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Psychodynamic therapy for burnout, chronic stress and emotional exhaustion with a Melbourne-based registered psychologist. Sessions online, weekday mornings AEST.
Burnout can look different from person to person. You may still be turning up, meeting your responsibilities and being someone others rely on, while feeling increasingly depleted underneath it. Or you may have reached a point where the exhaustion is affecting your ability to work, care for yourself, or manage everyday life.
The exhaustion does not seem to lift, even after a weekend or a holiday. Work you once cared about may feel flat, burdensome or increasingly difficult to engage with. You may notice yourself becoming more cynical or detached, or simply feel as though you are going through the motions. Alongside this can come a sense of guilt or confusion about why you are struggling, particularly when you feel you should be able to cope.
Burnout is not simply a failure to manage stress or a lack of resilience. It can develop when the demands placed on you remain high over time without sufficient opportunity for rest, recovery or a sense of reward and meaning in what you are doing.
Burnout is commonly described in terms of three dimensions, which can help explain how it tends to present. You might recognise yourself in one, or in all three.
Exhaustion
Cynicism and detachment
Reduced professional efficacy
Other common experiences include overwhelm, difficulty concentrating, physical tension, disrupted sleep, and losing enjoyment in things outside of work too.
These experiences are not a diagnostic checklist, and burnout is not a clinical condition in the way depression or an anxiety disorder is. The World Health Organization describes burnout specifically in relation to chronic workplace stress, rather than as a condition that can be diagnosed from particular symptoms. But the experience is real, exhausting to carry, and worth taking seriously before it reaches a breaking point.
Stress on its own isn’t necessarily the problem. It is a normal response to demand and, in manageable amounts, a natural part of life. It can focus attention, motivate us, and help us respond to things that matter.
Problems can arise when stress becomes chronic and there is not enough opportunity for recovery. Over time, ongoing demands can leave you feeling depleted in ways that ordinary rest does not resolve. This is an important distinction. While stress can often ease when demands reduce, burnout can persist even after time away from work, particularly when the circumstances contributing to the stress remain unchanged.
This is an important reframe for many people: if you’ve tried resting and found that it hasn’t been enough, that does not mean you have failed at recovering. It may mean that rest alone cannot address what is contributing to the depletion. Working with a chronic stress psychologist is not simply about learning to relax, but about understanding what is driving the stress and what may need to change.
For many people, burnout has its roots in work, though the effects rarely stay contained there. Work-related stress can spread into sleep, mood, health, relationships, and your sense of who you are outside of what you produce.
It can show up as:
Therapy provides space to understand not only the external demands, but your particular relationship to them: why saying no is so hard, why rest feels unearned, why the responsibility always seems to land with you. Those are the parts that a change of job, on its own, often doesn’t fix.
Stress is a response to pressure or demand. It tends to be tied to specific situations; it can come and go, and it often eases once the demand passes or circumstances change. A degree of stress is a normal and unavoidable part of life.
Burnout is better understood as what can happen when significant stress continues over a long period without adequate recovery. The World Health Organization describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterised by exhaustion, increased mental distance from or cynicism about one’s work, and a reduced sense of professional efficacy. Unlike depression or an anxiety disorder, burnout is not classified as a psychiatric diagnosis.
The practical difference is one of depth and recovery. Stress usually eases with rest or changed circumstances. Burnout tends to persist, affect more areas of life, and may require more than a break to shift, which is often why people seek support for it.
Burnout and depression can look very similar from the inside. Both can involve exhaustion, low motivation, difficulty concentrating, withdrawal, and no longer feeling like yourself.
A broad distinction is context. Burnout is usually connected to specific ongoing demands, particularly work, and may ease when those conditions genuinely change.
Depression can extend beyond a particular situation, following you into the holiday, the new role, or the weekend you’d been counting on. It can also involve broader changes in mood, self-worth, and how you experience yourself and the world.
The two can overlap, and prolonged or severe burnout may occur alongside depression. Rather than drawing a strict line between them, it is important to understand what is happening in your particular circumstances. This is something therapy can help with. Read more about depression treatment.
For many people, burnout is not only about workload. It is also about what drives the workload, including patterns that may extend beyond the demands of a particular job.
Perfectionism. A fear of not being enough. Difficulty saying no. Self-worth that has become quietly conditional on achievement and productivity. An inability to rest without guilt.
High-functioning anxiety can keep you over-preparing, over-delivering and permanently braced for what might go wrong.
For some people, burnout can be connected to patterns that have been operating for a long time. The immediate demands may change, but the pressure to achieve, take on more or keep going can remain.
This is where therapy can offer something that stress-management tips often cannot. Advice about boundaries and self-care can assume that the difficulty is simply not knowing what to do. But many people who burn out know they should rest, delegate or say no, yet find these things difficult or experience significant anxiety and guilt when they try. Understanding why it feels so difficult to stop is a different kind of work, and one that can make those patterns more available for reflection and change. Read more about anxiety treatment.
The standard advice for burnout is rest, boundaries and self-care. This advice isn’t necessarily wrong. But rest isn’t always enough, and if you find these things aren’t helping, you might wonder whether you have somehow failed at recovering too, on top of everything else.
When burnout keeps returning despite genuine rest, the patterns contributing to it may not have changed. You can take the holiday and come back to the same relationship with work, the same difficulty resting, the same fear of disappointing people, or the same identity built around being capable. The circumstances may reset, while the underlying patterns remain.
