It's 7:50 on a Tuesday and you're stopped on I-405 somewhere around Kirkland, on the second of your required office days. Your phone is face down in the cupholder, buzzing. You already know roughly what's in there: a Slack thread from the team in another time zone that started while you slept, a calendar invite titled "Org update" with no agenda, and a message from a friend at another company asking whether you've heard anything about the next round.
You do the math you've done a hundred times. Your next vest is in February. If the cuts come before then, that's a big chunk of this year's compensation gone. If you leave on your own, same problem. So you stay, and you keep doing the arithmetic in the shower, and on the drive, and at 11 p.m. when you should be asleep.
When you get home at 6:40, the evening has shrunk to a couple of hours. You spend most of them half-listening to the people you live with while some part of you stays tuned to the phone.
Nothing about that day is a crisis. That's what makes it hard to see as burnout. In Seattle tech, at Amazon, at Microsoft, or at one of the companies orbiting them, this is often just a normal week. Then it's a normal year.
You can be genuinely excellent at your job and quietly running on empty. Those two things live together far more often than standup admits.
What burnout in Seattle tech is made of
I've worked in Seattle-area mental health since 2021, including a few years at a group practice in the city, and now in my own practice in Edmonds. That means I've been doing this work through several rounds of big local layoffs, and the pattern I see most is less about hours worked than about never fully standing down.
Layoff anxiety is a big part of it. Between rounds, people live in a low, constant vigilance. A canceled one-on-one means something. A reorg slide gets studied for clues. You perform calm for a team that's watching you for cues, and that performance takes energy you don't get back. In my experience the people who stayed after a round sometimes struggle more than the ones who were cut. Survivors inherit a bigger scope and the suspicion that the next list is already being drafted.
Then there's how performance gets measured. Calibration and ranking against colleagues you respect create a particular kind of pressure, sharpest for people who arrived already convinced they had to be exceptional just to be kept. Meeting expectations starts to feel like falling behind.
Some signs it has tipped from tired into burned out:
A weekend doesn't fix it anymore, and you wake up Monday already depleted.
Work you used to care about feels pointless, or you've gone a little numb about it.
Sunday afternoon hollows out. (My post on the Monday scaries is about exactly this.)
Your body is keeping its own record: a tight jaw, a bad stomach, 3 a.m. wake-ups.
There's a longer list in signs you're heading toward burnout before you crash, which is worth reading before things get worse rather than after.
The system is built to extract your best. It is not built to notice when you're empty.
Golden handcuffs and the vest date
RSUs are a strange thing to bring into therapy, and people sometimes apologize for it, as if talking about stock were shallow. I don't think it is. Vesting schedules shape real decisions about whether you stay in a job that is wearing you down, and a lot of people organize their whole sense of when they're allowed to leave around a date on a brokerage site.
That's a real constraint, and I take it seriously. It can also turn into a story you hide behind. "I'll deal with it after the next vest" has a way of renewing itself every quarter. Part of the work is separating the two: what the money actually requires of you, and what you're using the money to avoid looking at.
For people whose visa runs through their employer, all of this is sharper. A layoff starts a clock. Vigilance in that situation is a reasonable response to a real threat, and I'd never treat it as an overreaction.
Imposter feelings aren't proof you don't belong. They're often loudest in the most capable people in the room.
The commute nobody budgeted for
Return-to-office policies added a local layer that I hear about constantly. For a lot of people living north of Seattle, office days mean an hour or more each way on I-5 or I-405. Whether it's three days or five depends on whose badge you carry, but the effect is similar. The time that used to hold a workout, dinner with a partner, or bedtime with kids now holds brake lights.
People tend to treat this as logistics. I think it's more than that. When a policy memo rearranges your household's whole routine, the resentment has to go somewhere, and often it goes home, into arguments that look like they're about dishes. Naming where it actually comes from helps more than people expect.
It also makes rest harder to get, because the only open time left is the time you'd normally use to recover. Some people find it helps to get recovery out of the house entirely. That's one reason I offer walk-and-talk sessions on the Edmonds waterfront, and I wrote about why in therapy that begins with a walk outside.
Understanding that burnout is structural, not personal, is freeing. The answer isn't "cope harder."
Therapy from home, the office, or a parked car
Some people take a session from a parked car or a booked room at the office, and that works fine. Most sessions are online, anywhere in Washington.
Therapy won't cancel the reorg or fix your on-call rotation. What it can do is help you figure out how braced you actually need to be, untangle your sense of worth from a performance rating, and make a clearer decision about whether to stay, set limits, or go. If a layoff has already happened, there's often a hit to confidence that outlasts the job search, which I wrote about in rebuilding confidence after a career setback.
I'm private pay and out of network, so nothing about our sessions goes through your employer. You won't need to explain what a cliff is, or why an org change can rattle you more than a layoff.
The therapy for tech workers page has more on how I work with people in this industry, and if exhaustion has become the main thing, start with burnout therapy.
