When Karen Schiro, a real estate agent in Fairfax Station, Virginia, realized last year that she was suffering from burnout, she reached out to a burnout coach, Ellyn Schinke of Tacoma, Washington. “I knew I was burned out and I just didn’t know how to fix it,” she said.
Over the course of six months of weekly video calls, Ms. Schiro, 45, learned to whittle down her overwhelming to-do lists. Making changes like adding a line to her email signature saying she would not respond to messages sent after 6 p.m. seemed “stupid,” she said, but it took an outside perspective to identify those adjustments.
“When you’re burned out, it’s hard to think about these things and implement them,” Ms. Schiro said.
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted how and where people work, the World Health Organization recognized burnout. In 2019, it defined the characteristics of this type of chronic workplace stress as exhaustion, cynicism and ineffectiveness — all attributes that make it difficult for people to recover on their own, said Michael P. Leiter, a professor emeritus at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who studies burnout.
“It’s hard at that point to pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” he said. “It’s really helpful to have a secondary point of view or some emotional support.”
Enter the burnout coach.
Operating in a gray area between psychotherapy and career coaching, and lacking formal accreditation and oversight, “burnout coach” can be an easy buzzword to advertise. Basically, anyone can hang a sign.
As a result, more people have been marketing themselves as burnout coaches in recent years, said Chris Bittinger, a clinical assistant professor of leadership and project management at Purdue University who studies burnout. “There’s no barrier to entry,” he said.
Making a profit is another matter. When Denver resident Rhia Batchelder started a career as a burnout coach in 2021, she lived off her savings at first, supplementing her income with freelance legal work and dog walking while honing her sales and marketing skills.
“Coaching in general is a very unregulated industry,” she said. “I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours researching burnout.”
This lack of oversight makes it difficult to say how many burnout coaches there are, but researchers who study burnout, like Mr. Leiter, say that a high-pressure corporate culture, a shortage of mental health care resources and the disruption of the pandemic have created a critical mass of burned-out workers seeking ways to cope.
Kim Hires, a burnout coach based in Atlanta, said few people knew what she did when she started her business a decade ago. “Now, I don’t have to explain it,” she said.
But burnout coaches suffer from a lack of accreditation. Some earn certifications through organizations like the International Coaching Federation, a large nonprofit coaching association. But unlike a life coach, executive coach, or wellness coach, a burnout coach doesn’t have any specific certification.
They say they need to gather certifications and continuing education on topics like stress management and sleep health — which even advocates acknowledge can make the practice seem like a gimmick.
Educational institutions, however, are responding to the growing interest.
Terrence E. Maltbia, director of Columbia University’s Coaching Certification Program, said the university was adding the topic of burnout to its continuing education curriculum after its biennial survey of coaching program alumni and executives found that interest in burnout spiked between 2018 and 2022, a surge he called unprecedented.
“The market is driving this because people need to work, and work is more stressful,” he said.
The latest annual survey by the American Psychological Association found that 77 percent of workers experienced work-related stress in the past month. Help for managing that stress is often hard to find: More than half of the U.S. population lives in an area with inadequate access to mental health care, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration.
Brett Linzer, a primary care physician and pediatrician in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, said some people prefer to talk to a burnout coach because the stigma surrounding mental health still persists.
“There’s a cultural narrative that doctors have to figure things out for themselves and can’t rely on other people,” Dr. Linzer said. Talking to a burnout coach has made him more empathetic and a better communicator, he said, and helped him cope with the deaths of two friends and colleagues.
Personal experience also plays a role in many burnout coaches’ discourse. Ms. Batchelder, the Denver coach, left a career in corporate litigation that left her feeling disengaged and exhausted.
“I started researching burnout to help myself,” said Ms. Batchelder, 33. Learning stress management tools like breathing exercises, setting boundaries and establishing routines gave her insights to help clients.
These coaches said they don’t replace therapists, but rather provide a different kind of support. Some clients said they appreciated how a burnout coach was able to relate to their workplace challenges.
“She could understand what I was going through,” said Tara Howell, a communications manager for a Baltimore nonprofit who began working with Ms. Batchelder while also seeing a therapist.
“My sessions with Rhia were much more hands-on,” said Ms Howell, 28. “I had considered working with career coaches, but it didn’t feel right for what I wanted.”
While some employers may pay for sessions with a burnout coach as part of professional development, most coaches and clients report that people pay out of pocket for coaching — which can cost $250 or more for a 45- or 60-minute one-on-one session, with packaged sessions costing thousands of dollars.
The interest in burnout coaches comes amid changing views on workplace well-being. William Fleming, a fellow at the University of Oxford’s Well-being Research Centre, has found that many employer-provided well-being services, such as sleep apps and mindfulness seminars, largely fall short of their promises of improving mental health .
“These interventions — many of them are not only not working, they’re backfiring,” said Kandi Wiens, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s master’s program in medical education and a burnout researcher.
Mr Fleming said such initiatives were ineffective because they focused on the individual rather than issues such as overwork or lack of resources that lead to burnout. “You’re trying to mitigate the symptoms of the problem without getting to the root causes,” he said.
Burnout coaches themselves acknowledge that they are not a panacea. “There is definitely a limit to what coaching can do,” Ms. Batchelder said. “There are so many institutional stressors.”