, rather than trying to argue you out of it.
Then the question that decides whether this recurs: what the drivenness was for. What it protected, what it cost, and what your life is organised around instead. This is where values and strengths work belongs — not as a wellness exercise, but because an identity built on output will rebuild the same conditions within a year.
People who burn out are very often high in endurance and low in resilience. That combination is precisely how they got there.
Settling after something demanding rather than carrying it into the week.
Rather than sleep that merely happens.
Without immediately reaching for the next task to justify it.
Reactions sized to the event rather than to the accumulated load behind it.
Being with them again, rather than managing them.
Usually the last to return, and the clearest sign that something has genuinely changed.
They overlap and can occur together, so this is a starting point rather than a diagnosis.
Burnout is usually tied to sustained demand, most often work. Away from the source, interest and pleasure are often still available — there simply isn't the energy to reach them. It tends to feature exhaustion, cynicism about the work, and a drop in a sense of effectiveness.
Depression is generally more pervasive. It tends to affect enjoyment across all contexts rather than one, and often comes with persistent low mood, worthlessness or hopelessness that doesn't lift when the demand does.
The practical question isn't which label fits. It's what's maintaining it — and that's what the first sessions are for.
If you're experiencing thoughts of harming yourself, please seek local support directly. Online therapy across borders isn't the right container for acute risk, and I'll say so plainly if that's where things are.
This isn't stress management, and it isn't a productivity intervention. If what you want is techniques for coping with the same load indefinitely, that's a legitimate goal and I'm not the right person for it.
It also asks you to look at the personal side — what drives the drivenness. Some people want only the physiological part. That's workable, but it tends to produce relief rather than change.
What this isn't
Because burnout isn't tiredness. Tiredness responds to rest by definition; burnout is a nervous system that has stayed in a mobilised state long enough that it no longer stands down when demand drops. The state has to be changed deliberately — through regulation training — rather than waited out.
Usually not the dramatic events. The largest cumulative cost tends to come from small, persistent, low-grade states running in the background — impatience, unvoiced irritation, mild frustration, anticipatory dread — which individually seem unremarkable and collectively account for why an ordinary day leaves you with nothing. A single blow-up is expensive but finite; the quiet leaks run all day.
Resilience is the capacity to prepare for, recover from and adapt in the face of stress, challenge or adversity. Note that it isn't endurance — it isn't how much you can absorb before breaking, but how quickly and completely you recover. People who burn out are very often high in endurance and low in resilience, which is precisely how they got there.
Burnout is usually tied to sustained demand and often eases away from its source, with interest still present even when energy isn't. Depression tends to be more pervasive, affecting enjoyment across all contexts and often including persistent low mood or hopelessness. They overlap and can co-occur, so the useful question is what's maintaining it rather than which label applies.
Regulation usually shows measurable change within four to eight weeks. Full recovery depends on whether the conditions that produced it change, and on the personal drivers underneath — which is the part that determines whether it recurs.
Not necessarily, and it's usually the wrong first question. Plenty of people recover without changing role, once the regulation improves and the relationship to the work shifts. Some do need to change something. That decision is better made from a regulated state than from the middle of burnout.
Those work on the same physiological layer, and they help. The difference is that they're used here as the first stage of a sequence rather than a stand-alone tool — which matters, because if something is still generating the activation, regulation alone becomes management rather than resolution.
Yes, including HeartMath training. I work with English-speaking clients across Europe and beyond.
Tell me what you've already tried. I'll tell you honestly whether this would reach the part that isn't shifting.
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