Am I burnt out, or is it just my job?

Why does the tiredness stay when the work eases?

A quiet week should give something back. When it gives nothing back, the tiredness is not being made by the hours.

You take the leave you were owed. You sleep, you walk by the water, you see the people you meant to see. On Monday the same weight is waiting at the door, and you are left asking what is wrong with you, because nothing in your life is going badly. That question is where most people on a posting start, and it is already the wrong question.

What is being spent is not only energy. On a posting you hold a role in front of people who read you as the role: the mission, the organisation, the country you came from. The holding is small and constant. It happens in the pause before you answer at a reception, in the second language you speak well but never without effort, in the care you take over a sentence that would cost you nothing at home. None of it is heavy. All of it is on.

Among 212 staff sent abroad by international organisations and followed from before a posting to after it, emotional exhaustion was higher at the end than at the start, and was still higher 3 to 6 months after the return.¹ They worked in a harder field than most embassy and corporate postings, and they reported on themselves, so take it as the shape of a pattern rather than a measurement of your week. The part that matches what I see is the lag: the recovery people expect at the end does not arrive on schedule.

Why is it so hard to say I am struggling in this job?

The job carries a quiet condition: that you are the kind of person who manages abroad. You were selected partly for that. Saying you are tired can feel like handing back the quality you were chosen for.

Then there are the practical reasons the admission gets postponed, and they are not excuses.

• The posting has an end date. You tell yourself to hold on until the rotation finishes, and the finish keeps moving further out.
• The people who would understand are colleagues. Anything you say travels inside the same small professional world you will be working in for years.
• Home gets the edited version. Family hear the good parts, because the hard parts worry people who can do nothing from a distance.

Each decision is sensible on its own. Together they produce a year in which the only person who knows the full size of the strain is you, which is the one place it cannot be set down. I hear the result as a flat sentence, usually late in a first session: I have not actually told anyone this.

Why does my own life feel like somewhere I visit?

A posting organises everything around the work, and the rest of life takes whatever is left over. Friendships that need 2 years are given 18 months. The flat is furnished for the duration. Danish stays at the level that gets you through the shop, because the course clashes with the week you always travel.

The person who usually carries the unspoken half of this is the partner who came with you. They gave up more and say less about it, often because they can see how hard you are working and do not want to add to it. That silence is protective, and it slowly removes the one conversation in which both of you could be honest about what the arrangement is costing. Where a couple arrives in my room after 3 postings, this is very often what they have come about, under the heading of an argument about something else.

In a study of 207 adults who relocate with a partner’s work, how stressed and how isolated they felt accounted for most of the difference in how they were faring, more than the cultural distance between the countries did.² It was measured at a single moment, so it cannot show what moved first, and the group was mostly women from Europe. It fits what I hear: the difficulty is rarely Denmark. It is the thinness of the week.

Is this burnout, or is it the life around the job?

Both are usually present, and it is worth telling them apart, because they ask for different things. What follows helps me think with a client. It is not a test, and a difficult answer does not settle anything on its own.

• What happens to the tiredness on a free weekend? Work exhaustion softens a little. Erosion sits at the same level whatever the diary says.
• What have you stopped wanting? Losing appetite for the work is one thing. Losing appetite for the people and the evenings is a wider loss.
• Who here knows the ordinary version of you? If the honest answer is nobody, that absence is doing some of the work you are blaming on the job.

Some of what you are carrying may also be older than this posting. Mobility suits people who are good at starting again, and being good at starting again is sometimes learned early, in a childhood where staying attached was not simple. I would not assume that about you. I would want to know whether leaving has always been the easier half.

What helps while the posting continues?

You are unlikely to change the contract this year, so the useful changes are small, repeatable and outside the work.

• Give the day an end. A walk, a shower, a change of clothes, anything that marks the point where the role comes off. Without a marker the role stays on until sleep.
• Build 1 relationship with no professional overlap. Not a network. One person who has no stake in how you are seen at work.
• Say the true version to your partner once a week. Short and unedited. The aim is not to solve it but to stop being the only one who knows.
• Treat the next rotation as a decision. Postings can move you along without anyone choosing. Put a date in the year when you and your partner look at it properly.

These help with strain. They are not enough when the flatness has lasted months rather than weeks, when you need a drink to land in the evening, when you have stopped replying to people you love, or when the thought of the next posting produces nothing at all. At that point the problem has moved past scheduling, and it is worth talking it through with someone outside your professional world, which is part of what therapy for expats in Copenhagen is for. What stays uncertain, and what a few sessions usually clarify, is how much of this belongs to the posting and how much you brought with you.

Questions people ask

Is it worth starting therapy if my posting ends in a year?

Yes, and a posting with a known end is often the clearest time to look at what the work has been costing, while the pattern is still in front of you. Work can be weekly for a period and then spaced out.

Do I have to be in crisis to come?

No, and most people on postings come while they are still functioning well at work. Being able to think clearly makes the early sessions more useful, not less.

What happens in the first session?

You describe what has been happening and how it feels from the inside, and I ask about the shape of the posting and what was already there before it. By the end there is usually a working sense of what we are looking at.

Can I come alone if most of the strain shows up at home?

Yes, individual work on a relationship pattern is common and often changes what happens between 2 people. Couples sessions remain an option if you both want them later.

What if I travel for work and cannot keep a fixed time?

Sessions can be held online while you are away and in person when you are in Copenhagen. Continuity matters more than the room.

If you cannot tell whether the job or life abroad is wearing you out, I can help you separate the two in therapy for burnout.

Sources

1. Psychological distress, depression, anxiety, and burnout among international humanitarian aid workers: a longitudinal study. PLOS ONE, 2012.
2. Expatriation stressors and the well-being of accompanying partners: a commonality analysis approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 2025.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.