Ever felt exhausted even after a full night’s sleep? That is indicative of insufficient restfulness, and you might be dealing with more than just stress.
In today’s demanding world, most of us are no strangers to stress. We hustle to meet deadlines, care for family, adapt to constant change, and often wear our busyness like a badge of honour. But when stress stops being motivating and starts becoming soul-depleting, we may be crossing into dangerous territory, a.k.a. burnout.
At Family-Therapy Ottawa, we see firsthand how common burnout has become, especially since the pandemic. Many people come to us believing they simply need better stress management techniques or more sleep, when in fact they are experiencing full-blown emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion.
Burnout is often misunderstood. Unlike everyday stress, it doesn’t go away with a good night’s rest. Understanding the difference between stress and burnout is essential, not just for choosing the right treatment, but for preventing deeper psychological crises. If you’re feeling drained, detached, or chronically overwhelmed, help is available.
Why Our Perspective Matters
Our team brings a unique depth of experience to this issue. Melanie Parnell, MSW, RSW, has over 25 years of experience working with caregiver burnout, particularly supporting parents, frontline workers, and loved ones of those with chronic conditions. Matthew Layne, MACP, RP (Qualifying), works with burnout recovery and life balance, helping professionals untangle their self-worth from overwork and guiding clients to sustainable well-being. We understand burnout not just as a clinical diagnosis, but as a lived experience that impacts everything from your sleep to your identity.
Our approach is tailored, trauma-informed, and grounded in therapeutic evidence. Going beyond treating symptoms, we help clients explore the root causes of their exhaustion, rebuild emotional resilience, and reclaim a sense of joy and purpose. Our perspective is deeply empathetic, culturally aware, and rooted in the complexities of real life. Seeing a therapist at Family-Therapy is not about ‘fixing’ you, it’s about walking alongside you as you heal.
Burnout Is Not Just ‘Too Much Stress’
While stress is a short-term reaction to pressure, burnout is a slow, cumulative depletion of your internal resources, and it has distinct causes. Research and clinical experience consistently point to several recurring burnout triggers:
- Workplace stress: Unrealistic demands, micromanagement, toxic cultures, and lack of autonomy are major drivers. Many employees feel undervalued or trapped in environments where expectations vastly outpace capacity.
- Caregiver fatigue: Parents, healthcare workers, teachers, and those supporting ill or aging loved ones face relentless emotional labour with little downtime or recognition. This can erode empathy and energy over time. Many of us in the helping profession are exhausted.
- Pandemic fallout: While the pandemic is in the past, many people are still suffering from the lasting effects of isolation, disrupted routines, and chronic uncertainty. The emotional toll hasn’t simply disappeared with the return to “normal.” Feelings of disconnection, loneliness, anxiety, and burnout continue to surface—often silently and unexpectedly.
- Perfectionism and over-functioning: People who equate their worth with productivity often push through red flags until their bodies or minds force a shutdown. This “push through” mentality often masks distress and delays necessary mental health and physical care.
- Lack of work-life boundaries: Always being on, whether through late-night emails or constant mental rumination or mentally rehashing the day of what could have been, prevents essential recovery time. This chronic overextension is a fast track to burnout.
In today’s climate, burnout is often normalized. But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. If you’re feeling numb, exhausted, or disconnected, this guide is for you or maybe someone you care for.
What Is Stress?
Stress is your body’s natural, adaptive response to perceived demands, threats, or challenges. It’s the mental and physiological activation that helps us face deadlines, juggle responsibilities, and navigate uncertainty. In the right dose, stress can sharpen focus, boost motivation, and even enhance performance, this is what psychologists call eustress. This little bit of stress is a good thing to push us to excel and achieve.
But stress is harmful when it becomes chronic, unmanaged, or disproportionate to the resources we have to cope. When this happens, the body’s helpful alert system becomes a burden on our nervous, immune, and cardiovascular systems. We ignore the signs that we need to back off and take the time to relax. We push past our limits ignoring messages from our bodies that it’s time to rest. We might start getting headaches, eye strain, an upset digestive system but we’re ignoring signals from our body that we need a break.
The Science of Stress
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), prolonged stress is a major contributor to health issues like heart disease, sleep disturbances, anxiety, weakened immunity, and depression. It activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, flooding the body with cortisol and adrenaline. When this system stays continuously activated, as it often does in modern life, it can disrupt everything from digestion to emotional regulation (MindGarden: Burnout Solutions). We are learning too much cortisol and adrenaline and prolonged exposure to cortisol and adrenaline is harmful to our bodies.
