Brooklyn and NYC · in person and online
Therapy for Burnout and Career Anxiety
Therapy for burnout in Brooklyn and NYC, for high-achieving professionals in tech, finance, law, medicine and the arts. I work psychodynamically and relationally, which means we treat the exhaustion you are feeling now and the older lessons underneath it. Two Brooklyn offices, plus online sessions across New York State. Free 15-minute consultation.
Most people who come to me for therapy for burnout are not looking for permission to quit. They are looking for a place to think clearly about a life they built on purpose and no longer recognize from the inside.
Anxiety, doubts, and fears about your career rarely begin and end with the job. When you have worked hard to build a career and life you are proud of, feeling dissatisfied with it or excessively anxious can be particularly destabilizing. Those who have spent their lives in high-stress, high-performing environments, in particular, may feel lost about how to pull back and reflect, let alone figure out what they want or how to feel better.
You may not want to slow down, but something has to change.
What burnout looks like
Signs You May Need Therapy for Burnout
Burnout is rarely a single dramatic moment. It usually arrives as a slow narrowing, where the things that used to restore you stop working and the workday takes up more and more of the room. You may recognize some of these:
- Sunday evenings carry a dread that is out of proportion to Monday
- You are still performing well, and privately running on fumes to do it
- Rest does not restore you - a weekend, or even a holiday, buys very little
- You feel detached or cynical about work you genuinely used to care about
- Small requests provoke a disproportionate irritation or shutdown
- Sleep, appetite, concentration or libido have quietly shifted
- You cannot answer the question "if you could do anything else, what would it be?"
If several of these are familiar, that is worth taking seriously rather than managing harder. Working with a therapist for burnout gives you somewhere to put it down long enough to look at it.
Who this is for
Burnout Therapy for High-Achieving Professionals
I work with a lot of people who are, by every external measure, doing extremely well. Consultants, engineers, lawyers, founders, physicians, performers. Many arrived at therapy having spent their lives making the "right" decisions, and finding themselves - after all that - feeling scared at work, burnt out, or directionless.
The options that seem on the table often feel even less palatable. Who am I if I am not striving for the next best thing? Will people still value me if I no longer fit into a specific mould? Will I? How do I even define what "value" means to me now?
Career anxiety is often so intense because it can reveal more foundational lessons we internalized to adapt and survive when we were younger. That love and affection from others were contingent on you being excellent or achieving things, for instance, or that it was your responsibility to over-perform to keep those around you secure and stable.
I came to this work from a career in consulting and tech, which tends to matter to the people I see. You will not have to explain what a performance cycle is, or justify why the job feels bigger than a job.
Areas of focus
Common Career Anxiety and Work Stress Themes in Therapy
As we begin to explore the specific events or dynamics inducing career-related anxiety in the present, we will begin to make connections about why these anxieties run so deep. In my work with professionals in tech, finance, law, and the arts, common themes that emerge are:
Perfectionism and the Fear of Slowing Down
For many people, the standard is not "good" but "beyond reproach", and the cost of maintaining it is invisible until it is not. Therapy for perfectionism tends to be less about lowering standards than about understanding what the standard is protecting you from, and what becomes possible when it is not running the whole system. This often shows up as overfunctioning at work long before it shows up as exhaustion.
Imposter Syndrome and Self-Worth Tied to Achievement
When worth has been earned by output for long enough, the arithmetic becomes automatic: I am valuable while I am producing. That is a workable arrangement until the producing stops, or stops being enough, and then it is not workable at all. We look at where that equation came from and what else could hold your sense of yourself.
Executive Burnout and Leadership Pressure
Executive burnout has a particular loneliness to it. The more senior you are, the fewer people you can say the true thing to, and the more your own strain reads to others as a problem they have to manage. Therapy becomes one of the few rooms where you are not responsible for anyone else's steadiness.
Your therapist
Frances Jin is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) with an MSEd from Hunter College, practicing in Downtown Brooklyn and Greenpoint. About Frances.
The approach
How Burnout Therapy Works
I practice psychodynamic and relational therapy. In plain terms: we work on two levels at once.
This is longer-term work built on trust rather than a protocol, and it is a genuinely different thing from short-course skills training. If you want the distinction laid out properly, I have written about psychodynamic therapy and CBT. Sessions are 45 minutes, typically weekly.
We will look at what is actually happening in your week, where the pressure is landing in your body and your sleep, and what could change now. Some of this is practical - boundaries, recovery, job anxiety as it shows up in specific meetings and specific people.
The second is slower and is where the durable change happens. Together, with compassion and deep understanding, we will work to alleviate some of your immediate symptoms of anxiety, and explore some of the questions and early lessons you learned, to understand how much of that you want to hold onto and what you are ready to let go of.
Where we meet
Burnout Therapy in Brooklyn and NYC
I see clients in person at two Brooklyn offices and online across New York State.
Downtown Brooklyn
Mondays and Tuesdays
26 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11242. Close to Borough Hall, Brooklyn Heights, and many neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan via the 2/3/4/5, A, C, R, F, and G lines.
Greenpoint
Wednesdays
861 Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222. Convenient for Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Queens via the G and L lines, and through Court Square.
Online
All Weekdays
Anywhere in New York State.
I am licensed in New York only, and I am out of network, providing superbills for reimbursement. If burnout sits alongside questions of family expectation and identity, you may also want to read about therapy for Asian Americans.
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions About Therapy for Burnout
How do I know if I need therapy for burnout?
A useful test is whether rest still works. Ordinary tiredness responds to a weekend; burnout does not. If you are recovering more slowly than you are depleting, and that has been true for months rather than weeks, therapy is a reasonable next step rather than an overreaction.
What is the difference between burnout and depression?
Burnout is context-bound and tends to lift when the context genuinely changes; depression travels with you and flattens things that have nothing to do with work. They also overlap often, and burnout that goes unaddressed for long enough can tip into depression. Part of early sessions is working out which you are dealing with, because the response differs.
Can I recover from burnout without leaving my job?
Frequently, yes. Most of my clients do not leave. What usually changes first is the relationship to the work - what you are carrying that is not yours, what you are protecting by over-functioning - and that often changes the job enough without changing the employer.
How long does burnout therapy take?
Symptom relief often arrives within the first couple of months. The deeper work - the part that stops the pattern re-forming at the next job - is longer-term, and I am transparent about that. I work psychodynamically, which means depth over speed, and I would rather say so up front than promise a timeline I do not believe.
Do you work with professionals in finance, law, and tech?
Yes, and it is the bulk of my practice. My own background is in consulting and tech, so the environment is familiar without needing translation.
Do you offer online therapy for burnout in New York?
Yes, for anyone located in New York State. Online sessions are available on all weekdays; Thursdays and Fridays are online only. I am licensed in New York only.
Where are your offices located?
26 Court Street in Downtown Brooklyn (Mondays and Tuesdays) and 861 Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint (Wednesdays). Greenpoint currently has limited availability.
What happens in a free 15-minute consultation?
It is a short call to hear what is bringing you here and for you to get a sense of how I work. No preparation needed, and no obligation. If I am not the right fit, I will say so and point you somewhere better.
Next step
Ready to Get Started?
Schedule a free, 15-minute consultation to see what it would be like to work together.
Book a consultation