Trueform Therapy

Tag: health

  • The Five Thousand Roses: What We Get Wrong About Loving Ourselves

    There’s a question I ask in the therapy room that most people can’t answer straight away. I ask people what loving themselves would actually mean, what it would look like on an ordinary Tuesday. And usually I get a puzzled look.

    Sometimes a nervous laugh. Sometimes a long silence. And then something like: “I don’t think I do. I can’t look in the mirror and think I’m amazing.”

    I’ve come to realise that this answer isn’t really about whether someone loves themselves. It’s about what they’ve been told self-love is supposed to feel like.

    What We Were Sold

    We’ve inherited a very particular idea of love. It comes to us through films, songs, novels, and the endless stream of social media posts about “self-love” — and almost all of it treats love as a feeling. Something that washes over you. You fall into it. You’re swept away by it. You know it’s real because of the warmth, the rush, the glow…

    So when we turn that idea inwards, we end up expecting to fall for ourselves the way people fall for each other in films. Self-love becomes standing in front of the mirror and admiring what you see. Feeling beautiful, clever, enough. And because everyone online seems to have access to this feeling, the people who don’t conclude that something must be missing in them.

    I see what this does to people. They wait for a feeling that doesn’t come, and the waiting itself becomes evidence against them. Everyone else can do this. Why can’t I?

    But I think the picture itself is back to front. The feeling isn’t where self-love starts. Usually, it’s where it ends up.

    The Mirror That Argues Back

    There’s a study I keep coming back to. In 2009, the psychologist Joanne Wood and her colleagues asked people to repeat the phrase “I’m a lovable person” and then measured how they felt. For people who already felt fairly good about themselves, it helped a little. For people with low self-esteem, it made them feel worse.

    When I first read this, it made immediate sense. When you say something to yourself that clashes too sharply with what you already believe, your mind doesn’t simply accept it. It argues back. “You’re lovable” summons up every piece of evidence for “no, I’m not”, and the gap between the words and the inner experience grows wider.

    It was a small study, and I don’t want to build too much on it. But it matches what I see every week. Trying to feel self-love on demand, when it isn’t there, often leaves people feeling more of a failure than when they started.

    Kristin Neff, who has spent decades researching self-compassion, offers a useful way of understanding why. She distinguishes between self-esteem and self-compassion. Self-esteem is a judgement — how favourably do I rate myself? — and it rises and falls with how things are going and how we compare with others. Self-compassion isn’t a rating at all. It’s a way of treating yourself, especially when things go badly. In her research with Roos Vonk, self-compassion was linked to steadier, less conditional feelings of self-worth over time than self-esteem.

    The mirror version of self-love is really self-esteem in disguise. It asks you to approve of what you see. No wonder it’s so fragile.

    Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

    Love as Something You Do

    Long before any of this research existed, Erich Fromm was saying something similar. In The Art of Loving, written in 1956, he argued that we had misunderstood love by treating it as something that happens to us. For Fromm, love was an activity — something we practise, something we get better at. He described it as “standing in” rather than “falling for”.

    He named what that practice involves: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. And he was clear that this applies to how we treat ourselves. Self-love, for him, had nothing to do with vanity. People who seem selfish, he argued, usually don’t love themselves too much, but too little.

    The American writer and cultural critic bell hooks picked up the same thread decades later in All About Love, writing about love as a verb rather than a feeling — something shown through how we act, consistently, over time.

    When I hold this alongside what my clients tell me, the question changes shape. “Do I love myself?” stops being a question about a feeling you either have or don’t. It becomes a question about practice. How am I treating myself, day by day?

    Five Thousand Roses

    I keep returning to The Little Prince, and to one moment in it that I think is often overlooked.

    The prince has spent a great deal of time on his tiny planet caring for a single rose. He has watered her, sheltered her from the wind, put up with her vanity and her moods. She has told him she is the only one of her kind in the whole universe.

    Then, on Earth, he walks into a garden full of roses. Five thousand of them, every one exactly like his. And he is heartbroken. His rose, it turns out, is ordinary.