Common Causes of Stress in Everyday Life
At Family-Therapy, our clients are talking to us about their recurring stressors, whether they are students or busy adults. As therapists we frequently hear about:
- Work demands and deadlines: Chronic pressure from performance expectations and long hours are common among professionals.
- Parenting and caregiving responsibilities: Emotional and time-related demands increase the risk of chronic stress and caregiver fatigue.
- Academic and identity stress: Students and young adults report stress related to school, social dynamics, and navigating the complexities of their path in life.
- Cultural adaptation: Newcomers and refugees often struggle with language barriers, financial pressures, loneliness and the absence of family, and the emotional weight of relocation.
- Post-pandemic emotional residue: Many people continue to feel depleted from years of survival-mode living, virtual overload, and caregiving stress brought on by COVID and its lasting effects on social and routine lifestyle.
To explore practical ways to cope with these ongoing challenges, check out our blog on Managing Adult Stress: Finding Balance in a Busy World. It offers evidence-based tips to help you reset routines, establish boundaries, and regain emotional stability in your daily life.
H3: Recognizing the Symptoms of Stress
Stress shows up in different ways, including:
- Physical signs: Tension headaches, stomach problems, sleep disturbances, and increased heart rate, muscle aches
- Emotional indicators: Irritability, anxiety, tantrums, inability to relax, racing thoughts
- Behavioral shifts: Overworking, withdrawal, increased reliance on caffeine or alcohol, addictions
The APA and Harvard Business Review report that among young adults (18–34), 67% say stress interferes with their ability to concentrate, and nearly half report that daily stress makes them feel unable to function (HBR: Burnout Impact on Young Adults).
Stress in the Canadian Workplace
The 2024 Gallup State of the Global Workplace report found that 41% of North American employees experience daily stress, second only to the Middle East and North Africa. Even more concerning, stress levels are often higher in employees with poor management or lack of workplace support (Gallup Report 2024).
This data highlights a crucial truth: stress isn’t just about how much you are doing; it’s about how little control and support you have in doing your everyday tasks. When pressure exceeds your capacity to cope, the risk of burnout rises.
How to Recover from Stress
Not all stress is bad. In fact, a certain level of stress, known as eustress, can motivate us to grow, solve problems, and adapt to new environments. But when stress becomes chronic and starts affecting your health, relationships, or peace of mind, it’s time to seek professional intervention.
The good news is that stress is manageable, especially when caught early. With consistent self-care and the right support, you can lower your stress levels, rebuild emotional bandwidth, and prevent it from escalating into burnout.
At Family-Therapy, we guide clients through personalized stress recovery plans rooted in evidence-based approaches. These strategies address both the physical effects of stress and the emotional patterns that keep stress cycles in place. We help our clients learn to give themselves permission to slow down.
For clients whose stress is rooted in past trauma or deeply embedded emotional responses, we may also incorporate EMDR therapy or brainspotting as part of their recovery plan. This clinically proven method helps reprocess distressing experiences and reduce the emotional impact of chronic stress triggers.
1. Prioritize Foundational Self-Care
You can’t pour from an empty cup. Replenishing your body and mind starts with meeting your most basic needs:
- Sleep: Aim for 7–9 hours of restorative sleep each night. Create a sleep-friendly routine by limiting screen time, caffeine, and late-night stressors.
- Nutrition: Fuel your body with whole foods rich in nutrients. Blood sugar spikes and crashes from processed foods can worsen anxiety and irritability.
- Movement: Regular physical activity reduces cortisol (the stress hormone) and boosts endorphins, promoting emotional regulation.
- Connect: Spend time with people who help you feel safe, supported, and cared for.
Tip: Try a short 20-minute walk, light stretching, or video-guided yoga. Even modest activity can shift your nervous system out of a harmful fight-or-flight syndrome.
2. Practice Relaxation Techniques
When stress is ongoing, your nervous system can become stuck in a heightened state of arousal. Integrating calming practices can retrain your body to return to a state of balance.
- Deep breathing: Box breathing (inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4) slows the heart rate and sends calming signals to the brain. Or try the 4,7 8 breathing technique. You inhale for 4, hold for 7, exhale for 8. Both work well in soothing and calming your nervous system. You can ever teach these techniques to children.
- Progressive muscle relaxation: Tensing and relaxing different muscle groups can reduce physical tension and foster mindfulness.
- Guided meditation or mindfulness: Apps like Insight Timer or Headspace or Oak can help you build a routine of grounding and awareness.
