Stress and Burnout Counselling in Milton Keynes

Do Something About the Situation First

This is the part almost no counselling page will tell you, and it is the first thing I say to people who are stressed about work.

Go to your manager. Say plainly that you are struggling with the workload, and be specific: this I can cope with, this I cannot.

Then follow it up in writing. An email, the same day, setting out what you said. If you have a good manager they will act on it and the email costs you nothing. If you have a poor one who is dismissive, you now have an audit trail, and that matters far more than people realise at the point where it starts to matter.

I am aware that is closer to employment advice than therapy. I say it anyway, because someone who is drowning at work and has told nobody in writing is carrying a risk on top of the stress, and no session with me removes that.

If it is not work, the same principle holds. Tell someone who can actually affect it, not only someone who will sympathise.

Why It Makes You So Tired

Stress is about now. Too much at once, all the plates spinning and wobbling, and you cannot work out which one to catch first.

What that does to you physically is the bit people underestimate. You are running with your foot flat on the accelerator and the handbrake on, which burns the engine. You are working hard and getting nowhere, and then you wonder why you are exhausted by the middle of the afternoon.

Eventually the system stops asking. The mind and the body decide enough, and they do not consult you about the timing.

Two things sit either side of this page and are covered properly elsewhere. If what you actually have is the fear of something that has not happened yet rather than too much happening now, that is anxiety and the difference matters. And if you have gone past stressed into shut down, flat and hiding, the five stages are a better map of where you are than anything on this page.

What Stress Costs Before You Notice

It rarely announces itself. What people report, usually months in, is that they have stopped doing anything that was only for them, they are short with people they like, they are sleeping badly and drinking a bit more than they used to, and they cannot remember the last time they enjoyed a weekend without a background hum of things undone.

Then it starts showing up in the body. Sustained long enough, stress does not stay psychological. It works through into physical health, and the body eventually presents the bill.

Which is the honest argument for dealing with it earlier than feels justified. Not because you are fragile, but because the compound interest on this is real.

What Counselling Does and Does Not Change

It does not reduce your workload. It will not make your manager reasonable, or your finances less tight, or the person you care for less ill.

What it does is take the thing apart with someone who is not in it. Which of these pressures are actually yours, which have you picked up, and which are you holding because putting them down would mean a conversation you do not want to have. Then what changes, in what order, and what you are going to say.

People arrive with one enormous undifferentiated problem. Most of the useful work is turning it back into a list of separate things, some of which are fixable this month.

What Working With Me Is Like

No reception, no team, nobody else in the building. You send a message, I am the person who replies, and I am the person you sit down with.

Early on I would want to look at all three levels rather than only mine. The biological, which is your GP's end and worth ruling out when someone is this tired. The sociological, meaning the actual pressures on you, your work, your money, the people around you. And the psychological, which is where I come in. They are linked, and looking at one alone tends to miss what is driving it.

I have been in practice since 2013 and I am an integrative therapist, which means I trained across several approaches rather than one.

In person in Wolverton, or online wherever you are.