Burnout therapy for people in tech.
For people who are still shipping and have nothing left at the end of the day.
What burnout looks like when you're good at hiding it
Burnout in tech rarely looks like collapse. More often it's someone who still closes their tickets and gets a decent rating, and has been running on fumes for a year. Things I hear in a first session:
- You're hitting your deliverables, but it takes everything you have and there's nothing left for anyone else.
- Sunday dread that starts around lunch.
- You've stopped caring about work you used to be proud of, and that worries you more than the tiredness.
- A reorg, a new manager, or a return-to-office mandate took away the parts of the job that made it worth doing.
- You've taken two vacations this year hoping they'd fix it.
- Irritability at home that isn't really about home.
- You can't tell anymore whether the problem is the job, the company, the industry, or you.
You don't need to be at a breaking point to start. A few of these is enough.
Why burnout in tech is its own thing
Most advice about burnout assumes you can take a break. In tech the cadence doesn't stop. Sprints roll into sprints, on-call comes back around, and the performance cycle arrives twice a year no matter what the last six months were like.
The last few years made it worse. After the layoffs, fewer people are doing more work and being told to be grateful for it. Vesting schedules make leaving expensive. And the constant messaging about AI adds a pressure to produce that has little to do with the work itself.
Most people who come in with burnout are carrying two different things: exhaustion, which gets better with rest, and a growing sense that the job is wrong for them, which doesn't. Sorting out which is which usually takes the first few sessions.
How I work with burnout
Once we know what we're dealing with, the work is practical. If it's depletion, we look at how you work and rest and what can change without blowing up your job. If it's a mismatch with the role or the company, we look at that honestly, including what leaving would cost and what staying would cost.
I draw on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to get clear on what you want from the next few years, and on cognitive-behavioral tools to unwind the overfunctioning that got you here. We try things with boundaries between sessions and see what happens, rather than only talking about them.
I don't have a stake in whether you leave or stay. My job is to make sure the decision gets made on purpose, by you, rather than by exhaustion.
More About MePrivate, out of network, and less complicated than it sounds.
I don't bill insurance, so nothing about your therapy reaches an insurer, an employer, or a background check. Most of my clients use out-of-network benefits. I provide a superbill after each session, and the plans common at tech companies often reimburse a large share of the $200 fee. Sessions are HSA and FSA eligible.
In person in Midtown Manhattan, or by secure video from anywhere in New York State. See fees and a worked reimbursement example.
Questions people ask before reaching out
They overlap, and sometimes it's both. Burnout is tied to work and usually eases when you're away from it. Depression follows you home. Figuring out which you're dealing with is part of the early work, because the treatment differs.
No. Most of my clients stay where they are, at least at first. The point is to see the situation clearly enough to make a choice, rather than reacting to the worst week of the quarter.
Sessions are 50 minutes and can be by video, so they fit between meetings without a commute. An hour a week on the thing that's draining every other hour tends to be a reasonable trade.