Burnout Therapy for Women in Coquitlam & Online Across BC

Support for women who are used to being capable, productive and dependable, but no longer feel like themselves underneath it all.

You may not look burned out.

Women in early stages of burnout often look like some of the most productive on top of everything people - likely working, parenting, meeting deadlines, keeping appointments, remembering what everyone needs and doing what needs to get done atll day everyday, but finding it is taking more effort or producing less good feelings than it used to.

Maybe you are more irritable. Less patient. Easily overwhelmed by things you used to handle. You procrastinate on relatively simple tasks, then get them done under pressure. You have less capacity for people. Your brain feels slower or less reliable. You keep thinking that if you could just get caught up, get organized, have a quiet weekend or get through this particularly busy stretch, you would feel like yourself again. Except the busy stretch keeps changing, and the more you lead the way and take on the big responsibilities, the more other people look to you to take on even more, the higher the pressure feels, and the more you push yourself, maybe without even realizing it. Until, at some point, getting everything done is no longer the same thing as being okay.

At Kayda Health, we work with high-achieving women who are experiencing burnout, anxiety and overwhelm, including women with ADHD, autism or other neurodivergent traits. Women's burnout therapy is available in Coquitlam and online throughout BC.

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Does this sound familiar?

Burnout does not always look like being unable to function. For high-performing women, it can look like functioning at a level that other people still consider impressive while privately knowing that something has changed. You might notice these signs of burnout:

You can still perform when something is urgent, but getting started when it isn't feels almost impossible.
Small requests feel disproportionately irritating or overwhelming.
Your patience with your partner, children, coworkers or clients is much shorter than it used to be.
You need more recovery time after work, socializing or being around people.
You fantasize about cancelling everything so nobody needs anything from you.
You avoid emails, messages, paperwork or decisions that would normally be manageable.
Your memory and concentration feel less reliable.
You have stopped doing things you enjoy because they now feel like one more thing to fit in.
You are getting through the day and then collapsing at night - finding yourself tuning out the world through doomscolling or similar instead of engaging in activities that truly fill your cup.
You are increasingly relying on urgency, caffeine, scrolling, food, wine, shopping or other quick ways to change how you feel.
You resent responsibilities you chose and people you love, then feel guilty about resenting them.
You keep trying new systems, routines, planners or productivity strategies, but cannot seem to make yourself follow them consistently.
You feel like you should be able to handle this because you always have before.

If your main strategy has always been “try harder,” burnout can be particularly disorienting when trying harder stops working.

If You Think You're Burning Out, Start Here

You do not need to reorganize your entire life in the next two days. Instead, start by figuring out where your capacity is actually going.

1. Stop asking, “How can I fit everything in?”

Instead ask:

What currently requires more from me than I realistically have available?

Make the list concrete. Workload. Parenting. Relationship conflict. Caring for a parent. Commuting. Managing a household. Masking at work. Financial stress. A difficult boss or employee. Too many decisions. Poor sleep. A child who is struggling. Being constantly reachable. --> You cannot productivity-hack your way around an unsustainable equation.

2. Identify one thing that can become “good enough”

High performers often respond to reduced capacity by becoming more controlling about performance.

Pick one area this week (and maybe every week) where the standard can come down, such as:

Dinner can be easy.
The email can be brief.
Someone else can do it differently than you would.
The house can be messier.
You can decline the optional thing.

No one else is going to give you permission to lower the bar - you have to show up for yourself here and tell yourself it is ok, and then you need to trial lowering a standard for a good chunk of time (think of 30 days if you need a number) and notice that the world actually is ok (maybe even better) if you don't send the most perfectly crafted email and instead get to take extra time doing something you love.

3. Find the tasks that only happen because you rescue them

What would not get done if you stopped remembering, reminding, organizing, anticipating or stepping in?

Those tasks tell you something about the invisible work you may be doing. Before immediately deciding that nobody else will do it properly, ask whether it truely needs to be done by you.

