Summit Counselling Services — Specialty
Stress & BurnoutRunning on empty is not a personality trait. It's a signal.
Stress and burnout are among the most common reasons people seek therapy — and among the most overlooked. If you've been pushing through for too long, therapy can help you understand what's driving it, recover what's been depleted, and build something more sustainable.
Understanding Stress & Burnout
There's a difference between stressed and burned out.
Stress is your body's natural response to demands and challenges. In the right doses, it can be motivating — it sharpens focus, drives effort, and helps you meet the moment. But when stress is chronic, unrelenting, and without adequate recovery, it shifts into something different.
Burnout is what happens when the stress cup stays full for too long. It's characterized by deep exhaustion — physical, emotional, and cognitive — combined with a growing sense of detachment, reduced capacity, and often a quiet hopelessness about things ever feeling different. It's not laziness. It's not weakness. It's a predictable response to a prolonged mismatch between demand and recovery.
Burnout doesn't only happen at work. It happens in caregiving, in parenting, in people-pleasing, in navigating systemic barriers and discrimination, in carrying more than your share for too long. Whatever has depleted you, the path forward is the same: understanding what happened, addressing what's driving it, and rebuilding intentionally.
"Burnout is not a personal failing. It's what happens when people are asked to give more than they can sustainably give — without enough support, recovery, or control."
Common sources of stress and burnout
- Chronic overwork and poor work-life balance
- High-demand or negative workplace environments
- Conflict at home or in close relationships
- Parenting and co-parenting demands
- Separation, divorce, or major relationship transitions
- Compassion fatigue — in caregivers, healthcare workers, and helping professions
- Oppression, discrimination, and the chronic stress of navigating systemic barriers
- Lack of personal or professional limits
- Carrying a disproportionate share of invisible labour
- Abuse and trauma
- Financial stress and housing insecurity
- Chronic illness — your own or a loved one's
- The cumulative weight of caring for others without adequate care for yourself
The Scale of It
Stress and burnout are not personal failures
They're widespread, they're measurable, and they're treatable. You are not alone in this.
Recognize the Signs
What stress and burnout actually look like
Burnout rarely arrives all at once. It accumulates slowly — until one day you realize you've been running on empty for longer than you can remember.
Physical Symptoms
- Persistent fatigue that doesn't improve with rest
- Sleep difficulties — trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking unrested
- Frequent headaches, muscle tension, or gastrointestinal issues
- Getting sick more often than usual
- Feeling physically depleted even on days off
Cognitive & Emotional Symptoms
- Difficulty concentrating, making decisions, or remembering things
- Working harder but feeling less productive
- Cynicism, detachment, or emotional numbness
- Loss of motivation or sense of purpose
- Intrusive negative thoughts about yourself or the future
- Feeling a profound loss of control over your work or personal life
Relational & Behavioural Symptoms
- Withdrawing from social connection or activities you used to enjoy
- Increased irritability, impatience, or emotional reactivity
- Difficulty being present with people you care about
- Neglecting your own needs — rest, nutrition, movement, care
- Relying on unhelpful coping strategies to get through
Signs It's Becoming Something More
- Persistent low mood or hopelessness — this may be depression
- Constant worry or dread — this may be anxiety
- Feeling trapped or like things will never improve
- Thoughts of not wanting to continue
- Using substances to cope
How Therapy Helps
Recovery isn't just rest. It's understanding.
Rest helps — but it's rarely enough on its own. If the patterns, pressures, and beliefs that drove the burnout don't change, rest is only a temporary reprieve. Therapy goes deeper: helping you understand what brought you here, what keeps you in it, and what a genuinely sustainable life might look like for you specifically.
Our therapists work with you to manage stress more effectively, recover what's been depleted, and build the limits, skills, and awareness that make burnout less likely to return. Whether the source is workplace pressure, caregiving, relational dynamics, or something harder to name, therapy offers a space to slow down, understand, and rebuild.
Sessions are available in person at all three Summit locations, and virtually across Alberta.
Who We Work With
Burnout looks different in different lives
There's no single profile of a person experiencing burnout. We work with people across many contexts and roles.
Workplace Burnout
Chronic overwork, a toxic or high-demand work environment, lack of autonomy or recognition, or simply carrying too much for too long. Therapy helps address both the practical and emotional dimensions of work-related burnout.
Caregiver Burnout
Parents, partners, adult children of aging parents, and professional caregivers all face the particular depletion that comes from giving care without receiving enough in return. Compassion fatigue is real — and it's treatable.
Healthcare & Helping Professions
Nurses, physicians, social workers, teachers, first responders — roles that require sustained emotional presence alongside high demand and often inadequate systemic support. We understand the specific pressures of these contexts.
Parenting Burnout
The relentlessness of parenting — especially with young children, children with complex needs, or in a context of co-parenting conflict — creates a particular form of exhaustion that is often invisible and minimized. See also our parenting support page.
Minority Stress & Systemic Pressure
The chronic, compounding stress of navigating discrimination, oppression, and systemic barriers based on race, culture, sexuality, gender identity, or disability is a real and significant source of burnout — one that requires specific, affirming support.
High Achievers & Perfectionists
People who hold themselves to impossibly high standards, who struggle to rest without guilt, or whose sense of worth is entirely tied to productivity — burnout is a near-inevitable destination. Therapy addresses the underlying beliefs, not just the symptoms.
Therapeutic Approaches
How our therapists work with stress & burnout
Our therapists draw on a range of evidence-based approaches — matched to the person and what's driving their burnout, not applied generically.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Identifying the thought patterns — perfectionism, people-pleasing, catastrophizing — that drive chronic stress and make recovery difficult. CBT builds more realistic appraisals of demand and capacity, and practical skills for responding differently.
Somatic Experiencing
Burnout lives in the body — in the chronic activation of the nervous system, the tension that never fully releases, the exhaustion that doesn't respond to sleep. Somatic approaches work at a physiological level to help the nervous system downregulate and recover.
Mindfulness & Positive Psychology
Building the capacity to be present without being swept away — to notice the stress response without escalating it, and to access moments of genuine rest and restoration even in demanding circumstances.
Solution Focused Therapy
For clients who want to focus on practical change — identifying what's working, building on existing strengths, and developing concrete strategies for a more sustainable life. Efficient and action-oriented without being superficial.
Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART)
When burnout is connected to specific traumatic experiences or overwhelming memories, ART offers efficient processing of those experiences — reducing their charge so they have less power over your present-day stress response.
Attachment & Values-Based Work
Understanding the deeper beliefs about worth, rest, and productivity that keep people stuck in burnout cycles — and rebuilding from a clearer sense of what actually matters to you, rather than what you feel you should be doing.
Book a Session
Find us in Edmonton, St. Albert & Windermere
Stress and burnout therapy is available in person at all three Summit locations, with virtual sessions across Alberta.
Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver)
Grandin Plaza, 2nd Floor
Edmonton, AB
Common Questions
Stress & burnout therapy — your questions answered
Our Therapists
Therapists who specialize in stress & burnout
The clinicians below specialize in stress and burnout. Start with a free 15-minute consultation — no commitment, just a conversation about fit and what kind of support makes sense for your situation.
Further Reading
From our blog
Summit Counselling Blog Understanding Burnout — What It Is and How to Recover Read article →Related Support
Other areas we work with
You don't have to keep pushing through. There's another way.
Your first consultation is free — no commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation about where you are and whether we're the right fit.
We acknowledge that our practice is located in Treaty 6 territory, on the traditional lands of the Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux Peoples, including our Brewery District office in Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver). We recognize that healing and reconciliation is a responsibility shared by all.