Therapy for Work Stress in Edinburgh

When work stress stops being ordinary

Work stress is easy to dismiss — by others, and by yourself. You might tell yourself that work is supposed to be hard, that you are supposed to cope. This is the same voice that keeps you at your desk past the point where something should have changed, because the alternative feels like failure. And for a while it works: a degree of stress can be what gets the work done, and most people move in and out of high-pressure periods without harm.

Work stress turns into something else when it stops being periodic: when rest no longer restores you, when the weekend leaves you as depleted as the week, when the dread arrives on Sunday and simply stays. Chronic stress erodes your sleep, shortens your patience, and drains the energy you need for everything else. It can turn a capable person into someone who doubts they are capable at all. Left long enough it can tip into burnout, which is harder to come back from than the stress that produced it.

Work stress is rarely only about work. Underneath it are older questions: what you owe other people, who you are, and how much of your worth has come to rest on the job. A better calendar will not change this. Facing the underlying issues can. And only by facing them can you make a decision about your work that holds the rest of your life in view.

How it shows up

Often the body knows first. You wake at five with the project already running, or you reach for your phone before you get out of bed. There is a feeling of nausea on Sunday evening, and leading up to the Monday check-in. Breakfast feels impossible; you make up for it late at night, often after a drink, because the evening is the only part of the day that belongs to you.

The holiday is supposed to put this right, and sometimes it makes things worse. Away from your desk you are no longer in control of the work your life now revolves around. So you check in with its progress, and fail at the job of being on holiday. Or you don’t, and your mind fills with worst-case scenarios. Beneath all of this sits a feeling of guilt: the sense that any hour not spent being productive is an hour you have to justify, that you should, always, be doing more.

None of this means that you are failing. It means something has been asking for your attention.

What your stress might be saying

How you relate to work has a history. For many of us, the first place we learned to win approval — and to fear losing it — was in the family, and at school. There, being capable or good or useful was rewarded — but only conditionally. They are what Carl Rogers called conditions of worth: the unspoken terms on which we were valued. As children we internalise these conditions, and as adults we continue to try and meet them, often at work. The trouble comes when we lean on them too hard, and mistake meeting the conditions for the whole of our worth.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described how a child who senses that their spontaneous, natural self is not welcome will build a more acceptable one instead: a compliant self, attuned to what others need. It is a good solution, at the time, and at work it often succeeds brilliantly — this is the self that gets promoted, that everyone likes and depends on. It is also the self that can’t say no. A self always on guard is tiring to keep up. Underneath it, the person can feel lonely and unreal — as if the praise were meant for someone else. This is often what lies behind ‘impostor syndrome’ (Clance & Imes, 1978). It’s not that you’re not competent; it’s that you fear this competence is all anyone wants of you.

It also explains why rest can be such hard work. If your worth has come to depend on what you produce, stopping is not restful; it is exposing. Winnicott noticed how readily we use busyness to keep difficult feelings at bay. So when you cannot switch off, it is worth asking what switching off might let in. For some people, as children, rest was the dangerous time, when the house grew unpredictable; for others, work was the one place they were left alone. Seen this way, the inability to stop is not simple industriousness but a kind of anxious vigilance.

Sometimes the stress is not a problem to be managed, but a message to be listened to. It is sensible to be stressed in a burning building, and sometimes we must ask: is the life I have been maintaining the one I want to lead? That question is frightening enough that staying busy can be a way of never having to answer it. It is the point where your inner life and your actual job meet — and part of what therapy can do is help you tell which of your difficulties belong to the work, and which to the history you have brought to it.

Is it you, or is it the job?

There is a fair question beneath all of this: is the problem you, or is it the job? Much of this page has assumed there is something in you to work with. Often there is. But sometimes it really is the job. Workplaces generate stress through many things: the scale of what’s demanded, how little say you have, whether support and decent working relationships exist, whether your role is clear, how change is handled. When several of these are wrong at once, work stress is a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation, and not a flaw in you (Health and Safety Executive, n.d.). I can’t answer that for you from the outside — but part of the early work is helping you weigh it honestly: how sustainable is this, and is what you’re carrying unusual for your workplace, or just how things are? Perhaps you already know the answer. Part of what therapy offers is a place to say it out loud, and to think about what this means.

How I work with work stress

Therapy for work stress isn’t career coaching. I won’t tell you to quit, and I won’t draw up an action plan — not because such plans are worthless, but because what’s keeping you back is likely not a shortage of plans. What I offer is a confidential space to understand what is driving the stress, why it has become unbearable, and what keeps you from changing. The person who can’t say no to their manager may be repeating something that began long before they had a manager. The perfectionist who works every evening may be trying to earn a sense of worth they were never reliably given. The person who feels like a fraud after years of competence may be carrying a verdict someone else reached, a long time ago.

I work psychodynamically and from a person-centred position. The psychodynamic part traces the line between your working life now and the experiences that shaped you — not to excuse anything, and not to blame your parents, but to understand why a particular situation at work can provoke a response out of all proportion to it. The person-centred part is a promise about how you’ll be met: with attention and without judgement, and at the pace you actually move rather than the pace you think you ought to. You won’t be told to toughen up or set better boundaries. We start from where you are.

This is also where the difference from coaching lies. Coaching tends to take your goal as given and help you reach it; therapy can ask the prior question of whether the goal is the right one — whether the promotion will actually deliver the ease you’re hoping for. Often it won’t, and that is worth knowing first. None of this is to say coaching has no value: if you want focused help meeting a defined professional goal, a good coach may be exactly right. But therapy is for when the trouble runs wider and deeper than your work goals, and you want help finding the way forward.

