How to Prevent Burnout as a BCBA: 7 Strategies That Actually Work
Burnout is a well-documented challenge for BCBAs and RBTs. It’s often preventable and can be significantly reduced with proactive habits. Setting boundaries early, seeking adequate supervision, staying connected to peers, and building consistent self-care routines are the strategies most likely to protect your mental health and your career long-term. Here are 7 steps to get started.
If you haven’t heard it yet, you will. Any time a crew of BCBAs or RBTs gets together for drinks, starts up a text chain, or gathers in an online forum, the topic of burnout is going to come up.
It makes sense. These are emotionally demanding jobs with big investments in clients and very draining interpersonal interactions. That’s why the field is becoming known for high turnover rates, which isn’t great for either clients or therapists.
While burnout isn’t a diagnosable medical condition, the stress and exhaustion that come with it can lead to real health issues,ues including depression, fatigue, and chronic illness. Beyond your own well-being, it also directly impacts your clients. You become detached, unavailable, and unmotivated. Those are all things that make ABA therapy far less effective than it should be.
The 7 strategies below are drawn from doctoral research, practitioner experience, and continuing education resources developed specifically for behavior analysts. They won’t make the hard parts of this job disappear. But they can make the difference between a long, fulfilling career and one that burns out too soon.
Should ABA Degree Programs Teach Strategies for Avoiding Practitioner Burnout?
While it’s becoming common in other, similar professions such as mental health counseling or clinical social work, self-care training isn’t a routine part of ABA education today.
Within the 405 required hours of instruction, ABAI sets out, as the standard for accrediting master’s programs in AB, exactly zero hours for therapist self-care.
A research project in 2019 found that BCBAs have, at best, informal exposure to self-care strategies. Yet the same project suggests that better self-care routines could lead to improved outcomes for clients and better continuity of care.
Why Isn’t There a More Organized Effort Behind Self-Care For Applied Behavior Analysts?
Part of the reason that self-care is routinely neglected in professional preparation for a career in applied behavior analysis may be that it hasn’t actually been a recognized profession for all that long.
In fact, in a handful of states, you still don’t need to undergo any evaluation or professional preparation to work as a behavior analyst. No licensing laws exist. Only the demands of insurance companies for qualifications for reimbursement make earning the BCBA a de facto requirement.
At the same time, demand has surged nationwide. As one of the most extensively researched and evidence-based interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), applied behavior analysts are needed to cope with the explosion of diagnoses. In schools, in private practice, and in healthcare facilities, ABAs are thrown into various silos without the benefits of a larger community of support already in place.
This uneven career landscape has left BACB as the primary source for guidance in ABA education. But you’ll only find any reference to self-care in the organization’s guidelines for supervisor training.
How To Find the Self-Care Strategies You Need To Avoid Burnout as an ABA
This state of affairs pretty much leaves the average behavior analyst on their own when it comes to dodging burnout. But although there’s not much official guidance, the community is organically coming together to provide information and resources for self-care.
Much of what we know about self-care strategies for practicing applied behavior analysts has come from doctoral students in ABA, who have taken the opportunity to explore the subject as part of their doctoral dissertations.
In other cases, supervisors and instructors in ABA have taken the initiative to develop self-care routines and share them, either freely on websites or as courses you can take as part of your required continuing education studies.
Even though it’s a little extra work on top of a caseload that may already seem overwhelming, it means you have the resources to craft your own self-care and mental wellness routines. Here are 7 ideas to get you started.
1. Start Early, Set Priorities, Set Boundaries
Every new BCBA is eager to get engaged in the exciting day-to-day process of working with clients. The newest therapist in the clinic is always the one who shows up early, seeks out the most challenging cases, and goes the extra mile to deliver the best service.
Those are all commendable qualities, and we can all hope that the enthusiasm and dedication stay with you throughout a long and productive career.
But you should learn to be cautious about overcommitting to your job right from the start. Setting expectations about your availability and intensity right away can help you avoid unhealthy patterns that will be hard to shake.
In the same way, developing good habits about boundaries between your personal life and professional demands can be one of the keys to avoiding burnout. Ensuring that your off-hours are truly off is important. Even when your position doesn’t demand it, there’s often a tendency among new BCBA therapists to take their work home. Avoid falling into that pattern. It’s not good for either you or your home life.
Your Own Outside Interests Will Be Key to Balanced Burnout Prevention
One reason many new BCBAs end up thinking and working almost all the time goes beyond a demanding caseload. The fact is, right out of college and excited about the position, a lot of graduates don’t really have a lot of other things to focus on in life.
