HomePsychologyWork stress and burnout
You moved for the job. Now the job is the problem.
Burnout, a working day with no edges, and a career you moved countries for.
What we work on
- Drawing the actual edges. Not a schedule you will abandon within a week — the specific points where work leaks into everything else, and which one is realistic to close first.
- What stopping would cost. Behind most burnout there is a fear: the contract, the residency, the person you told everyone you were becoming. It gets easier to weigh once it has been said out loud.
- Reading the early signals. Sleep, appetite, irritability, the mistakes. These shift before you consciously decide you are struggling, and learning your own order of collapse buys you weeks of warning.
- Deciding rather than enduring. Sometimes the outcome is a different relationship with the job. Sometimes it is a decision about the job itself. Both are legitimate results.
Working abroad adds a layer that never shows up on a payslip
If your right to be in Spain, your income and most of your social life all run through the same job or the same institution, then a problem at work is not only a problem at work. Losing it does not mean updating a CV; it can mean leaving the country. That makes it very hard to push back on anything.
Remote work brings its own version. When your team is in another time zone, the day has no natural end and no shared coffee break, and it is easy to go a fortnight without a conversation that is not about a deliverable. People describe it as being permanently on call and permanently alone at the same time.
Burnout is not a character flaw or proof that you were not built for this. It is what happens when demand stays high and recovery keeps being postponed — and it is worked on here the same way it is worked on anywhere.
What actually changes
Not that the workload disappears. That you stop being the only variable absorbing it.
- The working day has an end you can name, and you notice within days rather than months when it stops holding.
- You can separate exhaustion from the fear of what stopping might cost, and deal with each one on its own terms.
- You can have the conversation with a manager, a supervisor or a client that you have been rehearsing for months.
- If the honest answer is that the job has to change, you arrive there as a decision you made, not as something that happened once you finally broke.
Who it is for
If you work remotely across time zones, came here for a post at the university or a company, or run your own thing from a flat in Granada, and work has quietly taken the whole week.
- Where the working day actually ends, when the office is your kitchen and half your colleagues are five hours behind.
- What you are afraid will happen if you stop: a contract, a visa, a reputation, a picture of yourself.
- What is genuine overload and what is you doing the work of three people to justify being here.
Who it is not for
It is not productivity coaching, and it is not a plan to help you tolerate more. I will not give you a number of sessions in advance, and I will not pretend that therapy repairs a job that is genuinely unsustainable.
When it makes sense to get in touch. When Sunday evening has become a physical sensation, when you cannot remember your last full day off, or when you have started making mistakes you would never normally make.
The first consultation is free.Book the free consultation →
Frequently asked questions
My visa and my right to live here depend on this job. Can therapy do anything about that?
Therapy does not change your contract. What it can do is separate what you cannot control from what you can, so you stop spending the same energy on both, and give you somewhere to think clearly about a decision that affects your whole life here and not only your career.
I work across time zones. Can we meet outside normal working hours?
There is some flexibility and it is worth asking. Tell me your hours in the first consultation and we will look honestly at whether the times that work for you and the times I can offer overlap enough to be worth starting.
Is this burnout, or am I simply not good enough at this job?
That question is itself one of the more reliable signs of burnout: the ability to judge your own work goes early. Part of the first sessions is getting an outside view of what you are actually carrying, before you draw conclusions about yourself.
Do I need a sick note or a diagnosis from a doctor first?
No. You can book directly. If it turns out that a medical assessment would help you, for time off or for your doctor, I will say so and explain how that works here.