    It’s the fox who helps him understand. His rose isn’t special because she’s the most beautiful, or because she’s unique. She matters because of the time he has spent on her, the care he has given her. The love is in the tending.

    This, I think, is exactly where the mirror version of self-love goes wrong. It assumes you need to find yourself exceptional in order to love yourself — that you need to be the best rose in the garden. But the prince didn’t love his rose because she outshone the others. He loved her because she was his to care for.

    And it works the other way round, too. If loving the rose means taking care of her, then taking care of yourself is loving yourself. Not a step towards it. Not a preparation for the real thing. The thing itself.

    You don’t have to admire yourself to love yourself. You just have to be the one you tend.

    Photo by omerovic cetinkaya on Pexels.com

    Does the Feeling Ever Come?

    People often ask me this, and it’s a fair question. Is the warm feeling a myth?

    I don’t think so. But in my experience it tends to arrive after the care, not before it. When people begin treating themselves with consistent, practical kindness, the warmer feelings often follow — slowly, sometimes to their own surprise.

    I want to be honest about what the research can and can’t tell us here. Most studies on self-compassion run in the other direction: they show that people who are kinder to themselves are more likely to look after their health. A 2015 review led by Fuschia Sirois found that self-compassion was linked to healthier habits around sleep, food, exercise and stress, though the link was modest.

    The idea that doing can come before feeling has stronger support from a neighbouring field. Behavioural activation is a therapy for depression built on exactly this principle: rather than waiting to feel better before re-engaging with life, you begin with action, and mood often follows. In a large UK trial published in The Lancet in 2016, behavioural activation turned out to be just as effective as cognitive behavioural therapy.

    That isn’t research on self-love, and I’d hold it as a strong hint rather than proof. But it fits what I see. The feeling is often the result of the care. It isn’t the entry ticket.

    When Kindness Feels Dangerous

    There’s a part of this that rarely gets talked about, and it’s the part I think matters most.

    For some people, being kind to themselves isn’t just difficult to feel. It’s uncomfortable. Even threatening. Paul Gilbert, who developed compassion-focused therapy, noticed this in his clinical work and went on to research it. He found that some people — particularly those who are very self-critical — can actually fear self-compassion, and that this fear goes hand in hand with insecure attachment, depression, anxiety and stress.

    When I think about this through the lens of early experience, it starts to make sense. We learn how to treat ourselves from how we were treated. If care was patchy, conditional, or simply absent when we were small, we may never have seen what steady, ordinary care looks like up close. It’s hard to give yourself something you were never shown.

    Sometimes part of this work is grief. Grief for the care that should have been there and wasn’t.

    And this is exactly why thinking of love as action can be a gentler way in. You don’t need to feel tender towards yourself to drink a glass of water. To go to bed a little earlier. To book the appointment you’ve been putting off. The actions can come first, long before the feelings feel safe.

    Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

    Tending, Not Fixing

    There’s one more thing I want to say, because I’ve seen how easily this idea can be turned against people.

    The same action can come from love or from punishment. Going to the gym because you value your body is not the same as going because you can’t stand it. Eating well because you want to feel nourished is not the same as controlling food because you don’t feel you deserve to take up space. A strict routine can be a form of care — or a way of policing yourself.

    This is where Fromm’s idea of respect becomes important. Care without respect slides into control. Tending a plant means working with what it actually needs. It doesn’t mean forcing it to grow into something else.

    So the question I’d invite you to ask isn’t just am I looking after myself? It’s am I tending myself, or trying to fix myself?

    And consistency doesn’t mean perfection. Many people find routines genuinely hard — because of energy, health, circumstance, or simply the way their mind works. For them, “show up for yourself every day” can quickly become one more standard to fail. But a gardener doesn’t stop loving a plant because they forgot to water it one week. Tending is about coming back. Again and again. Not about never missing a day.

    Just the One You Tend

    If you’ve spent years feeling that self-love is something everyone else seems to have and you somehow don’t, I’d like to offer you a different way of looking at it.