One of the best ways to set yourself up to avoid burnout is to give yourself equally interesting things to focus on outside of work.
It’s impossible to randomly recommend a hobby to start without knowing your interests, but sometimes exploring new things is the path to finding one.
Getting out of the office to join a board game meet-up group, taking a hike with a local club, or volunteering with a local gardening group may not end up being your cup of tea in the end. But they are all ways to broaden your interests and give yourself a shot at finding something worthwhile to take your mind off work.
2. Don’t Settle for Less Supervision Than You Need
Clinical supervision is the process by which more experienced, more highly trained therapists review, coach, and guide the work of ABAs and RBTs. It’s baked into the certification and licensing process in every state.
As a BCBA candidate, you’ll have to go through between 1,500 and 2,000 hours of supervised fieldwork to qualify for certification. Your actual supervisory contact hours, depending on whether you are going with regular or concentrated supervision, will range from 5 percent to 10 percent of that total.
But these are minimums, and too many trainees and supervisors alike treat them as such. Supervision is the best way to get direct mentorship and guidance on exactly the kinds of material that come up in practice but aren’t covered in class, including self-care. A 2009 study found that perceived supervisor support played a big role in predicting burnout.
If you’re in the process of qualifying for your full BCBA, or in an assistant or tech position that requires ongoing supervision, don’t hesitate to talk to your supervisor as often as you need, and about your own state of mind and needs.
3. Connect With ABA Peers Outside the Workplace
Getting supervision from more experienced providers is valuable professionally, but it’s still work, which can contribute to burnout.
It’s equally valuable to connect with other providers at your level, experiencing the same challenges and difficulties. For that, it’s almost always to your benefit to look up local organizations designed to connect and support behavior analysts.
And while you might have professional supervision from a senior therapist on the job, it can also be valuable to connect with ABAs with more experience in less formal settings. Forging a lasting relationship with a senior ABA through meet-ups outside the daily grind gives you a chance to bounce issues off them and pick up sage bits of wisdom that won’t really come up in an official relationship.
Local chapters of ABAI, the Association for Behavior Analysis International, are almost always the first place to start your search for comrades in arms. There is also the APBA, or Association of Professional Behavior Analysts, which includes members of related professions, including:
- Psychologists
- Occupational and Physical Therapists
- Social Workers
- Educators
- Medical Professionals
- Compliance and HR Professionals
That can offer a valuable outside perspective that may help you understand and manage pressures from parts of the job you can’t directly control.
You can also find some ABA-adjacent organizations that may be valuable therapist community resources for wellbeing and support, depending on your practice area. For example, the Council of Autism Service Providers may connect you with a range of professionals who work with similar clients or in similar environments.
4. Accrue Continuing Education Hours in Self-Care Subject Areas
Fortunately, even though your master’s program in ABA might not come fully stocked with self-care tactics, a lot of the people designing ongoing continuing education courses for behavior analysts have their fingers on the pulse of the problem. So you can often find CEU options that both stack toward your license renewal and help you understand andaddressh burnout risk factors.
These can be found through national and local ABA associations, for-profit private education providers, and government agencies. There are also more general resources in the healthcare field to help workers avoid burnout, such as the SAMHSA Self-Care for Healthcare Workers Modules, freely available online. These may count toward CE hours depending on the source, but offer important training in an under-covered aspect of ABA practice either way.
5. Establish a Routine That Includes Exercise, Nutrition, Rest, and Reflection
Many people are surprised to find that self-care against work burnout is actually also work. You need to put in the hours and make time for the basics that help guard against stress and mental exhaustion.
Much of that comes back to the basics, simple stuff that every individual in every kind of position needs in their life:
- Exercise — It’s a recommendation Americans see almost constantly and very rarely accept, but getting out and moving around regularly really is a key feature in staying mentally sharp and engaged. Research backs it up: the Journal of Occupational Health found strong evidence that physical activity reduces exhaustion, a key component of burnout.
- Nutrition — A diet of coffee and candy bars from the office vending machine is the natural one for many ABAs, but it’s not the kind of fuel your system needs to keep you in top form. A balanced, healthy diet both improves your exercise potential and helps stave off burnout symptoms.
- Sufficient Rest — Almost 40 percent of Americans report not getting enough sleep each night, so there’s a good chance you aren’t clocking the seven to eight hours needed. But getting sufficient rest is how you fuel up with resilience and energy for the next day, so make time for your Zs.