--> Explore: What would happen if it didn't get done at all? What would happen if it wasn't done as well as I like to do it? Who ould learn from that? What could be the positive outcomes of that?

4. Pay attention to what restores capacity versus what only numbs depletion.

When you are depleted, watching TV, scrolling or lying on the couch may be exactly what you need. But notice what happens afterwards. Some things provide temporary escape. Other things actually make you feel more like yourself. Knowing the difference helps. Before you default to numbing out, do something that truly, maybe gently, fills your cup - even for 5 minutes.

5. Don't wait until you are unable to function to get help.

High-performing people can compensate for a long time. The goal is not to prove that things are bad enough to justify support. The better question is:

Is the way I am living and functioning right now sustainable?

If the answer is no, that is useful information.

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Want something practical to start with?

We’ve put together a short list of books we often recommend to women navigating burnout, stress, relationships, over-responsibility and the pressure to keep functioning at a high level. Click here to get it.

Why High-Achieving Women Burn Out

Being capable can protect you from consequences for a remarkably long time. It does not necessarily protect you from burnout. In fact, some of the qualities that contribute to achievement can become part of the problem when demands exceed capacity:

being dependable
having high standards
noticing what needs to be done
anticipating problems
feeling responsible for other people's experiences
pushing through discomfort
being good in a crisis
finding ways to compensate when something is difficult
being reluctant to disappoint people
believing you should be able to figure things out yourself

These are not inherently unhealthy traits. The problem occurs when your life increasingly depends on using them all the time. Many women are also managing several demanding roles simultaneously: professional, parent, partner, caregiver, household manager, friend, daughter, volunteer, organizer. There may be no single dramatic problem. There may simply be too many things requiring executive, emotional and practical capacity at the same time.

“But Other People Have More on Their Plate Than I Do.”

We hear versions of this frequently. You may have a supportive partner. A good career. Healthy children. Financial stability. Flexibility. Help. You may know women dealing with objectively harder circumstances. And you may therefore conclude that you have no reasonable explanation for feeling this depleted.

What matters is the relationship between the demands being placed on you, the resources and capacity available to meet them, and how long that imbalance has been going on. Sometimes therapy involves changing the demands. Sometimes it involves changing deeply ingrained expectations about what you are supposed to be able to manage. Often it involves both.

Burnout, Neurodivergence & Perimenopause in Women

Women often arrive at burnout after functioning at a very high level across several parts of life at once. Work may be demanding. Parenting may be demanding. Relationships, caregiving, household management and the less visible work of remembering, planning, anticipating and coordinating all require capacity too. And women still tend to take on more of that unpaid and organizational work than men in comparable family roles (see https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221108/dq221108b-eng.htm).

For some women, ADHD, autism or other neurodivergent traits add another layer. You may be managing difficulties with attention, task initiation, transitions, sensory overload, emotional regulation or executive functioning while also meeting very high expectations at work and at home. Many women become exceptionally good at compensating, often through perfectionism, urgency, anxiety, structure, over-preparation or simply working harder. Those strategies can work remarkably well. They can also be exhuasting and dismissive of what you actually need if you think about sustainability.

Then there is perimenopause. Perimenopause does not create neurodivergence, and neurodivergent women do not only burn out during perimenopause. But hormonal changes can affect sleep, concentration, memory, emotional regulation and executive functioning. For a woman who is already operating close to her available capacity, that additional change can make previously effective coping strategies much less reliable.

So the picture may be:

A demanding life + High expectations = A lot of responsibility.

Plus, for some women:

+ ADHD (or another neurodivergent profile that requires additional effort to manage)

+ Perimenopause (changing sleep, cognition, mood or stress tolerance at the same time)

This can help explain why a woman who has been highly capable for decades suddenly finds herself thinking:

“Why is everything so much harder than it used to be?”