    You don’t have to be the best rose in the garden. You don’t have to look in the mirror and feel amazing. You don’t have to wait for a feeling before you’re allowed to start.

    Love — including love for yourself — is built from small, repeated acts of care. A glass of water. An early night. Saying no when you mean no. Asking for help. Coming back to yourself after you’ve drifted away.

    The feelings may come, in their own time. And if they don’t come easily, that isn’t a sign you’ve failed. It may simply mean you’re learning something you were never taught.

    And if it feels too hard to do alone, therapy can be a place to practise it, slowly, at your own pace.

    If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further

    If the idea of love as something you practise rather than something you feel speaks to you, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving (1956) is the place to start. It’s short, surprisingly readable for a book written seventy years ago, and still one of the clearest things written on the subject.

    For a warmer, more personal take on the same idea, bell hooks’ All About Love (2000) explores what it means to treat love as an action, in families, friendships and in how we treat ourselves. It’s honest about where many of us first learned our ideas of love, and what those lessons cost.

    If you’d like to understand the difference between self-esteem and self-compassion, Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (2011) brings together her research in an accessible way, with practical exercises alongside it.

    If kindness towards yourself feels uncomfortable or even threatening, Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind (2009) is worth reading. Gilbert writes about why compassion can be so hard for people who are very self-critical, and he doesn’t pretend it’s simple.

    And if you haven’t read The Little Prince since childhood, or at all, it’s worth going back to. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote it in 1943 as a children’s book, but it reads very differently as an adult.

    For those who want to look at the research directly:

  • Walking Side by Side: What Happens When Therapy Leaves the Room

    Therapy doesn’t have to happen in a beige room with a box of tissues on the table.

    I’ve known for a long time that walking is where my own real thinking happens. Not at a desk, not when I’m trying hard to think, but on a path somewhere, moving, with my eyes on the trees rather than on a screen. Things that felt knotted untangle. Words arrive that wouldn’t come when I was sitting still.

    For a while I assumed this was just a personal quirk. It turns out it isn’t. And it raises a question I find myself asking more and more: if many of us think more freely when we’re moving and outside, why do we assume that the hardest conversations of our lives have to happen sitting down, indoors, facing each other?

    Walk-and-talk counselling session in a park – therapist and client walking side by side, outdoor therapy for anxiety, stress, and burnout, promoting mental health through movement and nature.

    Why the Words Come More Easily

    There’s a moment I think many people recognise. Some of the most honest conversations happen in the car, or on a long walk, or while washing up side by side. Not across a table. Not eye to eye.

    There’s research that helps explain this. Psychologists studying gaze have found that looking at a face takes up a surprising amount of mental effort. In one study, Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon and her colleagues taught young children to look away when they were thinking through a hard question, and those children answered challenging questions noticeably better than children who hadn’t been taught to do this. Studies with adults point the same way: looking away from a face seems to free up space for remembering and thinking.

    I find this striking when I think about therapy. We often treat looking away as avoidance, a sign that someone isn’t really engaging. But it may be the opposite. Looking away can be how we make room to think.

    Walking adds something else. In a well-known set of experiments at Stanford, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz found that people came up with noticeably more creative ideas while walking than while sitting, and the effect carried on for a while after they sat back down. That research was about generating ideas, not about therapy. But anyone who has ever solved a problem halfway round the park will recognise it.

    Put the two together and you get something interesting. Walking side by side, you’re not managing eye contact. Your body is moving. Your attention can drift to the path and back again. For many people, that combination makes it easier to say the thing they’ve been circling for weeks.

    This matters especially for people who find the traditional therapy room demanding in itself: the eye contact, the stillness, the feeling of being watched while you try to find the right words. For a lot of people, including many autistic people and people with ADHD, a face-to-face hour can feel like a performance. Moving through an open space can take some of that pressure off. I want to be honest that this is an area where therapists’ experience is ahead of the published research. But it’s something I take seriously.

