Therapy for Executive Burnout: Managing Expectations at Work and at Home

Why Executive Burnout Feels Different

If you lead teams, carry profit-and-loss responsibility, or shoulder the “mental load” at home, you’re used to performing under pressure. Burnout for high-achieving professionals rarely looks like collapse; it looks like quiet depletion: you keep executing, but motivation, empathy, and creativity shrink. For many high-performing professionals, burnout doesn’t show up as a dramatic crash. Instead, it sneaks in. You’re still working hard, showing up for your family, and meeting deadlines—but inside, you feel drained, less patient, and less inspired.

Researchers have long described burnout with three main signs: emotional exhaustion, feeling detached or cynical, and a sense that you’re not as effective as you used to be. For executives, business owners, and household leaders, this often looks like:

• Running on autopilot at work.

• Snapping at loved ones when you get home.

• Losing motivation for things that once mattered deeply.

In industrial-organizational psychology, models like Job Demands-Resources (JD-R), Demand-Control-Support, and Effort-Reward Imbalance explain why even exceptionally capable leaders hit a wall: chronic high demands paired with low recovery, low control, or low perceived reward eventually outpace your internal resources. At home, similar dynamics apply. You might be the default parent, logistics coordinator, or emotional anchor. When work and home compete for the same limited resources—time, attention, energy—the result is role strain: too many “priority ones,” and no buffer for recovery.

It’s not just about your job; it’s about living in a system where everyone needs something from you and there’s no pause button.

The Hidden Weight of Expectations

Executives and high achievers often hold themselves to impossible standards. These expectations can come from:

• Work culture: The idea that being available 24/7 proves dedication.

• Family responsibilities: Taking on the invisible labor—remembering schedules, handling logistics, managing emotions.

• Internal “rules”: Beliefs like “I can’t drop any balls” or “If I don’t fix it, everything will fall apart.”

Over time, these expectations create chronic stress that no human can sustain. And yet, many professionals try to push through—until their bodies, their relationships, or their careers start showing cracks.

Signs You’re Managing Expectations That No Human Can Meet

• You’re never “off.” Vacation is just remote work with nicer scenery.

• You keep raising the bar (for yourself and everyone else) to prevent mistakes or reputational risk.

• Delegation feels slower than doing it yourself, so you don’t.

• Feedback or minor friction triggers outsized stress reactions.

• At home, you carry the invisible labor: remembering everything, smoothing everyone’s path, absorbing everyone’s emotions.

• Sleep, movement, and meaningful connection have become optional—or transactional.

If this resonates, burnout therapy can help you recalibrate expectations (your own and others’) while protecting the career and relationships you value.

What Burnout Therapy Can Offer

Therapy provides a space to reset expectations—both your own and those placed on you—without sacrificing the things that matter most. I draw from three areas of research and practice:

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): A therapy approach that helps you step back from unhelpful thoughts and reconnect with your values, so your actions line up with what matters most.

• Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Tools for identifying and challenging the perfectionistic or catastrophic thinking patterns that fuel burnout.

• Career Counseling and Organizational Psychology: Research on how to create healthier work systems, negotiate boundaries, and make changes in the way roles are structured.

Together, these methods help you manage burnout not just by “coping better,” but by creating more realistic, sustainable expectations at work and at home.

Practical Steps We Explore in Therapy

1. Clarifying What Really Matters, Then Right-Size Commitments

Instead of trying to excel at everything, we identify your top values—at work (impact, leadership, creativity) and at home (connection, presence, health). We then translate those into concrete, doable behaviors.

• What we do: Identify your top work and home values (e.g., impact, integrity, mentorship, presence, health). Translate each into 1–2 observable, doable behaviors each week.

• Why it works: Values act like a compass when you can’t satisfy every demand. They help you choose trade-offs consciously rather than reactively.

• Example: If “strategic impact” and “family presence” are top values, we might create two weekly “non-negotiables”: a 90-minute deep-work block for strategy and a tech-free dinner twice a week. Everything else becomes flexible.

2. Loosening the Grip of Perfectionism & Catastrophic “Mind Rules”

High achievers often run on rigid “rules” like “If I’m not in every meeting, I’ll miss something critical.” In burnout therapy, you learn to notice these thoughts without letting them dictate your choices. You also test them out—asking, What happens if I let this email wait until tomorrow? Over time, you see that “good enough” often works just as well as “perfect.”

• What we do: Notice thoughts like “If I don’t respond in 10 minutes, I’m behind,” or “A good leader absorbs stress, so others don’t have to.” Using cognitive defusion, you practice labeling thoughts (“I’m having the thought that…”) and let them be background noise, not commands.

• CBT add-on: We test the thought as a hypothesis (What evidence supports/contradicts it? What’s a workable alternative?) and replace all-or-nothing rules with good-enough standards.

• Outcome: More room to delegate, say no, and tolerate “unfinished” without losing effectiveness.

