What is really going on in burnout?

I think one of the most common mistakes people make with burnout is this:

they treat it as a workload problem only.

Sometimes it is.

But often it is also a procedural problem.

By that I mean this:

long before a person burns out, they may already have learned an internal procedure for how to deal with pressure.

Do not notice your body.
Do not slow down.
Do not feel too much.
Do not need too much.
Override.
Push through.
Stay useful.
Keep performing.
Recover later.

For some people, that procedure starts very early.

Perhaps you grew up in an environment where stress was normal, need was inconvenient, feelings were not well helped, and worth became tied to being good, capable, useful, or undemanding.

If so, then what looks like “drive” in adulthood may sometimes be something more complicated.

Not simply ambition.

But procedural self-abandonment.

In my work, I often meet people who can run entire teams, companies, or households, but cannot yet recognise “enough” before their body says it for them.

Their body says:
I’m tired.
I’m tight.
I’m overwhelmed.
I need recovery.

And the learned procedure says:
keep going.

The emotional system says:
this is too much.

And the learned procedure says:
don’t be weak.

The self says:
I matter too.

And the learned procedure says:
later.

That is why insight alone so often fails.

A person may fully understand that they are overworked.

You may know you need rest, boundaries, support, movement, sleep, nourishment, and less pressure.

But when the moment comes, the old procedure runs.

Ignore the signal.
Push past the feeling.
Stay functional.
Pay for it later.

That, to me, is why burnout is often more than exhaustion.

It is the cost of repeatedly treating internal signals as obstacles rather than information.

So when I think about burnout, I do not only ask:

how much is this person carrying?

I also ask:

what have they learned to do when their body and emotions say “enough”?

Because that is where the procedural work begins.

Not just with reducing load.

But with building new skills:

body awareness
recovery and decompression
emotional processing
self-worth not tied only to output
boundaries without shame
and the ability to stop before collapse forces the stop for you

Burnout is not always a failure of effort.

Sometimes it is the procedural overuse of effort in the absence of enough internal permission to recover.

If you’d like to understand more about the psychology of burnout, here’s an explainer video: https://youtu.be/_xGocjrxbV8


And if you’d like a 3-minute practice on how to listen to your body’s need for rest without turning it into shame, here’s a short guided video: https://youtu.be/o3eLkRNCkH4

AI is forcing the helping professions to face an uncomfortable question:

what can only a human being do?

I have been thinking about this through work I did with a founder-led start-up.

For months, the team lived under existential threat:

possible bankruptcy,

possible job losses,

money running out,

the fear of not being paid for work already done.

And still they had to carry on.

By necessity, much of my focus was on the founder-CEO.

What he needed was not more information.

Not another framework.

Not a sharper prompt.

Not better bullet points about resilience.

What he needed was for another human being to look him in the eyes and see his terror.

To recognise it.

To validate it.

To help him stay with it.

To say, in effect:

feel your feet on the floor

feel the chair holding you

breathe

let yourself feel the enormity of this

the terror

the despair

the hopelessness

the shame

And then, through co-regulation, to discover something vital:

that he could feel these feelings without being destroyed by them

that he could experience them, process them, and still remain himself

that underneath all that fear he was still a worthwhile human being, with real ideas, real capacities, and a real will to continue

that he could get back up and rejoin the battle

That is not just insight.

That is not just reflection.

That is one human nervous system helping another human nervous system bear what feels unbearable, until a different capacity begins to come online.

I saw the same thing in quieter form with one of the team.

At one point I looked them in the eyes and said that no one had really seen or heard the quiet contribution they had been making to the whole effort.

They cried.

Sometimes what changes a person is not a clever interpretation.

It is finally being seen.

AI can do many marvellous things.

It can help us think, structure, reflect, draft, rehearse, and plan.

I use it myself.

But some of the deepest human changes still seem to happen in relationship:

when terror is contained

when shame softens

when a person dares to be fully themselves

when they discover they can survive the feeling

when they are helped not only to endure adversity, but to grow through it

That is why I think the future will belong not to those who vaguely defend “human touch”, but to those who can say much more precisely what human beings can uniquely help one another to do.

One of the more unsettling things a recent romance scam has taught me is this:

I suddenly saw the cycle.

The day after I realised what had happened, I was lying in the sun.

Doing what I now try much more deliberately to do:
noticing what my body was carrying,
staying with the feelings,
processing them rather than trying to out-think them.

Shock.
Disappointment.
Hurt.
Sadness.
Fear.
Anger.
Grief.

A lot of grief.

And then, after all that, something softened.

Finally, I could just lie there.
Relax.
Feel the heat on my skin.
Enjoy the peace and quiet.

And from that place, my mind drifted back to my previous relationship, which ended about a year ago after six years together.

And I could suddenly see the shape of the whole thing.

Meet someone.
Exchange messages.
Tentative meet-ups.
Committed meet-ups.
Lunch.
Dinner.
Museums.
Theatre.
Shopping.
Weekends away.
Spa.
Holidays.
Airport lounge.
Business class.
Five-star hotels.
Tuscany.
French Riviera.
Santorini.
Tenerife.
Dubai.

Work hard.
Pay the taxes.
Build the life.
Fall in love.
Struggle.
Try harder.
Fall out of love.
Process.
Recover.

And then finally,
lie down in the hot sunshine,
relax,
and enjoy the peace and quiet.

That was the moment something clicked.

The thing I was imagining the relationship would eventually give me was the very state I was already lying in.

Peace.
Quiet.
Relief.
Enoughness.

And yet, from within that peace,
I could feel my mind beginning to sketch the next cycle again.

That is what struck me.