    Photo by Janusz Walczak on Pexels.com

    What the Evidence Actually Says

    Nature and mental health is a field where enthusiasm often runs ahead of the evidence, so it’s worth being careful.

    The strongest overview I know of is a 2021 review led by Peter Coventry at the University of York, which pooled fifty studies of nature-based activities, from walking groups to gardening. In the randomised trials, people who took part showed meaningful improvements in mood and anxiety, and a clear increase in positive feelings, compared with people who didn’t. The most effective programmes ran for eight to twelve weeks, with sessions of between twenty and ninety minutes, which fits neatly with how counselling is usually offered.

    There are caveats. Many of the studies were small, and some had weaknesses in how they were designed, so the size of the benefit may be less than the headline numbers suggest. It’s also worth noticing that most of this research is about time in nature, not therapy in nature. It tells us green space is good for us. It doesn’t tell us that walking therapy beats sitting therapy.

    The research on walk-and-talk therapy itself is much thinner. A small pilot study at the University of Newcastle in Australia compared walk-and-talk with indoor therapy for 37 men with low mood. The walking group showed a bigger drop in overall distress, and both groups improved equally on standard measures of depression. But, interestingly, the indoor group did better on a measure of what researchers call “masculine-type” depression, the kind that shows up as irritability, anger or withdrawal. It’s an early, small study, and a larger trial is now under way. For now, the honest summary is: promising, not proven.

    There’s also research that listens to people’s own experiences. A 2026 review from the University of Manchester gathered studies in which people described what nature-based therapy had meant to them. Many said that being outdoors helped them work through painful emotions, accept difficult changes and reconnect with a sense of purpose. Some described simple moments, like watching trees grow, decay and renew, as giving them permission to accept change in their own lives. That’s not the kind of evidence that proves something works. But it tells us something about how it might help.

    The UK government has also trialled green social prescribing across seven sites in England, where people were referred to things like community gardening and nature walks. In the first area to publish results, Humber and North Yorkshire, people’s wellbeing, mood and anxiety improved, especially among those who took part for nine to twelve weeks. There was no comparison group, though, so we can’t be sure how much of that change came from the activities themselves.

    Photo by Farhaan Mushtaq Parimoo on Pexels.com

    What a Session Looks Like

    At Trueform Therapy, I offer walk-and-talk sessions in Cardiff. It isn’t the main way I work, but it draws on the same things I already do in the therapy room: paying attention to what the body is doing, using pace and pauses, and making a space where you don’t have to perform being okay.

    A session lasts about fifty minutes, the same as a standard counselling hour. Before we start, we’ll talk about the route, what you’ll need to wear and any mobility or sensory needs you have. I choose paths with privacy in mind, where we’re unlikely to be overheard, with places to stop. Some sessions involve walking the whole time. Others include pauses on a bench, when a conversation needs to slow down.

    We’ll also agree what happens if we meet someone you know, and what we’ll do if the weather turns. In Wales, rain isn’t a reason to cancel, but there’s always an alternative if being outside becomes impractical or unsafe. The session still has a shape — a beginning, a middle and an ending — even when the scenery keeps changing.

    You can read more about how I work here: Counselling Sessions

    When the Room Is the Better Choice

    Walking isn’t right for everyone, or for every moment.

    If someone is in acute crisis, or needs the steadiness and containment of a familiar, private room, indoors is usually the better place to start. The same is true for people with agoraphobia, or for some kinds of trauma work where feeling physically held and safe in one place matters a great deal. Significant mobility barriers need careful thought too, although good practitioners can adapt a lot, from step-free routes to quieter paths and regular places to rest.

    None of this is a permanent “no”. It’s a reason to be honest about where you are now. Outdoor work can be something you build towards, or something you mix with sessions indoors.

    And the Newcastle study is a useful reminder that indoor therapy has its own strengths. For some people and some kinds of struggle, sitting still in a room may be exactly what’s needed.