- Mindfulness — Mindfulness can be the hardest step to qualify in anti-burnout practices, but one of the most useful. It’s essentially about developing the mental discipline to be present in the moment, to keep your brain from spinning from the many distractions and stressors the ABA workplace offers. Meditation, breathing techniques, or even yoga can all help improve your mindfulness.
6. Get Professional Support and Counseling To Back You Up
Even though you should be well-connected with peers who can listen to your woes and offer support and advice, that’s no substitute for professional services to support your mental wellness. Just like ABA therapists are the go-to resource for behavioral healthcare, licensed mental health counselors and psychologists are the place to turn for your mental health needs.
It can be important to engage with a counselor before you think you need one. Just as behavior analysis isn’t about flipping a switch, counseling isn’t either. A counselor needs to get to know you as an individual, to understand your personality and your baseline, to really be able to get to the bottom of burnout issues.
So it’s a good idea to connect with a professional counselor before you get to the point where your head is about to explode. If you don’t have a referral through your behavior analysis community, resources like the American Counseling Association or the National Alliance on Mental Illness can help you get started on the right path.
7. Don’t Let Your Stress Impact Your Client Interactions
Maybe the most important step, and the goal behind all the others, is to avoid letting your personal challenges impact the effort and expertise you put into client services.
This is a specialized subset of burnout prevention, common in human services and healthcare fields, where professionals regularly work with patients in tremendous need. A combination of exhaustion and exposure can lead to a condition called compassion fatigue.
Basically, this is when you become so accustomed to seeing people with severe needs that you lose the ability to empathize. It’s a contributor and an outcome of burnout, both. It adds to burnout factors as a secondary stress reaction to seeing so many people in need. Still, it can also result from the exhaustion you experience as part of your individual burnout.
The Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project offers an overview of the issue and steps to help counteract it. A diagnostic self-test can get you some objective answers about your own condition, even if you don’t feel like you are experiencing it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is burnout common among BCBAs and RBTs?
Yes, burnout is well-documented and frequently reported in the ABA field. The emotionally demanding nature of the work, combined with high caseloads and limited formal training in self-care, poses a real risk to practitioners at all experience levels. Research consistently points to burnout as a driver of the high turnover rates seen across ABA organizations.
Why don’t ABA degree programs teach self-care?
Applied behavior analysis is a relatively young profession, and the current standards set by ABAI for accredited master’s programs don’t include therapist self-care among the 405 required instructional hours. That’s starting to change as the community pushes for more formal attention to practitioner wellness. Still, for now, most behavior analysts have to seek out self-care guidance on their own or through continuing education.
Can continuing education credits count toward burnout prevention training?
Yes, many ABA-approved CEU providers now offer courses specifically covering therapist wellness, compassion fatigue, and self-care strategies. Some general healthcare resources, like the SAMHSA Self-Care for Healthcare Workers Modules, may also be approvable depending on your state or certification requirements. It’s worth checking with your supervisor or licensing board if you’re unsure what qualifies.
What is compassion fatigue, and how does it differ from burnout?
Burnout is a state of exhaustion resulting from prolonged workplace stress. Compassion fatigue is a more specific condition that develops from repeated exposure to clients in significant distress, where you gradually lose the capacity to empathize. The two often occur together and feed each other. The Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project has assessment tools if you want to evaluate your own situation.
When should I start working on burnout prevention?
The short answer: right now, no matter where you are in your career. Starting early, ideally before you feel burned out, is far more effective than trying to recover after the fact. Building good boundaries, strong peer networks, and consistent self-care routines from the beginning of your career is much easier than trying to establish them under duress.
Key Takeaways
- Burnout is often preventable — With proactive boundaries, adequate supervision, and consistent self-care habits, you can significantly reduce your risk before it takes hold.
- Self-care training isn’t in most ABA programs yet — The responsibility falls on individual practitioners to seek it out through supervision, peer networks, and continuing education.
- Boundaries matter from day one — Setting limits on your availability and workload early is far easier than trying to walk them back later in your career.
- Supervision is more than a certification requirement — It’s one of your best tools for getting real guidance on the personal and professional challenges that come with the job.
- Compassion fatigue is a real risk in ABA work — Understanding what it is and monitoring yourself for its signs are part of responsible practice.
- Professional counseling is for practitioners too — Connecting with a mental health professional before you’re in crisis is always the smarter move.
Ready to build a sustainable ABA career? Explore master’s programs that prepare you for the full scope of practice, including the personal demands that come with this work.
