Anxiety/Burnout/Depression
When something is off and you cannot say why.
Anxiety, burnout, and depression in adults who have been functioning for a long time.
What this looks like in your life
You are not falling apart. From the outside, things look fine. You go to work. You answer the messages. You show up where you are supposed to show up. The people around you would say you are doing well.
And still something is off. There is a tightness in the chest that does not have a cause you can name, a kind of fatigue that does not lift on the weekend, a thought you cannot turn off, or a quiet flatness that has been there long enough that you have stopped noticing it as separate from you.
Sometimes it shows up in the body first. A clenched jaw, a stomach that has its own opinions, sleep that comes late or breaks too early, headaches that have become routine. Sometimes it shows up in the relationships. You are quicker than you used to be, or more withdrawn. You are tired of explaining yourself. You have started to wonder whether you remember what it felt like to not be managing.
And sometimes it shows up as just nothing. The version of yourself that used to want things. The energy that used to make plans. Gone, or so far away you cannot reach it. You have learned not to mention it because there is no good way to explain that you are fine and also you are not.
What I notice clients carry
Most adults who come in with anxiety, burnout, or depression are not carrying just those things. They are carrying the conditions that produced them.
Some are carrying the cost of being the only one in the room: code-switching, cultural translation, being asked to represent something that should not be one person's job to represent. The kind of vigilance this requires is not optional and not visible, and over time it costs something.
Some are carrying the weight of identities the world has not made easy to hold. Queer adults navigating family systems that did not get easier with time. Bicultural adults who have been translating themselves since childhood. Neurodivergent adults who have been masking long enough that they cannot quite locate what is underneath. Each of these is its own kind of work, and when more than one is happening at once, the load compounds in ways that do not always announce themselves.
Some are carrying provider stress: the inherited expectation that being okay is a thing you do for other people, that asking for support is not what you were raised to do. Some are carrying perfectionism dressed up as standards, or the slow erosion of staying in a role that is not quite right, or grief that has not been allowed to be grief. The presenting symptom is usually anxiety, burnout, or depression. The underlying material is almost always something more specific.
How I think about these patterns
There is a way the mind has of trying to keep up. Picture a good waiter or waitress starting their shift. They have a few tables. They want to do a thoughtful job: checking on every table, remembering every order, holding the small details so the room runs well. The attention is the work, and the work is what makes them good at it.
Then the rush hits. New tables fill in, then more new tables. None of the original tables have left. At first the waiter tries to keep up with all of it, and for a while they do. But the system was not built to carry everything at once. At some point one of two things happens. Some waiters speed up. They try to track every table, check every detail, stay ahead of every order, and they keep going long after their resources have run out. Other waiters go quiet. They stop checking on tables. They cannot bring themselves to engage. The system has shut down to protect itself. Some waiters do both, oscillating between the two. None of these is a defect. Each is what a system does when it is asked to manage more than it was built to manage.
This is something the mind does too. Anxiety is often what shows up when the system speeds up, when the mind is trying to track every open loop, when the body is staying alert long after it needed to. Burnout is what happens when that speeding-up has gone on for too long and the resources are gone. Depression is often what happens when the system goes the other direction, when it shuts down to protect itself from a load it cannot keep carrying. Some people experience all three over time. Some cycle between them. The same overwhelmed system can produce very different symptoms depending on which way the nervous system tends to drift.
What the work looks like
The work, in part, is understanding which direction your particular system tends to drift, what kept it overwhelmed in the first place, and what it would take to bring it back into a range it can sustain. It is rarely about stopping the anxiety, the burnout, or the depression directly. It is about understanding what those states are doing for you and what they are responding to.
We start by getting clear on what is actually happening. Not just the symptom, but the texture of it. When it shows up. What it interrupts. What it has been protecting. What it has been asking for that you have not been able to give it. We work with the body when the body has things to say. Anxiety and depression live in the nervous system as much as in the mind, and sometimes the most direct path to understanding what is happening is not through more thinking but through paying attention to what the body is doing.
We work with the context: where you came from, what you were trained to expect of yourself, what roles you have been holding, what you have been quiet about and for how long. The point is not to assign blame to your history. The point is to understand what your current symptoms are responding to, so they have something other than themselves to point at.
We work with the existential layer when it is there. Some anxiety is about specific situations. Some anxiety is about what it means to be a person living the life you are living. Both are legitimate. And we work with what you actually want. Therapy can become its own kind of project, with goals and metrics, and that is sometimes useful. But the real question is usually quieter than that. What would it look like to stop performing your life and start living it? What would it cost to find out? What would you do with the energy you would get back?
Not sure if this is the right fit?
The first call is free and fifteen minutes long. We can talk about what is bringing you here, what the work would look like, and whether this practice is the right place for you.