    Photo by Csenteri Arthur on Pexels.com

    Safety, Privacy and the Weather

    Taking therapy outside raises practical and ethical questions, and professional bodies have taken them seriously. The BACP highlights confidentiality, contracting, risk assessment and weather plans as the key issues to think through. The Institute for Outdoor Learning publishes good-practice guidance on what to look for in an outdoor therapist, and the British Psychological Society produced guidance on taking therapy outdoors in 2021.

    In practice, a good outdoor therapist will talk you through how outdoor sessions differ from indoor ones before you start. They’ll have thought about the route, including privacy and what happens if you meet someone you know. They’ll have a clear plan for bad weather and cancellations, and they’ll be willing to adapt to your physical and sensory needs.

    If a therapist can’t answer questions about these things, that’s worth noticing.

    If You’re Thinking About Trying It

    It can help to ask yourself a few honest questions first. Are you comfortable with a bit of weather and uneven ground? Do you have mobility or sensory needs that would need planning for? Do you feel steady enough, right now, to work without the containment of a room?

    When you speak to a therapist, it’s reasonable to ask what training they have for outdoor work, how they plan routes and assess risk, and what happens when the weather makes it impractical. In the UK, outdoor sessions usually cost about the same as indoor ones. Directories such as the BACP’s Therapist Directory or Counselling Directory let you search for therapists who offer outdoor work, and if cost is a barrier, your GP or local Mind may know of lower-cost options nearby.

    Small Doses

    If getting outside for therapy isn’t possible right now, some of what makes it helpful can still find its way into your day. A short walk before a difficult conversation. Sitting near a window during a phone call. A few minutes in a garden or a park at the end of the day.

    One small study found that just twenty to thirty minutes in a natural space was enough to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. That’s not therapy, and it’s not a cure. But it’s a reminder that our bodies respond to where we put them.

    Where the Words Come More Easily

    If you’ve sat in a therapy room and found the words wouldn’t come, it may not be because you weren’t ready, or weren’t trying hard enough. It may simply be that the room wasn’t the right place for you to think.

    Trueform Therapy offers one-to-one support in person in Cardiff, including walk-and-talk sessions, and online across the UK and EU. Whether you’re burned out, overwhelmed, or struggling beneath an exterior that seems to be coping, you don’t have to be in crisis to deserve support. You can read more about counselling sessions and get in touch to see whether this feels like the right fit for where you are now.

    If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further

    If the link between walking and thinking interests you, Shane O’Mara’s In Praise of Walking (2019) is a lively, readable account by a neuroscientist of what walking does for the brain.

    For a therapist’s perspective on taking sessions outside, William Pullen’s Run for Your Life (2017) describes his own approach to combining movement and talking therapy.

    And if you’d like to look at the research directly:

  • Why Rest Isn’t Fixing It: Burnout in People Who Are Still Coping

    You’re still showing up. Still meeting deadlines, still answering messages, still holding things together. And yet something is off. There’s a heaviness that doesn’t lift after a weekend, and a sense that you’re running on something you can’t quite refill.

    You might be wondering whether you’re simply not coping well enough. Or whether everyone feels like this, and you’re making too much of it.

    Most of what’s written about burnout describes people who have already hit a wall: signed off work, unable to get out of bed, unable to go on. But many of the people I see in the therapy room haven’t reached that point. They’re still functioning. And that’s exactly why it’s so easy for them, and everyone around them, to miss what’s happening.

    Photo by Anna Tarazevich on Pexels.com

    Still Functioning Isn’t the Same as Being Well

    The scale of this is easy to underestimate. According to the Health and Safety Executive, around 964,000 workers in Great Britain were affected by work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, with an estimated 22.1 million working days lost. And those figures only count the people who recognised it and reported it.

    The people I worry about most are the ones who look fine. The reliable ones, the capable ones, the ones everyone else leans on. They’re often very good at explaining their symptoms away. The headache is dehydration. The exhaustion is just a busy month. The tension in the shoulders is bad posture. Because they keep delivering, the people around them read their output as a sign that all is well, and so do they.