The answer is not necessarily that you have become less capable. The longevity or intensity of demands may have taken a toll over time. Your available capacity may have changed due to many different factrs. The strategies you used to compensate may now cost more than they once did or no longer be as effective. Or several of these things may be happening together. Therapy can help figure out which parts of the equation are actually contributing to your burnout and what can realistically change.

When Anxiety and Burnout Feed Each Other

Sometimes anxiety is what keeps a burned-out person functioning. You worry about missing something, so you check repeatedly. You are afraid of disappointing someone, so you say yes. You do not trust yourself to remember, so you keep everything in your head or keep lists so long you have no way to know what's on the list anymore. You feel behind, so you work later. You worry that slowing down will make everything fall apart, so you keep going.

For a while, anxiety can produce energy and urgency.

Eventually, living in that state becomes exhausting.

Therapy can help separate what genuinely requires your attention from the internal alarm system telling you everything does.

What Burnout Therapy Can Actually Help With

Therapy should be more useful than simply giving you another place to talk about how busy you are. Depending on what is contributing to your burnout, we may work on:

Understanding your burnout pattern

What changed? Where does your energy go? What are the biggest sources of cognitive, emotional and practical demand? What keeps getting added without anything being removed?

Reducing overwhelm

When everything feels important, deciding what to do first becomes harder. We can help you develop realistic ways of prioritizing, externalizing information and making decisions when your executive capacity is reduced.

Perfectionism and impossible standards

Not by asking you to stop caring about doing things well.

Instead, we look at where excellence matters, where perfection is costing you unnecessarily, and why lowering a standard can feel surprisingly threatening.

Boundaries without becoming someone you are not

Boundaries do not need to mean becoming rigid, selfish or unavailable.

Often the work is learning to recognize a limit earlier, communicate it clearly and tolerate the discomfort of someone else not necessarily liking it.

Over-responsibility

If your brain automatically notices what everyone needs, what might go wrong and what you could do to prevent it, simply telling yourself to “let go” probably will not work. We can examine where that responsibility came from and decide more deliberately what actually belongs to you.

Anxiety and nervous-system activation

If your body and brain rarely receive a convincing signal that the demand is over, downtime may not actually feel restorative. Therapy can help address chronic anxiety, hypervigilance and stress responses rather than simply adding relaxation exercises to an already full schedule.

ADHD, Neurodivergent profile and executive functioning

If ADHD or executive-function challenges are part of the picture, we focus on strategies that work with the brain you actually have, including realistic external supports, environmental changes and different ways of approaching motivation and task initiation.

Trauma and earlier experiences

Sometimes current over-functioning is connected to older beliefs such as:

I have to get it right.

I can't let people down.

If I don't take care of it, nobody will.

I should not need help.

My value comes from what I accomplish.

When appropriate, therapies such as EMDR and Lifespan Integration can help address the experiences and beliefs that continue to drive these patterns.

Burnout Is Not Always Just Burnout

Exhaustion, changes in concentration, sleep disturbance, low motivation and reduced functioning can have many causes. Burnout can overlap with anxiety, depression, ADHD, trauma, sleep problems, hormonal changes and physical health conditions. If your energy, cognition, mood or physical functioning has changed significantly, particularly without an obvious explanation, we may encourage you to speak with your physician as well. Therapy does not require us to assume every difficulty is mentally/ emotionaly based.

What If I Can't Reduce My Workload Right Now?

That is real. Sometimes you cannot quit the job, reduce your hours, hire help, change your child's needs or make a major life change. Therapy can still be useful. We can look for leverage points:

What can stop?
What can wait?
What can be delegated?
What standard can change?
Where are you spending energy because of anxiety rather than necessity?
Which conflicts or decisions are consuming disproportionate capacity?
What support is missing?
What are you doing manually that needs a system?
Where are you masking or compensating?
What are you saying yes to because saying no feels worse?

A 10% reduction in unnecessary demand is still meaningful. You do not need to redesign your whole life before therapy can help.