3. Building in Recovery—Not as a Reward, but as a Necessity

Research shows that time for recovery is essential for performance. What we do:

• Micro-breaks: 60-second resets before switching tasks.

• Macro-breaks: Protected time for sleep, exercise, and connection.

• Better performance occurs when resources (recovery, autonomy, feedback, support) rise. We’ll renegotiate meetings, tighten agendas, and reduce “context switching” to rebuild resources during the workday.

Instead of treating rest as something you earn at the end of a marathon week, you learn to see it as fuel for showing up well.

4. Setting Boundaries That Actually Hold

Many leaders worry that boundaries will make them look less committed. But the truth is: clear boundaries make you more reliable, not less. We practice simple scripts like:

• “I can attend for the first 20 minutes, then I’ll need to step out.”

• “Given Q4 priorities, I’ll sign off on the deck but won’t lead the rewrite. Please route revisions through X.”

• “I’ll take this on, but that means another task needs to shift—what should we prioritize?”

These small shifts help prevent scope creep and signal that your time has value. It also helps you convey clearer expectations that you are “precisely reliable,” and not simply “always available.”

5. Sharing the Mental Expectations with Reality and Equity

Burnout isn’t just about the office. At home, therapy can help you and your family make invisible tasks visible. Instead of one person carrying it all, responsibilities get divided more fairly, with clear ownership. This doesn’t just ease stress—it creates healthier dynamics for everyone.

• What we do: Externalize the mental load: list invisible tasks (planning, anticipating, remembering, emotional caretaking). Assign each task an owner (not a helper), a cadence, and a definition of done.

• ACT lens: Accept that discomfort (guilt, fear of disappointing) will show up as you change patterns; move with your values anyway.

• Example: A weekly 20-minute “household stand-up” aligns the calendar, childcare, meals, and big rocks. Everyone chooses one overflow task to drop—or outsource.

6. Learning to Be Present on Demand

Burnout makes you feel pulled in a hundred directions at once. Therapy offers quick practices to bring you back into the moment:

• A 90-second grounding exercise before walking into a meeting.

  • Feet on the floor.

  • Three slow exhales longer than inhales.

  • Name 3 values you want to embody (clear, kind, firm).

  • Choose one sentence that signals that stance (e.g., “Here’s my POV and the trade-offs.”)

• A 10-minute evening “buffer ritual” to help you shift from work mode into family mode.

  • Close loops: jot tomorrow’s “Big 3.”

  • Gentle body downshift: 3 stretches, dim lights.

  • Transition phrase with family: “Work is closed; I’m here now.”

  • These short practices widen your “choice gap” and reduce carryover stress.

These small practices help you show up as the leader, partner, or parent you want to be, not just the one running on fumes.

Real-World Examples- A Tale of Two Leaders

Avery, 42, VP of Operations, parent of two middle school students

Avery came into therapy exhausted and guilty—convinced she was letting down both her team at work and her family at home. She was attending back-to-back meetings, checking email late at night, and then rushing through dinner with her kids while mentally still at the office. She wanted to be a strong leader and a present parent, but her energy was stretched too thin to feel effective in either role.

In therapy, we started with values clarification. Avery identified mentorship and strategic impact as her top work values, and family presence as her core home value. She experimented with two non-negotiables each week: one 90-minute deep-focus block for strategic projects, and two tech-free family dinners. To honor her value of mentorship, she shifted time away from routine meetings and instead scheduled short one-on-one check-ins with her direct reports—something that gave her energy instead of draining it.

We also practiced boundary-setting, using scripts to push back on tasks that didn’t align with her role: “Given my focus on Q4 priorities, I’ll review the deck but won’t lead the rewrite—please route revisions through [colleague].” These small, clear statements helped her protect her limited energy without damaging her credibility.

At home, Avery used a weekly “household stand-up” with her partner and kids to divide responsibilities more equitably. By sharing the invisible tasks (meal planning, school communication, scheduling appointments), she lightened her mental load and reduced the constant sense of being “on call” at home.

The results were tangible: within two months, Avery was less reactive, her kids noticed she was “more fun at dinner,” and her boss complimented her sharper strategic contributions. By aligning her choices with her values at both work and home, Avery began to feel like the leader and parent she wanted to be—not the burned-out version she feared she had become.

Marcus, 39, Founder, Aging Parent Care

Marcus carried heavy responsibility—both for his growing company and for the care of his aging parent. He often felt torn between these two worlds and guilty whenever he stepped away from either.

In therapy, we began by clarifying his values. He identified family loyalty and leadership integrity as his guiding principles. That helped us create a framework: caring for his parent wasn’t a distraction from his professional life, but an expression of his deepest values.

We then worked on loosening the grip of the belief, “I’m indispensable.” Together, we practiced ways of stepping back from this thought so he could see it as just a story his mind told him, not an absolute truth. This gave him the psychological flexibility to restructure both work and caregiving.

