When that work stress isn’t about workload...

Evelyn [the following synthetic persona, illustrating a common pattern of real client issues, was generated by this AI] said to me “I don’t understand. I’ve worked so much harder than this before now, but my current role is killing me.”

Here's her story...

Evelyn is 38 and lives in a bustling suburb outside of a major city. She's a highly capable, driven professional who built her career on a bedrock of shared purpose and mutual respect. For years, she thrived in a collaborative, in-office environment where her contributions were not just noted, but actively celebrated. She wasn't just doing a job; she was part of a team effort, and that feeling fuelled her.

Six months ago, she accepted a significant promotion to a Senior Project Strategist role at a global tech firm. The move promised a higher salary and greater strategic input—an outward sign of her professional ascent. Critically, the role is largely remote, a change she viewed as a modern convenience, not a fundamental shift in her work identity.

The promotion has ironically become the source of a deep, unsettling emotional crisis. Evelyn isn't struggling with the workload; she's struggling with the disconnection and the dynamic shift in power and recognition:

The Recognition Void: Her new line manager, Mark, operates from a "no news is good news" philosophy. Evelyn's successful completion of major milestones—which previously earned an enthusiastic email or a public shout-out—now receives a terse, one-line acknowledgment or, often, silence. This lack of visible recognition has slowly eroded her sense of personal achievement.

The Loss of Control: Where she was once trusted to own her projects end-to-end, Mark now insists on constant, detailed updates and approval for minor decisions. This feeling of being constantly monitored rather than trusted has led to a real loss of autonomy and a feeling of being micromanaged, despite her senior title.

The Social Bypass: Her new colleagues, whom she only interacts with via video call, maintain a professional distance. She often feels like she's a step behind, missing informal conversations or critical context. She’s noticed teams making decisions that impact her projects without including her in the initial discussion. This lack of organic social support and the sense of being bypassed by the network she can't physically inhabit has made her feel like an outsider looking in.

The Injustice & Purpose Drift: The culmination of these factors has triggered a profound feeling of unfairness. She's doing excellent work, yet she feels less valued, less connected, and less free than she did in a junior role. Her core work value of shared purpose—that feeling of everyone pulling together toward a visible, common goal—has utterly evaporated. The job now feels solitary, transactional, and, worst of all, meaningless in a way it never did before.

Evelyn is now experiencing high anxiety before team meetings, feeling she has to constantly prove her value in a way she never did before. Her professional success has delivered personal isolation and a painful disconnection from the values that once made her career fulfilling.

And here's how I helped her....

We were able to make sense of these experiences by exploring Maslach and Leiter’s six Organisational Burnout Factors. While the first and most obvious factor, Workload, might be sitting out this particular dance, she was surprised by how strongly she recognised the other five - Autonomy, Recognition, Social Support, Fairness, and Alignment of Values - by their unwelcome absence from her new boss’s micro-management and her new work environment’s social vacuum.

The big three tasks when encountering burnout are recognition, recovery and regrowth. Recognition brings normalisation, the realisation that experiencing the challenges of chronic stress and burnout is perfectly normal for people in these circumstances, the gradual understanding that this experience does not in any way mean that you are broken or in any way inadequate.

Given this change in the balance of positive and negative inputs in her life, she could also see how this had reduced her capacity to cope with what she would otherwise consider an unremarkable workload. We also explored the impact of her earlier move to London and the way her personal and family relationships were now longer-distance and less readily available to fill her support gaps. And going deeper, we looked at her need for external validation, and how this could prove both helpful or unhelpful in her pursuit of happiness.

It was clear that being able to explore and articulate her situation and receive conceptual as well as emotional support was bringing a sense of relief, of coming unstuck, and this in turn released her purpose and energy. She decided to take action. A long-delayed holiday was booked, with an intentional balance of rest and play. She started to look after her positive inputs, rescheduling time in her week for the friendships which stress and exhaustion had previously squeezed out. She also started to reduce the negative inputs, booking in a meeting with her manager where she asked him for clear criteria and greater autonomy on her next project. He indicated that he too had feeling overwhelmed, and was surprisingly cooperative.

With recovery in hand, she started planning her next role - one that would deliver satisfying challenges, but where she could reasonably hope for the autonomy, recognition, social support, fairness, and alignment of values that she now understood would fuel her drive, belonging and wellbeing.

Negative feelings get a bad rap. Evelyn’s feelings of stress and overwhelm allowed her to understand what was wrong with her new “dream role”

If you’re feeling stressed, even if you can’t see why, try talking to someone to feel your way into the issue so you can own it and resolve it. And if you need a professional for that exploration, I’m here.