When Sunday evening already hurts.
You turn up exhausted to a job you used to enjoy. You get things done, but you no longer care, and the weekend doesn’t restore you. It isn’t a lack of character or organisation: it’s a well-understood process, with a well-understood way out.
Hardly anyone has to quit their job to recover. Individual 60-minute session: £90 in person (Cambridge), £80 online.
The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. You don’t need a diagnosis or a fit note to start.
Burnout isn’t caused by workload alone: it’s caused by sustained workload without recovery. And when work piles up, recovery is the first thing to go.
A week has 168 hours. Build a typical week and decide for yourself what drains you and what recharges you (for some people cooking is rest; for others it’s one more shift). The battery, Monday to Sunday, shows what a single day can’t: what happens when the load keeps going and recovery never arrives.
Weekly hours for each thing. Start from the example: change it, remove what doesn’t apply and add what’s missing.
By day it drains with load (amber); at night and in your free time it recharges with recovery (green).
Tap a day to see its balance.
How you’d arrive at each Monday.
An illustration, not a measurement: each hour of load subtracts what each hour of recovery adds. Real life isn’t that linear, and the quality of free time counts as much as its length. Nothing you type leaves your screen.
They’re often confused, and the treatment plan is different in each case. It’s the first thing we look at in the first session.
Read each case and put it in the tray that fits best, using the clues in the table above. These are made-up people, and what gets marked is the clue, not you: once you answer, the case lights up and you’ll see which row of the table explains it.
Case 1 of 6
What best describes what’s going on?
Summary
In real life the lines are rarely this sharp: tiredness that goes on and on can turn into burnout, and burnout and depression can exist side by side or lead into each other.
These cases are for learning what to look for, not for giving yourself a label. Only a professional assessment can tell whether what you’re going through is tiredness, burnout, depression or a mix, and in what order it’s best to work on it.
If you feel hopeless or are thinking about harming yourself, don’t wait: call Samaritans on 116 123 (free, 24/7), text SHOUT to 85258, or call NHS 111 and choose the mental health option. In an emergency, call 999. In Spain: 112 / 024.
A quiet, private room on a leafy road in south Cambridge. Under a mile from Addenbrooke’s and the Biomedical Campus, about two miles from the city centre. Online sessions are available too.
Weekly at first, fortnightly once things settle. Most people end up in the same job with a different relationship to it. If it turns out the role really is unsustainable, that decision is yours, and we think it through calmly, not at eleven o’clock at night.
Usually not. Most people recover in the same role, having changed what they absorb, how they recover and what they believe they owe their employer. If it becomes clear that the role is unsustainable, the decision is yours, and I’ll help you think it through properly, not in the heat of the moment.
It isn’t an illness in itself. The WHO classifies it as an occupational phenomenon: a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed. You don’t need a diagnosis, a referral or a fit note to start working on it.
Usually between eight and twelve, weekly at first and fortnightly after that. Sleep and that Sunday-evening dread tend to shift well before the end. By the third or fourth session I’ll give you an estimate based on your situation.
Coaching works on performance and goals. Here we work on the mechanism: why the loop keeps re-forming, what it’s protecting you from and what happens when you stop feeding it. You’re working with a qualified psychologist (licence M-41370, Madrid) with a PhD in Neuroscience, using cognitive-behavioural and third-wave methods.
It’s often one of the best times, because there’s room to work on things without the week dragging you along. A big part of the process is preparing your return: what changes, what needs saying and to whom (for example, a phased return or adjustments agreed with occupational health), so you don’t go back to the same conditions that brought you here.
No. I’m independent of your employer and of any occupational health service: you’re the one who engages me. Everything is confidential and nothing is shared with third parties without your consent, except where the law requires it. Sessions are not recorded.
Fifteen minutes by phone or video, free and with no obligation to book afterwards. Just tell me roughly how the last few months have been.
Book your free callOr email me at jose.gonzalez.m@cop.es or message me on WhatsApp at +44 7490 975208.