He delegated lower-level business issues to trusted staff, set clear thresholds for when he truly needed to step in, and blocked off caregiving time on his calendar with the same importance as investor meetings. At home, he scheduled a weekly check-in with his parent’s medical team so that care felt proactive instead of reactive. He also built two non-negotiable recovery anchors into his week: strength training and lunch with a close friend. The result? His guilt eased because his caregiving was rooted in values rather than pressure, and his work performance improved because he was no longer reacting to every demand.

What “Managing Expectations” Really Means

Managing expectations isn’t about lowering standards or doing less. It’s about:

• Focusing on what matters most.

• Letting go of impossible “shoulds.”

• Creating systems that support you rather than drain you.

This is how high achievers avoid burning out and instead build sustainable success—at work and at home.

How to Get Started

During your first few sessions through my virtual Denver therapy practice, we’ll:

1. Map out your burnout symptoms and stressors.

2. Identify your core values.

3. Create 1–2 practical changes at work and at home.

4. Practice tools for managing perfectionism, setting boundaries, and protecting recovery.

You’ll leave with strategies you can start applying right away—no jargon required.

Is It Time to Reach Out?

You may benefit from therapy for burnout if:

• You feel irritable or checked out most nights.

• You’re relying more on caffeine, alcohol, or late-night work to get through.

• Loved ones say you’re “not really here,” even when you’re present.

• You can’t remember the last time you felt both proud and rested.

• Small setbacks feel catastrophic.

If that sounds familiar, you don’t have to keep pushing through alone. With the right framework and support, you can lead with clarity at work and be truly present at home.

Denver, CO & Telehealth: Let’s Recalibrate

As a licensed burnout therapist in Denver, I help executives, business owners, and high-achieving parents recover from burnout and create healthier, more balanced lives. My approach blends science, strategy, and compassion—so you can feel both effective and present.

Schedule a free 15-minute consultation to start reclaiming your time, your energy, and your peace of mind. Here are a few ways to get in touch:

💻Email jennifer@drolsonmadden.com

📱Call or text 720-588-3823

📝Fill out the contact form

Regain Control and Balance Through Therapy for Executive Burnout in Denver, CO

When your career success starts coming at the expense of your well-being, it’s a sign that something needs to shift. Executive burnout therapy helps high-achieving professionals manage constant pressure, set healthy boundaries, and find fulfillment both at work and at home—without sacrificing drive or purpose.

Through my Colorado-based online therapy practice, I work with executives and professionals who feel overextended, exhausted, or disconnected from what once motivated them. Together, we’ll uncover the patterns that lead to burnout, explore practical ways to restore balance, and build resilience that lasts. You’ll learn to handle expectations with clarity and calm while creating space for rest, relationships, and personal growth. If you’re ready to begin, here’s how we can get started:

1️⃣ Discuss what you’re experiencing and determine if therapy for executive burnout is right for you during your free 15-minute consultation.

2️⃣ Partner with a licensed online psychologist in Denver, CO who understands the unique challenges of leadership stress, work-life imbalance, and performance fatigue.

3️⃣ Learn research-backed strategies to manage high expectations, reduce overwhelm, and sustain your success without burning out.

Online Therapy in Colorado: Other Services I Provide

Burnout therapy for executives is designed to help high-achieving professionals find relief from constant pressure while rediscovering purpose, balance, and fulfillment. Through evidence-based techniques and compassionate support, I help clients quiet the mental noise of overcommitment and learn how to succeed without sacrificing their well-being.

While executive burnout therapy is a key focus of my work, my Denver-based telehealth practice offers a wide range of additional mental health services. I provide therapy for anxiety disorders, trauma recovery, and support for clients navigating major life transitions like career changes or leadership challenges. Many professionals also seek my help with relationship concerns—both personal and professional—where we work to strengthen communication, reduce conflict, and foster more authentic connections.

Alongside individual psychotherapy sessions, I offer screening and assessments that reflect your individual goals and responsibilities. To learn more, I invite you to explore my website, read practical insights on my mental health blog, and get in touch when you’re ready to take the next step toward resilience and sustainable success. You can also download my free e-book and follow me on X, Instagram, and LinkedIn for regular tips and resources on managing stress and burnout.

About the Author

Dr. Jennifer Olson-Madden is a licensed psychologist in Denver, CO, specializing in executive burnout, chronic stress, and high-performance psychology. With over 20 years of clinical experience, she helps leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals balance ambition with emotional health. Using a combination of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and mindfulness-based techniques, Dr. Olson-Madden empowers clients to set boundaries, manage expectations, and cultivate sustainable success at work and home. As a trusted burnout therapist in Denver, she integrates the same evidence-based principles she teaches into her own life, modeling what it means to thrive with balance, clarity, and purpose.