Recovery from burnout does not follow a fixed timeline and can vary enormously depending on how long it has been building and what is contributing to it. For some people, meaningful changes to their circumstances and a period of genuine recovery may be enough. For others, particularly where burnout is recurrent or connected to longstanding ways of coping, recovery may involve understanding and working with these difficulties, not only reducing the workload.
Can therapy help with burnout? Yes, particularly when burnout keeps coming back or is connected to difficulties that predate the current situation. Therapy can explore what keeps depleting you and why rest has not been enough, with the aim of developing a different and more sustainable relationship with work, rest and your own needs.
Psychodynamic therapy explores the patterns and beliefs that can make it difficult to stop, rest, set limits, or recognise that you are asking too much of yourself.
Areas that may come into view over the course of therapy include:
None of this is about blame. These ways of coping usually developed for understandable reasons, often long ago. Understanding them, including where they came from, what they may have protected you from, and what they now cost, can create space for something different.
You don’t need to have collapsed, or be unable to work, before support is warranted. It may be worth speaking with a psychologist if:
Psychologist or GP for burnout? Both can have a role, and they can work well together. Your GP is often a good first step, particularly if you need time off work, medical support or documentation, or if physical symptoms need checking. A psychologist offers space to understand the patterns contributing to burnout and work towards lasting change. Many people see both.
Alicia Shevlin (she/her) is a registered psychologist and clinical psychology registrar, based in Melbourne and working with adults across Australia via telehealth. She holds a Master of Applied Psychology (Clinical Psychology) from Victoria University, where her training took an integrative approach spanning both cognitive behavioural and psychodynamic traditions. In her current practice, she works psychodynamically.
Alicia has worked in mental health since 2016, beginning in the domestic and family violence sector and going on to work across community, university and public health settings before entering private practice. Workplace issues, stress and the pressures that contribute to burnout are among the concerns she regularly works with. She works with adults aged 18 and over, and with people of all genders, sexual orientations and sex characteristics.
AHPRA registration: PSY0002275993
Member: Australian Psychological Society
Alicia works psychodynamically, which means the focus isn’t only on managing symptoms but on understanding the complex factors that cause them. Applied to burnout, that means looking at your relationship to work, rest, responsibility and your own needs, and the experiences and patterns that shaped it.
Alicia works with individuals and does not provide couples therapy. Sessions are for therapeutic support and are not conducted for medico-legal purposes such as court reports. Third-party funding via WorkCover, TAC or DVA is not currently available.
Alicia is Melbourne-based and works entirely via telehealth, with sessions held over Zoom.
For burnout in particular, this matters. When you’re already depleted, the practical demand of getting to an appointment — travelling across the city, parking, sitting in a waiting room, losing half a day — is one more thing you might not have capacity for. Online therapy removes it. Attending from your own home, in a chair you already know, takes less out of you, and that difference could determine whether therapy continues past the first few weeks.
Practically, you’ll need a private space where you won’t be overheard, a stable internet connection, and a device with a camera. Headphones help.
Appointments are available on weekday mornings only, scheduled in Australian Eastern Standard Time (or AEDT during Victorian daylight saving), both before and after 9:00 am AEST.
Service area: Because of the session times, burnout and stress therapy with Alicia is typically most suitable for people in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory. Whether you’re looking for a burnout therapist in Victoria, a burnout psychologist offering telehealth from Melbourne, or stress therapy online elsewhere in eastern and central Australia, sessions are available within those time zones.
Yes. Although burnout often begins with work or other ongoing demands, its effects rarely stay contained there. Depletion, cynicism and irritability can spill into relationships, and the withdrawal and loss of enjoyment that come with burnout can affect connection, mood and overall wellbeing. Therapy provides space to understand how these effects are playing out across your life, not only at work.
Not exactly, though they can look very similar and might overlap. Burnout is usually connected to specific ongoing demands, particularly work, while depression can affect you across different areas of life and circumstances. Depression can also involve broader changes in mood, self-worth and how you experience yourself and the world. Burnout and depression can occur together, and prolonged burnout may increase the risk of developing depression. Understanding what is happening in your particular circumstances is more useful than drawing a strict line, and it is something therapy can help clarify. Read more about depression treatment.
It varies considerably, depending on how long the burnout has been building and what’s driving it. Where burnout is connected to circumstances that can change, recovery may be quicker. Where it’s recurrent or tied to longstanding patterns, lasting change usually involves understanding and shifting those patterns, which takes more time. Alicia’s approach is generally suited to medium- to long-term work, with pace discussed throughout.
No to either. You can book directly with Alicia without a referral or a Mental Health Treatment Plan, and you don’t need a formal diagnosis to begin therapy. Burnout itself is not a clinical diagnosis, but that does not make the experience any less real or significant. A referral from your GP or psychiatrist is only needed if you want to claim a Medicare rebate. Without a referral, sessions are privately billed. See current session fees.
Yes. All of Alicia’s sessions are delivered via telehealth over Zoom, which can be especially helpful with burnout, when the effort of getting to an in-person appointment is one more demand you may not have capacity for. She works with adults across Australia, subject to the weekday-morning AEST session times.
If you’ve spent a long time managing on empty, stopping to look at what is happening can feel like one more thing you don’t have the energy for. But understanding what has kept you pushing beyond your limits can be an important step towards finding a different way of living.
The free 15-minute phone call is a simple, low-pressure first step.
The information below outlines what therapy involves, how telehealth sessions work, and practical details regarding fees and Medicare rebates.
Learn about how a range of mental health issues can be treated with psychodynamic therapy.
Access therapy without leaving home. Learn what to expect from beginning telehealth therapy.
Medicare rebates available for eligible patients. A referral from your GP or psychiatrist is required.