According to the Mayo Clinic, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is linked to improved mood, lower anxiety, and reduced blood pressure, especially in high-stress populations.
3. Set Boundaries and Reclaim Time
One of the most empowering ways to reduce stress is to reclaim control over your time and energy.
- Say no without guilt: You are not obligated to “fit in” by saying yes to every request. Protect your capacity by conserving time and energy for the activities that are beneficial for you.
- Schedule micro-breaks: Step away from your desk, stretch, breathe, or take a short walk every 90 minutes.
Designate screen-free time: Unplugging from devices, especially before bed, helps prevent sensory overload. Spending extended periods on devices can negatively impact breathing through shallow or suspended breathing patterns, often referred to as “screen apnea”. This can lead to increased stress signals in the brain and reduced respiratory function.
4. Process Emotions, Don’t Suppress Them
Stress isn’t just physical, it’s emotional to a large extent. Releasing internal pressure means tending to your inner world too. Journaling, creative expression, or simply talking things out can reduce internal pressure.
- Keep a stress journal: Note what triggers stress, how you respond, and how you’d like to respond differently.
- Express creatively: Art, music, or writing can help release emotions you may not yet have words for. Art therapy can help you get out your emotions if you struggle with naming them. And being creative helps keep you present so you can’t worry about today’s past events while playing the guitar.
- Talk to someone you trust: Confiding in a friend, mentor, or therapist helps normalize stress and soften the shame you might be experiencing.
Therapy offers a safe, non-judgmental space to unpack long-standing stress patterns and develop sustainable coping tools. Learn more in our blog on Managing Adult Stress or explore Anxiety Counselling options at Family-Therapy.
5. Identify and Change Stress-Driving Thought Patterns
Sometimes, our own beliefs, about perfection, worth, or control, feed our stress. Therapy approaches like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can help identify and reframe these patterns. For comprehensive burnout and stress relief, combining CBT with mindfulness, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), or Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) techniques can be very effective. DBT combines CBT techniques with mindfulness and emotional regulation skills, useful for managing intense stress and emotional exhaustion.
- Example: “If I don’t do everything perfectly, I’ll disappoint everyone.”
- Reframe: “Doing my best is enough. I can’t control everyone’s response.”
Changing your internal dialogue is a powerful lever for reducing stress and increasing self-compassion.
6. Know When to Ask for Help
If you’ve been trying to manage stress alone and it continues to disrupt your life, it’s okay to seek support. Therapy is not only for moments of crisis; it’s a proactive way to maintain mental and emotional well-being.
Family-Therapy Ottawa offers:
- Virtual and in-person sessions for flexible access
- Trauma-informed, culturally sensitive care
- Therapists experienced in anxiety, work-life imbalance, parenting stress, and more
We meet you where you are and walk with you toward a life with less pressure and more presence.
What Is Burnout?
Burnout is not simply about being overworked, it is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged and excessive stress, often related to work, caregiving, or other demanding life situations. It happens when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. Defined by the World Health Organization as an occupational phenomenon, burnout is marked by chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy.
It’s the collapse that follows prolonged stress with no relief. While stress might leave you frazzled and hyper-alert, burnout creates a sense of emotional numbness, hopelessness, or disconnection. You’re not just tired; you feel empty.
At Family-Therapy, we help individuals recognize that burnout isn’t a personal failure or weakness. It’s a predictable consequence of living in systems that ask too much and give too little, whether in the workplace, caregiving environments, or during significant life transitions.
Additional insights and recovery tools can be found in Dr. Farrell’s Burnout Library, a curated collection of clinical resources and expert strategies.
Understanding Burnout vs. Stress
If Burnout can’t be fixed with a weekend off or a few yoga classes. It’s not a moment but rather a slow spiral brought on by a mismatch between sustained demands and inadequate support or recovery. While stress makes you feel over-engaged, burnout makes you feel emotionally hollow. You also might start feeling resentful and angry towards those you love because the demands on your time and energy don’t stop.
At Family-Therapy Ottawa, we frequently see burnout in professionals, parents, students, caregivers, and immigrant newcomers. Many have silently carried their emotional overload for months or even years before realizing what they are experiencing isn’t just stress but something deeper and more enduring.
What Causes Burnout?
While burnout may look different across life roles and identities, research and clinical observation identify several consistent root causes:
- Unrealistic work demands: Jobs that require constant urgency, long hours, or lack autonomy and support.
- Toxic workplace dynamics: Poor communication, bullying, micromanagement, or feeling devalued.