    The early signs of burnout are often small and easy to dismiss. Tiredness that a good night’s sleep doesn’t touch, or waking up already exhausted. Feeling flat, cynical or detached about work you used to care about. Snapping at the people you love over things that wouldn’t normally bother you. Brain fog: losing your thread mid-sentence, rereading the same email three times. Doing the same amount of work, but needing far more effort to manage it. Pulling back from friends, or putting off tasks you’d once have done without thinking.

    None of these on their own means you’re burned out. But if several have been building for months, it’s worth paying attention.

    What Burnout Actually Is

    It helps to be clear about what the word means, because it gets used for almost everything now.

    The World Health Organization describes burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed. It has three parts: exhaustion, a growing mental distance or cynicism towards your job, and a drop in how effective you feel at work. Importantly, the WHO classifies it as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, and says the term should only be used for experiences at work.

    That definition is useful. It reminds us that burnout isn’t a personal weakness, it’s a response to working conditions. But it’s also limiting. Many people are exhausted by things that have nothing to do with a job: caring for a family member, parenting, illness, or the effort of fitting into a world that wasn’t designed for them. The tiredness is just as real, even if the official word doesn’t quite fit.

    Photo by Yan Krukau on Pexels.com

    Why the Holiday Didn’t Work

    One of the most common things I hear is: “I took two weeks off, and I was back to feeling awful within days.”

    There’s research on this. A review led by Jessica de Bloom found that holidays do improve health and wellbeing. But the benefits fade fast. By somewhere between about twelve days and a month after returning to work, little or nothing was left.

    This tells us something important. If burnout were simply a matter of running out of energy, rest would refill the tank and that would be that. But the tank keeps draining, because whatever was draining it is still there when you get back.

    Christina Maslach, who has spent decades researching burnout, describes it less as a problem of tiredness and more as a problem of fit: a mismatch between a person and their working life. With her colleague Michael Leiter, she identified six areas where that mismatch tends to happen: too much work, too little control, too little reward or recognition, a lack of supportive community, unfairness, and a clash of values.

    That last one is the one I find people overlook most. You can have a manageable workload and still burn out if you’re spending your days doing things that go against what you care about. Sometimes the exhaustion isn’t really about doing too much. It’s about living, day after day, in a way that doesn’t feel like you.

    What We Don’t Know

    You may have read that burnout is caused by cortisol “dysregulation”, or that it damages your stress-response system in a specific, measurable way. This explanation is everywhere. The evidence for it is much shakier than it sounds.

    An early systematic review, back in 2011, found no reliable biological markers of burnout. A more recent review, looking at 48 studies of cortisol, found the results all over the place: some found higher cortisol in people with burnout, some found lower, and many found no link at all. The researchers concluded that cortisol isn’t clearly associated with burnout, though they suggested the body’s stress response may change as burnout goes on, which could explain the mixed results.

    I’m telling you this not to make burnout sound less real. It’s very real. But I think it matters to be honest about what’s known. You don’t need a blood test to prove that you’re struggling. Your experience counts as evidence on its own.

    Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com

    Neurodivergent Burnout: When It Isn’t Only About Work

    For many neurodivergent people, exhaustion doesn’t come only from work. It comes from everything: the noise, the lights, the social rules, the constant effort of monitoring how you’re coming across.

    Autistic people have described this for years, and researchers have started to listen. In a 2020 study, Dora Raymaker and her colleagues worked with autistic adults to describe what they called autistic burnout: long-lasting exhaustion, loss of skills and abilities, and reduced tolerance to sensory input, usually lasting three months or more. Participants linked it to chronic life stress, masking and a mismatch between what was expected of them and the support they had.

    This is different from the WHO’s version of burnout. It isn’t limited to work, and it can affect every part of life. It’s also worth knowing that this research is still young; the 2020 study was small and qualitative. Research on burnout in ADHD is even thinner. But many neurodivergent adults recognise themselves immediately in these descriptions, and that recognition matters.

    If this sounds familiar, standard advice to “rest and recover” may not be enough. Recovery often means looking at the load you carry every day, not just at work, and finding ways to reduce it.