Not only that a scam can exploit longing.

But that human beings can become attached not only to a person,
but to the life that begins assembling itself around them in the mind.

Not “imagined” in the sense of unreal.

Imagined in the sense that relationships are always partly lived forward through hope,
anticipation,
fantasy,
effort,
projection,
plans,
promises,
and the meaning we attach to what this might all become.

And sometimes, I think, what we are really falling in love with is not only the person.

It is the promise that, this time,
through love, effort, money, beauty, travel, companionship, repair, and all the rest of it,
we might finally arrive somewhere we can rest.

Somewhere we can stop.
Lie down.
Relax.
And enjoy the peace and quiet.

Once I saw that, I could not help wondering how often this same structure appears elsewhere.

In ordinary dating.
In long relationships.
In couples work.
In the way people can keep investing extraordinary amounts of hope, labour, patience, money, and emotional credit into what the relationship is going to become.

Not always because anyone is consciously deceiving anyone.

But because hope itself can become organised into a cycle.

I think there is something here worth understanding much more deeply.

Not only how emotional connection is created.

But how relationships can become organised around the promise of the very relief we are still learning how to give ourselves.

As a leader, how do you build this in other people?

A good place to start is:

How do you build it in yourself?

I’m thinking here about intrinsic motivation.

The shift from:

“I have to”
to
“I choose to because it matters to me.”

That shift is one of the most important leadership questions there is.

Because many leaders are trying to create energy, ownership, creativity, and commitment in other people…

without fully understanding how those states are built in themselves.

If I only know how to drive myself through:

pressure,
fear,
approval,
guilt,
deadlines,
or the avoidance of criticism,

then that is very likely what I will export into the culture around me.

I may call it performance.

I may call it standards.

I may call it accountability.

But underneath it, I may be training compliance more than commitment.

Short-term effort, perhaps.

But not deep ownership.

Not sustainable motivation.

Not real engagement.

In my work, intrinsic motivation is the ability to move from external pressure to inner purpose — from “I have to” toward “I choose to because it matters to me.” It is about learning to power behaviour from meaning, values, curiosity, and growth.

So as a leader, if I want to build this in other people, I think I need to ask at least four questions of myself first:

1. How much of my own effort is still pressure-driven?

2. Do I know what genuinely matters to me, beyond performance and approval?

3. Can I connect a task to meaning, values, curiosity, or contribution?

4. Do I know how to help someone move from obligation to ownership, rather than just pushing harder?

Because we do not really teach motivation by telling people to be motivated.

We teach it by how we frame work, how we relate to pressure, and how we help people find a reason to care that is deeper than fear.

When intrinsic motivation is underdeveloped, what often shows up is procrastination, self-criticism, dread, guilt-driven effort, and swings between overdrive and collapse. In work, that can look like compliance without creativity, effort without aliveness, and commitment that fades quickly. As intrinsic motivation grows, we tend to see steadier energy, deeper engagement, clearer priorities, more creativity, and persistence that lasts.

So perhaps the leadership question is not only:

How do I get more out of people?

But also:

How do I help people find a more meaningful source of fuel?

And often, the place to begin is closer to home:

What is driving me?

Because if I cannot answer that honestly for myself, I may struggle to build it well in anyone else.

Why knowing what to do is so often not enough

Most of us already know the basics.

Sleep more.
Eat better.
Move regularly.
Get outside.
Pause.
Breathe.
Reduce stress.
Connect better.

And yet many of us still struggle to do these things consistently.

Why?

Because knowing is not the same as having built the procedures that make healthier choices more available.

I was thinking about this in relation to my own life.

Six days a week, my alarm is set for 4.47am.

That is the time it takes me to:

get up,
drink coffee,
practise my Greek on Duolingo
(1674-day streak and counting),
have a bath,
get dressed,
prepare my gym kit,
and drive to the gym in good time for a 6.30am class
(or two, depending on the day).

I do not drink alcohol.

I eat a vegan diet with no artificial additives.

I am usually in bed by 9pm, reading my Kindle. At the moment, Game of Thrones.

It is not that these choices are right for everyone.

They are just mine.

And the important point is this:

I do not have to think much about them.

It is not a daily internal debate.

Not:
“Should I go?”
“Do I feel like it?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Perhaps I’ll skip it.”

I just do it.

It is my procedure.

I follow it.

And it works.

I don’t do this because I wake up every morning overflowing with motivation.

I do it because the procedure is already there.

That is what I mean when I say change is often less about more information, and more about training better defaults.

If we are disconnected from our body,
organised around threat,
running on stress,
or have never really learned how to notice and respond to what is happening inside us,

then even good advice can remain strangely hard to carry out.

We may know we need rest,
but not know how to come down.

We may know we need movement,
but not know how to shift from pressure into action.

We may know we need boundaries,
but not know how to tolerate the discomfort of setting them.

We may know we need sleep, stillness, nourishment, or connection,
but not know how to make those choices from a regulated, values-led place.

Procedural learning is what happens when a healthier response becomes more available through repetition.

Not just understood.
Not just agreed with.
Not just admired.

But practised enough that, under real-life conditions, we are more able to do it.

Because under pressure, most of us do not rise to the level of our intentions.

We fall back on what is more deeply learned.

So sometimes the more useful question is not:

What do we know we should do?

It is:

What have we actually trained ourselves to do?

We do not just need better advice.

We need better procedures.

And once a good procedure is built, it reduces cognitive load rather than adding to it.

That, in my view, is where much real change begins.

Good procedures reduce cognitive load.

But the quality of the fuel still matters.

That is where intrinsic motivation comes in — and I’ll say more about that in my next post.