- Caregiver fatigue: Parents, healthcare providers, teachers, and those caring for aging or ill loved ones, often sacrifice their own well-being.
- Pandemic residue: Emotional depletion from years of sustained uncertainty, disrupted routines, and caregiving overload.
- Perfectionism and over-functioning: When your worth feels tied to productivity, it’s easy to ignore exhaustion until you crash.
- Blurred boundaries: Being constantly accessible, through emails, texts, or mental rumination, leaves little room for psychological recovery.
These overlapping pressures drain the body and mind over time. Burnout is best understood as the accumulation of unchecked and built-up stress over a period of time. You can be stressed without being burned out, but burnout doesn’t occur without long-term stress first.
Signs and Symptoms of Burnout
Burnout tends to unfold gradually. Many clients describe the moment they realized something wasn’t right: they were getting enough sleep and still waking up tired, crying on the way to work, or snapping at loved ones without knowing why.
Common symptoms include:
- Chronic fatigue that persists even after rest
- Detachment, numbness, or cynicism about work or caregiving roles
- Inability to concentrate or complete everyday tasks
- Emotional volatility or irritability
- Sleep disturbances or insomnia
- Physical complaints such as tension headaches or stomach issues
- Feeling like nothing you do is ever enough
- Avoidance behaviors like procrastination or absenteeism
These symptoms often co-occur, and over time can contribute to mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. Tools like the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) help assess the severity of burnout, while the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS) reveals which mismatches in workload, values, or control, may be driving chronic stress and emotional fatigue.
Burnout Through the Lens of Our Clients
At Family-Therapy, we see burnout manifest differently across our client base:
- For parents, burnout comes from trying to meet impossible standards at home and work, leaving little time or energy for yourself or for your children or teens.
- For newcomers, burnout may arise from chronic stress related to job insecurity, cultural pressure, trouble adjusting to a new culture, language demands, and isolation.
- For professionals, it’s often the result of overwork in demanding industries where hustle culture is glorified and resting between tasks is viewed as weakness.
Our clinicians, including Melanie Parnell, MSW, RSW (with 25+ years in caregiver burnout) and Matthew Layne, MACP, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), and Olusegun Raji, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) provide trauma-informed, culturally responsive support. We go beyond symptom relief and work with clients to rebuild meaning, energy, and joy in their lives.
Quick Self-Check: Am I Burned Out?
At Family-Therapy we offer a practical Burnout Quiz to help you assess where you might be on the burnout spectrum.
“I wake up tired, even after a full night’s sleep.”
“Small tasks feel overwhelming or hard to start.”
“I feel emotionally drained at the end of most days.”
“I feel like I’m just going through the motions.”
If these statements resonate, it may be time to explore whether you’re beyond stress and in need of deeper recovery strategies (Are You Experiencing Burnout? Quiz PDF).
How to Recover from Burnout
Recovering from burnout requires more than “bouncing back”. You must work at building back differently. Unlike stress, which can often be alleviated with rest and short-term self-care, burnout recovery demands a more intentional, long-term approach. It involves rethinking your relationship with work, boundaries, and your own emotional needs.
At Family-Therapy, we help clients rebuild from burnout through trauma-informed care, self-exploration, and behavioural change. Our goal is to sustainably relieve exhaustion by helping you reconnect with your values, identity, and capacity for joy. Explore our guide to Achieving a Balanced Lifestyle to support your long-term well-being.
We help clients:
1. Recognize the Depth of Your Depletion
The first step in healing from burnout is acknowledging it. Many people minimize their symptoms, fearing they will be seen as lazy or weak. But burnout is not a personal failure; it’s a sign that your environment and demands have outpaced your ability to recover.
If you are waking up exhausted, feeling numb about tasks that once excited you, or finding it hard to care, these are signals that deeper rest and change are needed, not just a weekend off.
Therapist Insight: “Burnout doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a slow depletion of your emotional reserves. If you’re constantly drained and disconnected, it’s time to reevaluate your what you are doing. You can’t get somewhere new without changing old patterns of thinking or behaving” – Family-Therapy Ottawa clinician
2. Reset Your Life’s Pace — Not Just Your Schedule
Burnout recovery requires more than taking time off, it requires taking pressure off. That often means reevaluating the values and patterns that got you here:
- Reassess your obligations: What can you pause, delegate, or drop entirely?
- Reprioritize rest as a necessity, not a luxury
- Change environments if needed: Sometimes, a toxic or unsupportive workplace or caregiving context needs more than boundary-setting. You may need to exit.
