Stress & Burnout

They are different states. Under chronic stress you generally still care — often too much — and feel overloaded, urgent, and hyper-engaged. Burnout is what follows when that has gone on long enough: not too much feeling but too little. Disengagement, flatness, cynicism, and a sense of futility about work that once mattered.

The distinction matters because the remedies differ. Stress responds to load management, boundaries, and recovery. Burnout is rarely solved by a vacation — people routinely return from two weeks off and feel the dread reappear within a day, because the conditions that produced it are unchanged.

Burnout is usually driven by structural conditions — workload, insufficient control, unfairness, absent recognition, values conflict — not by an individual failure to relax properly. Advice to take a bath or download a meditation app can therefore add insult, implying the problem is that you haven't tried hard enough at recovering.

That does not mean nothing helps. It means useful work addresses the actual drivers: what you can influence, what has to be renegotiated, which boundaries have quietly disappeared, and what the exhaustion has been protecting you from noticing.

DBT skills provide concrete tools for tolerating distress and regulating emotion when you're past capacity. CBT addresses the beliefs that keep the pressure on — that rest must be earned, that saying no is a failure, that everything will collapse without you. Individual therapy holds it together and adapts it to your actual circumstances.

Sessions are available in person in Bountiful and via telehealth across Utah and Idaho, including evening telehealth for people whose schedule is a large part of the problem.