We use the word burnout far too loosely.
I’ve spoken before about the difference between genuine burnout and the much more common state of being depleted, under-recovered and operating with less capacity than the demands of your life require.
I’ve experienced that state myself, more than once. And one of the dangerous things about it is that the warning signs can be blindingly obvious in hindsight and incredibly easy to explain away when you’re living through them.
The first time for me was in my early 30s. I’d sold my first business to Accor and was balancing business with work in professional sport. I came from a middle-distance running background and had carried a fairly useful, but ultimately dangerous, narrative from the track into my career: I can outwork everybody. Give me more. I’ll find a way.
For a while, that wiring is rocket fuel. You get opportunities, say yes, work hard, build a reputation and people trust you with more. The problem is that success can reinforce the very behaviour that eventually brings you unstuck.
I remember going on holidays during that period and sleeping for 18 hours. My mum asked if I was okay. For anyone who knows me, sleeping for 18 hours is about as normal as me deciding to spend a week sitting quietly beside a pool doing nothing.
I was cooked.
But I rested, recovered, changed a few things and eventually got going again. In my head, that was evidence I’d solved the problem.
I hadn’t. I’d recovered from the consequences without really changing the operating system underneath them.
When high capacity becomes a liability
Years later, I felt some of those patterns returning. This time I was at KPMG and a few months into the role I started noticing some familiar signs: irritability, difficulty focusing and concentrating, tiredness and a lack of my normal creative edge.
I could still perform, and that’s an important distinction.
If you’d seen me in a meeting or working with a client, you probably wouldn’t have looked across the table and thought, “Andrew’s falling apart.” I could masquerade pretty well. But the people who knew me could tell I wasn’t at full capacity, and I could certainly feel it.
The biggest signal was that I couldn’t relax. My nervous system felt hijacked and there was no real pulse between stress and recovery. It was stress followed by more stress, with the occasional attempt to collapse and recover when there was finally enough room.
The difference this time was pattern recognition. I’d experienced significant depletion before, knew what I was looking at, got some coaching and changed things much faster.
That experience has stayed with me because I now see versions of the same pattern in senior leaders all the time.
Being able to tolerate a high workload doesn’t necessarily mean you have high capacity. Sometimes it just means you’ve become very good at operating while depleted.
There is a big difference.
The whispers, nudges and pushes
I was reminded of this in a recent Performance Intelligence Podcast conversation with performance dietitian Jessica Spendlove.
At one point in her career, Jess was working across seven professional sporting teams. Her job was to help elite athletes fuel, hydrate, recover and perform, yet she was neglecting one of those fundamentals herself: recovery.
Jess described being completely depleted for years while telling herself it was normal and simply the price she had to pay for the opportunities she’d been given.
What I really liked was the language she used to describe how her body tried to get her attention.
There were whispers, then nudges, then pushes.
The whispers were relatively innocuous: getting sick more frequently, disrupted sleep and little lapses that weren’t typical of her. None of those things in isolation screamed crisis, which is precisely why they were so easy to rationalise.
I recognised the underlying narrative immediately because I’d told myself a version of the same story.
I have a greater capacity than most people, therefore I can keep absorbing more.
And here’s the problem. That belief often contains a grain of truth.
A lot of the executives, entrepreneurs and athletes I work with do have unusually high capacity. They’re driven, conscientious, resilient and capable of carrying more than the average person. Those attributes are often part of the reason they’ve been successful.
But nobody is invincible.
You cannot continually outrun your physiology simply because you’ve been successful at outrunning everyone else.
The burnout holiday is not recovery
Jess used another phrase in our conversation that made me laugh: the burnout vacation.
You work at full throttle for months, finally get to Christmas or the family holiday, collapse for the first few days and slowly drag yourself back towards baseline. Just as you’re beginning to feel human again, the holiday finishes.
Then you return to work and say, “I’m refreshed.”
Are you?
Or have you simply recovered enough to start depleting yourself again?
There is an important difference between recovery as an operating rhythm and recovery as emergency repair.
In elite sport we would never deliberately program an athlete to train relentlessly until their physiology started falling apart, give them two weeks on a beach and call that a sustainable performance system. Stress and recovery are programmed together because adaptation requires both.