Tip: Time off without emotional reconfiguration often leads to relapse. Sustainable recovery includes redefining your relationship with productivity and performance.
3. Engage in Professional Support
Burnout recovery is layered and personal, and therapy can make all the difference. At Family Therapy Ottawa, we work with clients to:
- Unpack the roots of their burnout: perfectionism, over-functioning, unresolved trauma, or systemic inequity
- Rebuild emotional regulation: through mindfulness, grounding, and nervous system awareness
- Explore identity recovery: We guide you to think about who you are beyond your job or caregiving role
Research confirms that therapy and coaching are among the most effective interventions for burnout, especially when combined with lifestyle changes (Harvard Business Review).
4. Reconnect With What Nourishes You
One of the quiet tragedies of burnout is the way it disconnects us from joy. As you recover, it’s important to gradually rebuild your connection to passion, purpose, and play.
- Revisit hobbies or activities you once loved
- Reintroduce novelty: a new skill, interest, or volunteer experience
- Prioritize relationships that nourish rather than deplete
5. Repair Boundaries and Rebuild Autonomy
Burnout often grows in the absence of boundaries, particularly for people in caregiving roles, high-responsibility jobs, or toxic work cultures.
Therapy can help you:
- Define your limits without guilt
- Communicate boundaries clearly
- Remain calm in the face of resistance from others when you start saying no
6. Restore Nervous System Balance
Chronic burnout keeps your body in a near-constant state of dysregulation. Recovery means gently rebalancing your nervous system over time through:
- Breathwork and somatic therapy
- Nature immersion
- Safe, co-regulating relationships
- Consistent sleep and hydration
When Burnout Recovery Requires Professional Help
If you are experiencing any of the following, it’s time to consider therapy:
- Chronic fatigue that rest doesn’t relieve
- Emotional numbness or hopelessness
- Severe anxiety, panic attacks, or irritability
- Self-medicating with alcohol, stimulants, or excessive screen time
- Inability to function at work or in relationships
Family-Therapy Ottawa offers compassionate, confidential care tailored to your needs. From flexible scheduling for working parents to culturally sensitive sessions for refugees and newcomers, our team is ready to help you reclaim your well-being.
Conclusion
Stress and burnout are often mistakenly considered synonymous, but the difference is crucial, both in how they make you feel and how you can heal.
Stress is a response to pressure. It can be managed with proactive self-care, time boundaries, and lifestyle shifts. Burnout, however, is a deeper depletion, a signal that something about the way you are living, working, or giving, needs to change. Feeling burned out is not a sign of being weak. You are worn out from doing too much, for too long, without enough support. Help is at hand.
At Family-Therapy Ottawa, we understand the complexity of what you are going through. Whether you are a parent trying to stay present while stretched too thin, a professional caught in workplace overload, or a student drowning under perfectionism and uncertainty, your experience is real, and you don’t have to face it alone.
Our team offers tailored, non-judgmental support. We are here to help you slow down, reconnect with yourself, and rediscover what health and wholesomeness look like for you.
Here’s What You Can Expect at Family-Therapy Ottawa:
- A welcoming, non-judgmental space (virtual or in-person)
- Trauma-informed care that respects your pace
- Support for caregivers, professionals, newcomers, youth, and more
- Experienced clinicians trained in CBT, mindfulness, family systems, and burnout recovery
Whether you are dealing with chronic stress or full-blown burnout, healing starts by acknowledging the load you are carrying and choosing not to carry it alone anymore.
Let’s Take That First Step, Together
Your energy, your clarity, your joy, they are not gone. They are just buried under layers of obligation, expectation, a misplaced sense of guilt, and exhaustion.
Book a free consultation at Family Therapy Ottawa
Or call us at 613-287-3799 to speak with our caring team of psychotherapists and social workers. Your healing doesn’t have to wait until you hit rock bottom. It can begin today with one small, courageous step toward seeking the right support.
Reference Links
American Psychological Association – Stress Overview https://www.apa.org/topics/stress
MindGarden – Burnout Solutions https://www.mindgarden.com/content/34-burnout-solutions
Harvard Business Review – How Burnout Became Normal and How to Push Back Against It
https://hbr.org/2024/04/how-burnout-became-normal-and-how-to-push-back-against-it
Gallup – State of the Global Workplace 2024 Report
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
Mayo Clinic – Mindfulness Exercises
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/stress-relief/in-depth/mindfulness-exercises/art-20046356
Maslach Burnout Inventory Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI)
MindGarden: Areas of Worklife Survey Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS)
Burnout Library Dr. Farrell’s Burnout Library
