What is the Best Therapy for Burnout? Insights from Clinical Psychologist and Burnout author

The best burnout therapy for you depends on the severity of your symptoms, your specific needs, situation and reasons for burning out.

I’m an HCPC-clinical psychologist and author on this topic. In this article I explain six evidence-based therapies and how each one could help you.

What is Burnout Therapy?

Therapy for burnout covers a spectrum of possible approaches aimed at different aspects of need - from supporting those who have have become quite unwell, perhaps are signed off work sick and struggling with basic tasks - which is known as clinical burnout. To helping those with more functional burnout: those who are struggling with the symptoms of burnout, but managing to keep going. This is you if you're exhausted, have brain fog, are operating on autopilot, feeling overwhelmed and irritable - perhaps you feel trapped or helpless with how to feel better or change things, or are masking to yourself how bad things have become.

What's the Best Therapy For Clinical Burnout?

If you’re struggling to function, your therapy needs to help with the stepping stones back to your old self:

1. Get the essentials back into place for wellbeing - meaningful social connections, a nutritious diet, moving your body, plus a plan in place for caring for dependents and general life admin whilst you're recovering.

2. Addressing (and where possible, removing) external stressors, for example: making occupational health recommendations for an adjusted workload, social support for extra resources

3. Teach skills for soothing yourself, feeling calm again and able to be attuned to what your body needs.
   

Helpful therapies at this point are often skills-based behavioural approaches. Both Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) (in particular, DBT skills training) can help you to increase helpful behaviours (such as adding structure back into your day, eating better, moving your body, social touch points with others) and reduce the behaviours that are making things worse (such as doom-scrolling, drinking alcohol heavily, emotional spending, social withdrawal).

The aim is to slowly rebuild your capacity and sense of calm again before proceeding to anything more in-depth.

What's the Best Therapy For Functional Burnout?

If you’re feeling stable enough, therapies that help you understand and shift the underlying internal pressures can be a good next step.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) for Burnout

CBT can help you identify the beliefs that keep you stuck in patterns of overworking, perfectionism, or people-pleasing—behaviours that can exacerbate burnout. Common beliefs I see in therapy include: “I mustn’t let people down,” or “If I say no, everything will fall apart.”

Some people come to us saying they've tried CBT and found it unhelpful. What I would say to this is that, occasionally they've had an 'off-the-peg' CBT approach by a less well qualified therapist, who has taught generic “thought-challenging.” More experience CBT therapists and psychologists are trained in multiple CBT models which are specific to perfectionism, self-esteem, health anxiety, generalised anxiety and more.

When working with a CBT therapist who is trained in this way they spend the early sessions assessing with you what has been underpinning your burnout - getting to understand the long-standing rules you apply to yourself (such as "I must not let others down") before working with you re-evaluate these and try out alternative ways of coping to the ones that have kept you stuck.

CBT can also help with excessive overthinking, overworking, hyper-independence and withdrawal. It’s a structured and collaborative therapy, usually you meet the therapist weekly, and after each session you have some practical homework to try. The sessions give a sense of progression and accountability, clarity and steady steps forward.

Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) for Burnout

ACT therapy is all about living a meaningful life - something that often gets quietly stripped back during burnout. An ACT therapist will help you reconnect with your personal values (what matters to you) across life domains beyond work, like relationships, health, rest, creativity, and play.

ACT then supports you to navigate the discomfort (often guilt or anxiety) that stops you living in line with those values, helping you become more balanced again. Even in workplaces where you have less agency, you and your therapist can find value-aligned actions that improve wellbeing and rebuild a sense of choice.

ACT also teaches ways to relate differently to “sticky thoughts” - the ones that keep you trapped in the same loops. Many people find these skills become long-term tools for coping with unhelpful thinking patterns long after therapy ends.

Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) for Burnout

In CFT, we explore the imbalance in your three emotional systems that keeps you stuck in overdrive and 'doing-mode'. We identify fear-based motivations that make it feel unsafe to pause, delegate, or request support - such as fear of criticism, rejection, or falling behind.