Yet in the corporate world we routinely treat recovery as something that happens after the work is finished.
The work is never finished.
That’s why Strategic Recovery has to sit inside the way you operate, not outside it.
Build habits that survive a bad day
One of the practical ideas Jess uses with her clients is what she calls a domino habit: one behaviour that gives the day an anchor and helps the other pieces fall into place.
The important part is that it has to survive a bad day. It needs to work at home, in the office, on the road or sitting in an airport lounge.
A domino habit doesn’t need to be impressive. It might be a 20-minute walk before your first meeting, eating breakfast rather than running on coffee until midday, protecting a short transition between work and home, or putting your phone away at a set time each night.
The specific behaviour will be different for everyone. What matters is that it reliably helps you get into rhythm and can survive the days when life gets messy.
The mistake is choosing a domino habit that only works when everything else is going well.
High performers have a tendency to benchmark themselves against the best version of themselves and decide that should be their baseline.
You might remember what you were doing in your late 20s when you had fewer responsibilities, or the six-month period when you were training five mornings a week, eating perfectly and getting eight hours of sleep. Then you add a bigger role, children, ageing parents, international travel and a calendar that looks like Tetris, while still judging yourself against the old standard.
It doesn’t make sense.
Build your habits for the season of life you’re actually in and make your minimum standard robust enough to survive your busiest week, rather than designing it exclusively for the week when everything goes perfectly.
High performance is incredibly boring
After more than two decades working around elite sport and high-performing leaders, I’ve become convinced that people are attracted to the outcome of high performance and routinely underestimate how boring the process is.
The Olympics look exciting. Winning a premiership looks exciting. Building a successful company looks exciting.
What happens behind those outcomes is a lot less glamorous.
I describe the best performers as maniacal, monotonous and mechanical. Maniacal about the handful of things that genuinely make a difference. Monotonous because they repeat them thousands of times. Mechanical because eventually the fundamentals become so embedded they don’t need to renegotiate them every morning.
That’s the bit we don’t put in the highlight reel.
And it applies just as much to executives as athletes.
Sustainable performance isn’t built through the occasional heroic week. It comes from having an operating rhythm that allows you to absorb pressure, recover, adapt and then go again.
Know your early warning signs
This is the question I think is worth sitting with.
Not: Am I burnt out?
By the time you’ve reached genuine burnout, you are dealing with something very different.
A better question much earlier in the cycle is: What changes in me when I’m starting to run down?
Mine are pretty clear now. I become more irritable. My concentration starts to fragment. I lose some of my creativity and, most importantly, I find it difficult to switch off.
Your early warning signs won’t necessarily look like mine.
Maybe you’re normally patient and suddenly you’re snapping at people. Maybe you usually think clearly and find yourself rereading the same email three times. Maybe your sleep changes, exercise disappears from the week or you find it much harder to switch off at night.
Know your normal well enough to notice when you’re moving away from it.
That’s what I missed the first time and recognised much faster when those patterns returned.
There is a tendency to think performance problems arrive like a car crash: dramatic, obvious and impossible to ignore. My experience, and what I see working with senior leaders, is that depletion is often much more insidious.
Capacity starts leaking around the edges while you’re still performing well enough to convince yourself nothing is wrong.
And this is why language matters. Not every exhausted leader is burnt out. Sometimes you’re tired. Sometimes you’re under-recovered. Sometimes the demands in your life have increased without a corresponding increase in capacity. Sometimes your systems and operating rhythm simply aren’t supporting the way you’re trying to perform.
Those things still matter. In fact, recognising them for what they are gives you a much better opportunity to do something about them.
I don’t think the answer for ambitious people is to stop pushing. I certainly haven’t stopped, and I don’t intend to. Ambition, challenge and periods of intense effort are part of a meaningful career.
There will be periods when you push hard. The skill is knowing how to recover hard as well, so you can keep performing when it matters without continually borrowing from tomorrow.
Don’t wait until depletion becomes the operating model. Learn to recognise the signs while you still have room to change the trajectory.
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