Former lawyer.
Burnout survivor.
I found my way back.
Let me help you find yours.

From the bathroom floor to resilience coach.

Like so many professionals, I spent long hours at my desk trying to meet the unrelenting demands of my clients. I was a litigation lawyer. The pressure was constant, the stakes were high, and stopping simply wasn't an option. Or so I believed. Some of that pressure was simply workload. Some of it was something else: arguing positions I didn't always believe in, telling myself it was just the job. It cost more than I let myself notice at the time.

I was constantly tense. My mind was always overloaded. Panic attacks became a regular feature of my life. I was convinced it was all mental, that I could think my way out of it. The truth? My body was keeping me in a constant state of stress that no amount of thinking could fix.

Something had to change. I gave up working as a lawyer and took a break. Not because I wanted to, but because I had no choice. It sounds like a cliche, but I was burnt out.

I took up Iyengar yoga and later became a yoga teacher. I started paying attention to my body in a way I never had before. I worked with my psychologist and took medication. And I kept looking for tools that could support me.

Then, on a yoga retreat, I read James Nestor's book Breath. It didn't explain why I'd burned out. What it gave me was something else: enough physiological stability to finally think clearly again, instead of just surviving each day. I'd been breathing shallow, fast, and through my mouth for years, and that pattern alone had kept my nervous system locked in a low-level emergency long after any specific stressor had passed.

Learning to breathe properly strengthened my connection with my body, revitalised my health, and calmed my mind enough that I could finally look at what had actually happened to me, not just how burnt out I felt, but why. It was one piece of the puzzle, and it turned out to be the piece that let me go looking for the others.

That clarity sent me looking into why burnout happens in the first place. I went back to university and studied psychology. I found the work of Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter who identified six workplace conditions that drive burnout: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. I trained as an Oxygen Advantage Certified Functional Breathing Instructor and went deeper into the physiology too. I started helping others because I knew what I'd found wasn't just useful for me. It was the thing most burnt-out professionals had never been told, on either side, the causes or the physiology.

It's also why I don't only work with individuals. If those six conditions are what's actually driving burnout, real change often means working with the organisation itself, not just helping the people inside it cope better with conditions that shouldn't have to be coped with.

What it's actually like.

People come to me having usually already tried other things first: therapy, medication, meditation apps. Organisations provide wellness workshops, EAP programmes, and parental support, to name a few. Some of it helps. Some doesn't. No one intervention works for everyone, and what works for an individual doesn't automatically work for a team.

For individuals

What's usually missing is a clear picture of what's actually driving things, and a body that's able to recover once that picture is clear. So we work on both. We name the real conditions behind your burnout, not just 'stress' in general, and work through what you can actually do about them, whether that's a conversation you need to have, a boundary you need to set, or a bigger decision about whether the role itself needs to change. Alongside that, we retrain your nervous system directly through your breathing, so your body can actually carry through whatever you decide.

Your body finally starts working for you, instead of running the show from underneath everything else.

For organisations

Many organisations offer support: EAP programmes, wellness workshops, a meditation app subscription, mental health first aid training. The organisations want to help and are prepared to invest. The problem? Many of these things are 'bolted on' to the existing structure. They can support an individual who's already struggling without addressing the structural drivers of burnout. Because of this, they won't stop someone from burning out.

There are practical limits too. Access to a psychologist through an EAP is often capped at a handful of sessions a year, nowhere near enough for someone dealing with genuine burnout. And even where sessions are confidential, plenty of high-pressure fields still carry real stigma around asking for help, where being tough is treated as part of the job. People don't use what's available, not because it isn't private, but because being seen to need it feels like a risk in itself.

That's why organisational work needs to include looking at the actual conditions, not just adding more access to support on top of them. Here's how that works.