The following is a composite — drawn from many clients, with details changed; no individual is described. He is a man in his forties who has done well: promoted more than once, holding a demanding role in a demanding place. In the first session he is mostly assessing me — whether I will be of any use, whether I am full of it. The wariness is itself information; it is, more or less, how he meets everyone with a say over him. He agrees readily with whatever I offer, or corrects each thing I say. Each allows him to avoid engaging. He is managing me, as he manages everyone. He has not, in a long time, been in a room he didn’t need to manage.

The change, when it comes, is small. One week he arrives meaning to talk about a deadline, and a few minutes in, he mentions, almost in passing, that his father has been unwell. He stops. The pace that has driven our sessions drops out of him, and for a moment he does not manage the silence. He looks neither competent nor in charge — just tired, and sad. We stay there. It is not a breakthrough, and he will manage the next session as briskly as ever. But something has been let into the room that he usually keeps out, I have seen it, and he has survived it being seen. The next time it will come for longer.

What helps him, in the end, is less anything I say than being met by someone who does not need him to perform, who does not need him to be competent and will not leave if he is not. It is the performance which costs him at work, and it is the performance that he can here start to rewrite.

Composite drawn from clinical experience; no individual client is described.

Work stress therapy in Edinburgh and online

We meet weekly, for fifty minutes, either in person in Edinburgh’s New Town or online. My consulting room is on Drumsheugh Gardens, a few minutes from the West End and Princes Street, and each session is £70. Many people dealing with work stress prefer to meet online — it fits into a working day without the commute, and can happen from anywhere private. The work is no less effective for being done over video.

Sessions are entirely confidential and completely separate from your workplace. I don’t speak to employers, HR departments or occupational health services, and your work need not know you are attending unless you choose to tell them. For people in senior or public-facing roles, that separation can matter.

I work with adults, over eighteen, one to one rather than with couples or families. Work stress and burnout are a particular interest of mine, but not all I work with: depression, anxiety and bereavement are part of the same practice, and difficulties that cross several of these are common. And work stress is not exclusively a young man’s or a high-flyer’s problem — it reaches across every job and every level, and women report it to the HSE at higher rates than men. If what you are carrying turns out to be more than stress — if you are persistently low, or frightened, or having thoughts of harming yourself — it is worth taking to your GP as well, and I will say so plainly if I think this is the case.

I offer a free 20-minute consultation, by phone or video, so you can describe what’s going on for you and get a feel for whether working with me is a good fit. If it isn’t, or I’m not the right therapist for you, there’s no obligation to go on.

Frequently asked questions

• Will my employer find out I’m having therapy?

  No. Private therapy is completely confidential and separate from your workplace. I don’t contact employers, HR or occupational health, and no one at your work will know you are attending unless you tell them yourself.

• Is therapy the right thing, or do I just need to change jobs?

  Sometimes the honest answer is that the job is wrong and needs to change. But many people find the same difficulty waiting for them in the next role, which suggests something is travelling with them. The more useful question is usually not “should I stay or go” but “why is this happening, and how can I choose freely?” If it becomes clear that you want to leave, I’ll help you think it through, but I won’t talk you into it, or out of it.

• Is my work stress serious enough to bring to therapy?

  You don’t need to be in crisis, and you don’t need to have it worse than anyone else. The belief that you haven’t earned the right to struggle is often part of the very pattern that’s wearing you down. If it’s affecting your sleep, your health, your relationships or your sense of yourself, that is reason enough.

• What’s the difference between therapy and coaching for work stress?

  Roughly: coaching helps you reach a goal, while therapy can ask whether the goal is the right one — and can work with the parts of the difficulty that coaching isn’t built for, the patterns and feelings and history underneath it. Coaching tends to look forward and outward, at performance; therapy is willing to look back and inward, at what the stress is made of. Both are legitimate. If your aim is focused and practical, coaching may suit you better; if the trouble runs wider, therapy is likely the better fit.

• I think I might be burned out. Can therapy help?

  Often, yes. Burnout isn’t a medical diagnosis — the World Health Organization describes it as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, a syndrome that follows chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed (World Health Organization, 2019). If work stress is the strain, burnout is the point at which something gives. The line between them is rarely clean, and I work with both. You can read more on my burnout page, or we can talk it through in a first session.

• I feel like a fraud at work, even though I’m good at my job.

  This is common, and oddly stubborn: impostor feelings tend to persist regardless of the evidence of your competence, which is part of why you can’t simply reason your way out of them. They usually have a history — a sense, formed early, that your worth was provisional and had to be continually re-earned. Therapy is a way of getting underneath the feeling rather than managing it on the surface.

• I’ve lost my job, and I don’t know who I am without it. Can therapy help?

  When a job has carried a large part of your sense of who you are, losing it — even on good terms, even by your own choice — can feel like losing a piece of yourself, and the grief can take people by surprise. That isn’t an overreaction. It’s a measure of how much the role was doing for you, and it is something that therapy is well suited to help you work through.

About this page

Written by Tom Wells, MBACP, COSCA. Last reviewed July 2026.

Trained at the University of Edinburgh (PGDip Counselling and Psychotherapy). Registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (profile on the BACP register) and with Counselling and Psychotherapy in Scotland (COSCA).

Scope of practice: adults aged 18 and over; individual therapy only. I do not offer couples therapy, EMDR, formal diagnosis, or medication; where any of these would serve you better, I am glad to point you towards them.