Therapy for Career Burnout and the Sunday-Night Scaries

The Sunday-night tightness is useful information. It is also not the whole story.

What usually sits underneath is a bind. Leave, and you risk money, health insurance, status, and the story you have told about being the responsible one. Stay, and you spend another year in a room that drains you—difficult people, a promotion that will never come, work you can do in your sleep and no longer respect. Add the question of school or a new field and the bind gets sharper: you can see the door, and you can also see your age standing next to it.

We spend less time on motivational speeches and more time on the actual conditions. What is the job costing your sleep, your marriage, your patience with your children. What would you do if fear were not running the meeting. What is realistic in this market, in this body, with these bills. Some women decide to stay and change how they carry the role. Some decide the cost is already too high. Both are adult decisions. Neither requires you to perform passion you do not feel.

If work has been living in your nervous system all weekend, that is enough reason to begin.