    Burnout or Depression?

    People often ask me whether what they’re feeling “counts” as burnout, or whether it might be depression.

    The honest answer is that the line between them is blurrier than most articles suggest. In a large analysis of fourteen studies, Renzo Bianchi and his colleagues found that the core of burnout, exhaustion, was very strongly linked with depression, more strongly than it was with the other parts of burnout. Some researchers now argue that burnout may be better understood as a form of work-related depression. Others disagree. The debate is still going.

    A rough rule of thumb many clinicians use is this: burnout tends to be tied to work, and often eases a little when you’re away from it. Depression tends to spread across your whole life, with a heaviness or hopelessness that doesn’t lift during a holiday or a good weekend. It’s a useful starting point, but it’s not a reliable test.

    If you’re feeling hopeless, if the low mood has spread into every part of your life, if your sleep or appetite has changed significantly, or if things have stopped feeling worth it, please speak to your GP. And if you’re having thoughts of not wanting to be here, you can call Samaritans any time on 116 123.

    If you’d like to get a clearer sense of where you are, the Burnout Assessment Tool is a free, validated questionnaire you can find online. It doesn’t replace a conversation with a professional, but it can help you put words to what you’re experiencing.

    Photo by Emir Kenter on Pexels.com

    What Actually Helps

    The usual advice — sleep more, exercise, try mindfulness — isn’t wrong. Sleep and movement do support recovery, and mindfulness-based programmes have shown modest benefits for burnout in research. But on their own, they can feel like trying to empty a bath while the tap is still running.

    Research on recovery, particularly by the psychologist Sabine Sonnentag, suggests that rest is not all the same. What seems to matter is psychological detachment: actually switching off from work in your head, not just physically leaving it. She also found benefits from activities that feel relaxing, activities that give you a sense of mastery or learning something new, and having some control over how you spend your free time. An evening scrolling while thinking about tomorrow’s meeting isn’t the same kind of rest as an evening absorbed in something you love.

    But the bigger lesson from the research is that the causes often lie outside the individual. Reviews of interventions for doctors, for example, have found that changes to how work is organised tend to have stronger effects than programmes aimed at individuals alone. That’s an important message for anyone who has been told that burnout is a resilience problem. Often it isn’t.

    So it can help to ask two kinds of questions. The first is about the symptoms: how can I sleep, move and switch off a little better? The second is about the causes: what is draining me, and what would need to change? That might mean a conversation about workload. It might mean learning to say no. And sometimes it means a bigger question about whether the life you’re living still fits who you are.

    When to Talk to Someone

    Self-help has its limits, particularly when burnout has been building for a long time, or when it’s tangled up with neurodivergence, or with questions about whether your work or your life still feels like yours.

    Therapy can help when rest no longer works, when the same patterns keep repeating, or when you can see the problem clearly but can’t find a way through it alone. It can be a place to slow down, make sense of what’s been happening, and work out what needs to change, at a pace that keeps your life stable.

    Trueform Therapy offers one-to-one sessions in person in Cardiff and online across the UK and EU, with a particular focus on burnout and neurodivergent-affirming support. It’s designed for people who are still functioning but struggling: the people for whom “just take a break” has never been the whole answer.

    Taking It Seriously

    Burnout often looks like “fine” from the outside, especially in people who have spent years adapting to environments that weren’t built for them. That doesn’t make it any less real, or any less deserving of support.

    If you’ve recognised yourself here, that recognition matters. Whether your next step is a conversation about your workload, a change in how you rest, or a conversation with someone who can help you untangle it, you don’t have to wait until you’ve hit a wall.

    If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further

    If you’d like to understand burnout as a mismatch between people and their work, Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter’s The Burnout Challenge (2022) brings together decades of their research in an accessible way, with a strong focus on what organisations can change.

    Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s Burnout: The Secret to Solving the Stress Cycle (2019) is a warmer, more personal book about why stress builds up in the body and what helps to release it, written with women’s experience particularly in mind.

    And if you’d like to look at the research directly: