You've spent years mastering the art of helping others navigate their inner worlds, it can be important to stop and ask yourself: when did you last pause to explore your own? If you're feeling emotionally depleted, going through the motions of therapy rather than truly connecting, or can't remember the last time something genuinely delighted you, you're not alone—and you're not broken.

Burnout can quietly move into the spaces where your curiosity, spontaneity, and sense of wonder tend to flourish. While we readily encourage clients to prioritize their wellbeing, many of us may not follow our own advice. However, rediscovering joy isn't selfish self-indulgence, it's essential for sustainable clinical practice. And it starts with a deceptively simple question: what nourishes you?

Taking Account of Who You Care Outside of Work

Between the clinical hours and extensive training, it’s easy for your role as a therapist to become your identity. Then there’s the day-to-day time-consuming documentation, continued education, and pouring everything into client care – which can mean spending downtime recovering from work – rather than living life.

But the more you invest in only your clinical identity, the more vulnerable you become to burnout. One of the most restorative things you can do for your emotional health is to remember who you are when you’re not holding space for others.

A 2022 study published in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy found that therapists with strong personal identities outside their work reported significantly lower rates of emotional exhaustion and greater psychological wellbeing.

Try this:

• Ask yourself: What did I love doing before I became a therapist? What gives me energy when no one’s watching?
• Make a "non-therapy self" vision board (digital or physical) of hobbies, colors, places, and moods that reflect your joy.
• Set a recurring reminder to do one non-clinical activity each week—cooking a new recipe, attending a lecture, or browsing a local bookstore.

Move, Play, Create: Embodied Joy and Mental Clarity

The neuroscience is clear: Movement reduces cortisol. Creativity lights up reward pathways. Novelty builds resilience. But knowing isn’t the same as integrating.

Whether it’s dancing in your kitchen, painting with watercolors, hiking local trails, or learning to play the ukulele, creative and embodied practices interrupt the repetitive cognitive load of therapy work and reintroduce pleasure, autonomy, and flow.

Learnings from programs like Colorado’s CORAL (Clinician-Operated Recovery through Arts and Leisure) have shown that healthcare professionals who engaged in creative group activities for just 12 weeks experienced notable decreases in burnout, anxiety, and depressive symptoms.

It should be noted that you don’t need to be “good” at your hobby for it to help. The goal isn’t mastery—it’s freedom. Play is your nervous system’s antidote to constant vigilance.

Try this:

• Schedule one “joy block” each week—just 30 minutes of movement, creativity, or curiosity.
• Keep a list of 10 activities that help you feel playful or light (e.g., singing along to a favorite album, sketching, birdwatching).
• Start a practice you can grow with over time (e.g., improv class, community theater, or pottery).

Connection Is Nourishment, Too

Connection is important, but it’s all too common for therapists to feel quietly isolated. When your day is filled with emotionally intimate conversations, it’s easy to mistake that for having your own emotional support network.

Yet peer connection and community has been shown to dramatically reduce burnout. A 2020 review published in Frontiers in Psychology found that mental health professionals who participated in peer support groups and professional supervision had lower levels of secondary traumatic stress and emotional fatigue.

Sometimes nourishment looks like lunch with a friend who gets your sense of humor. Or a phone call with someone you haven’t chatted with for a while. Other times, it means being part of a therapist processing group, where you can safely share your clinical stress without risking rupture.

Try this:

• Identify one person you can be fully yourself with, and set a recurring check-in (even 15 minutes).
• Join a local or online book club, art collective, or hobby group unrelated to mental health.
• Host a monthly therapist-free dinner (no shop talk allowed).

Find Rituals That Replenish You

Big self-care gestures are great. But in the long haul, it’s daily rituals that restore your nervous system and protect your mental clarity.

Think: steeping tea in silence after a full day of sessions. A walk around the block if you have a longer break between clients. Turning off screens at 8 p.m. Rituals like these create pockets of nervous system safety and give your body a chance to regulate after a day of co-regulation.

Try this:

• Choose one sensory ritual to start or end your day—scent, sound, light, texture.
• Light a candle and journal for five minutes after sessions to offload emotional residue.
• Build a “work shut-down” ritual (e.g., play a certain playlist, tidy your space, say an affirmation) to symbolically end your therapy day.

Confronting Time Barriers

If you’ve ever felt guilty for resting, you’re not alone. It’s common for helping professionals to internalize the belief that their worth is tied to how much they give. But as burnout rates rise, this mindset has real consequences.

A 2021 Medscape report found that 63% of physicians – many in mental health-related fields – reported feeling burned out, a jump from 42% pre-pandemic. And while the specifics vary by discipline, therapists face similar patterns: emotional fatigue, low motivation, and cynicism.

The antidote isn’t another productivity hack, it’s permission. Permission to take breaks. To feel joy. To say no. To stop seeing clients at 7 p.m. on a Thursday just because you can. Time will never magically appear. But boundaries will.

Try this:

• Block 30–60 minutes in your calendar weekly for an activity that brings you joy. Treat it like a high-priority meeting.
• Pre-write a gentle email template for declining opportunities that don’t align with your energy or values.
• Track how you feel after nourishing activities versus when you skip them – then use that data to advocate for your own needs.

Joy as a Clinical Competency

Here’s the reframe that’s been missing: Joy is not extracurricular. It’s part of your ethical obligation to yourself and your clients.

When you nourish your own humanity, you model possibility for your clients. When you make space for joy, you practice the very self-compassion you teach. And when you reclaim your identity beyond the therapy room, you not only reduce burnout, you remember why you chose this work in the first place.

So ask yourself:
What nourishes me today?
And what would it look like to let joy be part of my job?

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