CFT helps you reconnect with your positive motivations (your values, relationships, and fulfilling goals), and learn to understand and tend to tricky emotions rather than pushing them down or attacking yourself for having them. It’s grounded in neuroscience, uses imagery and compassion practices, and supports you to take compassionate actions that rebuild resilience.

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) for Burnout

EMDR can be helpful if you have long-standing patterns that feel bigger than the present moment, or if your responses feel intense, sudden, or hard to reason your way out of.

The EMDR therapist will help you identify when the pattern began and explore whether it links back to “big T” or “small t” trauma - anything from being bullied at work, publicly undermined by a manager, or repeatedly placed under threat, through to earlier experiences like harsh criticism, conditional approval, or situations where you had to earn safety by performing.

These experiences can lodge in the nervous system more than we realise, leading you to behave in ways designed to prevent it happening again - overworking to avoid being called lazy; over-functioning to avoid conflict; never resting because rest used to equal danger. In EMDR we work with those linked memories and use bilateral stimulation (such as left-right eye movements) to update how the experience is held in the brain and body. This can free you up from old survival strategies that are no longer serving you.

You can learn more about EMDR for Burnout on this page here, including specific example of how EMDR sessions actually work.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) for Burnout

MBSR is a structured, evidence-based programme that teaches mindfulness skills to reduce stress and improve wellbeing. It can be particularly helpful in burnout because it works on how you relate to your internal experience - your thoughts, body sensations, and emotions—rather than trying to “fix” them through force.

In burnout, many people become either highly vigilant (“I need to stay on top of everything”) or emotionally numb (“I can’t feel anything, I’m just getting through the day”). MBSR helps you practise noticing what’s happening in your nervous system, building tolerance for rest and stillness again, and responding with more choice rather than automatic push-through or collapse.

It’s not about becoming calm all the time. It’s about building the capacity to meet your experience without immediately going into panic, avoidance, or self-criticism.

Mindfulness is such a valuable skill that it is woven into all the therapies on this page, however, in MBSR this practice is honed.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) for Burnout

IFS is a compassionate approach all about noticing the different parts of you and how they drive you forward. Sometimes overdoing it so you're left exhausted.

Rather than labelling these as “bad habits,” IFS treats them as protective strategies that developed for a reason. For example:

• A competitive part that insists you must keep going to stay safe or valued

• A perfectionist part that believes mistakes coudl lead to danger

• A caretaker part that can’t stop rescuing others

• An avoidant part that uses busyness to avoid feeling discomfort
  

IFS helps you understand what each part is trying to do for you, soften the internal battles, and build a steadier internal leadership that can set boundaries without panic - or collapse without shame. For some people, this is the missing piece when they’ve tried practical strategies but still find themselves pulled back into the same burnout patterns.

What Else Helps?

Workplace Interventions

Burnout arises in the context of unmanaged occupational stress. Whilst there are talking therapies that can help an individual to recover, this ideally goes hand-in-hand with systemic changes within your place of work. We offer workplace workshops for wellbeing at Plum Psychology. Although if you think your organisation need a deep-rooted overhaul of how things are done then you might need to employ an occupational psychologist to do a bigger piece of work.

Somatic or Body-Based Work

In burnout we have often become very misaligned with our bodies needs and natural rhythms. Any work that involves learning to listen and reconnect to the body will support you to good health. This can go alongside talking therapies listed above or could be a way to begin your journey if you don't feel ready for therapy. Ideas include: Trauma-Informed Yoga, Somatic Experiencing and Trauma-Release Exercises (TRE). I write more about how these fit with increasing body-felt safety in my book Burnout: How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You if you'd like to learn more.

Next steps

You don't need to figure out which therapy you need on your own. Our Plum Psychology psychologists are trained across several of these approaches, so a good starting point is to arrange an assessment and ask for recommendations on what would be the best fit for you at this point in time.

👉More resources available on our Burnout Guide page, including assessment tools, case studies and treatment pathways.

👉Download our free 7 Step Roadmap for Overcoming Burnout here.

👉Or book a free call with a member of our team to get started here.