You Don't Have to Become Less Ambitious

The goal of burnout therapy is not to convince capable women to care less, accomplish less or lower every expectation they have for themselves. You may genuinely like your career. You may enjoy responsibility and achievement. You may have big goals. The question is whether the way you are currently pursuing those things is working for you. We want to help you keep what is meaningful about your drive, competence and ambition while changing the patterns that make maintaining them unnecessarily costly.

Burnout Therapy at Kayda Health

Burnout can look very different from one woman to the next. Our therapists each bring a slightly different focus to the patterns, pressures and life circumstances that can contribute to burnout in women.

Kyle Pelletier, RCC works with women experiencing burnout alongside perfectionism, people pleasing, anxiety, self-doubt and the pressure to keep everything together, with a particular interest in supporting both working and stay-at-home mothers.
Vanessa Thomson, RCC works with women whose burnout is connected to achievement, career pressure, performance, high expectations and changes in identity or sense of self.
Krupa Samji, RCC works with women navigating burnout during major life transitions, including immigration, career change, shifting family roles and the challenge of balancing competing responsibilities.
Ashley Gossen, RCC works with women experiencing burnout, anxiety and overwhelm related to relationships, parenting, family demands and the strain of trying to meet everyone’s needs.
Thea Megas, RCC-ACS works with women experiencing workplace burnout, chronic stress and overwhelm, particularly where high responsibility, anxiety, neurodivergence or changing capacity are making it harder to keep functioning in the same way.

Not sure who would be the best fit?

Complete our Therapist Matching Form and tell us a little about what is happening. We can help you identify a clinician whose experience and approach fit what you are looking for. In-person burnout counselling is available in Coquitlam, BC, and online therapy is available throughout British Columbia.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if I'm burned out or just stressed?

Stress often feels like there is too much happening. Burnout more often includes a sense that your usual ways of coping are no longer restoring your capacity. You may notice exhaustion, cynicism or detachment, irritability, reduced motivation, difficulty concentrating or feeling increasingly ineffective despite continuing to work hard. There is not a single test that can determine why you feel this way, and similar symptoms can occur with anxiety, depression, ADHD, sleep problems and medical conditions. Therapy can help you understand the pattern and determine what kind of support makes sense.

Can I be burned out if I'm still functioning well?

Yes. Your external performance does not tell us how much effort it is requiring. Many high-performing women seek therapy before work or family responsibilities have fallen apart because they recognize that maintaining their current level of functioning is becoming increasingly difficult. You do not have to wait for a crisis.

Is burnout more common in women with ADHD?

ADHD can create additional demands around executive functioning, attention, emotional regulation and maintaining systems. Many women also compensate for ADHD through urgency, perfectionism, anxiety or significant effort. When overall demands increase or available capacity decreases, strategies that worked previously may stop being enough. Therapy can help distinguish between burnout, ADHD-related challenges, anxiety and the interaction between them.

Do I need to take time off work?

Not necessarily. For some people, time away from work is appropriate. For others, changes in workload, expectations, boundaries, supports or patterns outside of work may be more relevant. If burnout is significantly affecting your ability to work, your therapist can help you think through your options. Decisions regarding medical leave should also involve the appropriate medical professionals.

How long does burnout therapy take?

There is no standard timeline because burnout is not caused by the same thing for everyone. Some clients need focused support around a current period of overload. Others discover longer-standing patterns involving anxiety, perfectionism, trauma, ADHD, relationships or over-responsibility that they want to address more deeply. We will work with you to identify what you actually want to change rather than assuming therapy needs to continue indefinitely.

You Can Be Doing Well and Still Want Things to Be Better

You do not have to prove that your life is unmanageable. You do not have to wait until you cannot work. And you do not have to give up the parts of yourself that are ambitious, capable or driven. If the way you are functioning no longer feels sustainable, we can help you understand why and figure out what needs to change. Burnout therapy for women is available in Coquitlam and online across BC.

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