Executive Stress: Understanding & Preventing CEO Burnout

“Self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others.”
– Parker Palmer, from Let Your Life Speak

Executive burnout in C-suite leaders is an often-overlooked issue, but one Reboot is keenly aware of. Executive burnout is more than just physical tiredness and includes the loss of connection to oneself and the original purpose of leadership. The causes of CEO burnout are many, including work environments, work relationships, high demands, time pressure, lack of autonomy or belonging, and personal behaviors like people-pleasing or perfectionism. 

While there’s pressure on executives to project resilience, this can lead to isolation and exacerbate burnout because they assume they have no one to talk to. Often, founder and CEO burnout happens when an executive ties one’s identity too closely to their business. Emotional exhaustion impacts not only one’s personal well-being, but also decision making and ability to lead well. 

Overcoming burnout includes looking closely at what is driving you to exhaustion. While it’s often a mix of C-suite stressors and personal tendencies that amplify burnout, the antidote to burnout is looking closely at what got you here, a process Jerry Colonna calls Radical Self Inquiry. Executive coaching is a beneficial tool for recognizing patterns, changing behaviors, and finding new ways to respond to stress and new ways to reconnect with one’s inner self and prevent burnout. 

Suffering from Executive Burnout? See how Executive Coaching can help.  

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How to Recover from CEO Burnout

The exhaustion that accompanies executive leadership isn’t just physical. It’s the kind of tiredness that comes from pushing past your limits so many times that you can no longer hear the voice inside that once told you, “Enough. Slow down.” The burnout comes from years of trying to be everything to everyone, carrying the weight of an identity built on external expectations rather than internal alignment. 

As Jerry Colonna wrote in the first chapter of Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up: “I had spent so much of my life tending to everyone else’s needs, being the man everyone needed me to be, that I didn’t know who I was anymore. My soul wasn’t just tired—it was lost.”

Burnout isn’t about being tired; it’s about losing touch with the things that brought you into leadership in the first place. It’s not just a matter of running out of energy—it’s a loss of connection to who you truly are. It’s a numbness that won’t allow you to feel until you’ve stopped pushing. 

But where does it begin? At what point do you stop listening to yourself and start listening to everyone around you? And at what point can you recognize the rapid unravelling of your soul as it becomes an anesthetized blur? Most leaders can track burnout back to the place where it all began: work. 

What is Your Relationship to Work? 

Poet David Whyte said, “Work is where we can make ourselves; work is where we can break ourselves.” 

As humans, we work for purpose and meaning, to create value in the world, and for money. Yet very few of us take the time to explore what work truly means to us and where we first learned our beliefs about work.

What is work to you? Is it your job or your joy? What did your parents teach you about work? How did they relate to work? What is your relationship to work right now? What is success to you? What is failure?

We bring a lot to work, and we check a lot of ourselves at the door of our respective workplaces before we enter. When you understand the story under the story of your relationship to work, or discover what is truly driving you, a new understanding of why you do what you do may surface. Apperception is the gateway to stronger decision-making.

When it comes to finding meaningful work, know what connects you to your purpose and commit to aligning with it often.

What Causes CEO Burnout?

You don’t go into work hoping to become loose at the seams. Your goal is never to enter into the burnout abyss. But work is where the conditions are often so stressful that you may push past your breaking point and refuse to listen to yourself until it’s too late. 

There are markers that tell you a stressful situation is ahead. You can identify them and learn to expertly maneuver around them before they become monsters you can’t battle. If you are feeling stressed at work and are starting to lose control of yourself, ask yourself these questions: 

• Where are you experiencing high demands at work? Is the project ahead of you clear, or are you getting contrary input about desired outcomes? 
• Are you feeling time pressure? Where and how? Can you adapt or change that deadline? 
• Do you lack the autonomy to make decisions?
• Do you feel a lack of belonging? Is there bad behaviour, such as bullying or lack of inclusion? Can you identify it? 

You may also be contributing to your own eventual burnout. A harsh inner critic, for example, may be feeding your need to push past your own breaking point. Some other patterns may also be adding fuel to the fire:

• People pleasing
• A need to be right or a compulsion to prove
• Lack of boundaries
• Unrealistic expectations of yourself
• A need for recognition
• Perfectionism
• Excessive Worrying

Read More: 

How Imposter Syndrome drains our capacity to lead well and take care of ourselves.  

 

Feeling Unmotivated? Is Burnout Close? Tips to gain perspective, clarity, and your bearings when life feels overwhelming.

 

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The Pressure to Model Resilience

There’s an unwritten rule that C-suite leaders have to project an image of immovability. That to lead is to be an emotional rock–never wavering and always the team’s emotional barometer. But this rule is one forged in the past and one we’ve come to learn hard lessons from. There is no heroism in being emotionless or acting like things are fine when they’re not. There’s no prize for resilience in the boardroom or leading teams without ever showing real emotion. In fact, the opposite is true. 

Burnout can often come from the pressure to model resilience and suppress your own stress, doubts, or emotional fatigue in order to maintain a strong exterior. The insecurity felt when needing to step back, ask for help, or show vulnerability can be isolating. It is in moments of isolation that you can easily feel alone and separated from those around you, and that’s when burnout fatigue can begin to move in. 

Why C-Suite Isolation Fuels Executive Burnout

One of the most powerful tools to combat executive burnout is connection. When you project a resilient front and turn towards isolation, the ability to connect and resonate with the people around you is isolating. According to a meta-analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour, social isolation is associated with a 32% higher risk of all-cause mortality, while loneliness increases that risk by 14%. There are few lonelier people on the planet than a leader who is fearful of showing emotion and, by default, becomes detached from the other humans in the room. 

While burnout is often associated with overworking, there’s a hefty emotional component that goes along with burnout that’s often disregarded until it’s too late. Indirect isolation as a result of attempting resiliency can lead to decision fatigue, self-doubt, mental and physical exhaustion, and cynicism. When your work consumes you and there’s no one beside you to share the weight or offer perspective, you risk losing your sense of self entirely.

When Your Identity Becomes the Business

You are more than your work. Being wrong doesn’t diminish your worth. When your identity is too tightly tied to what you do, every setback feels personal—so when work falters, your sense of self can unravel with it. It’s crucial that you separate your identity from your business to avoid burnout. Otherwise, the self that you know will rise and fall with the work that is or isn’t completed. 

How can you preserve your sense of self despite the leadership decisions you make? Own your fallibility. Acknowledge to the people around you that your decisions could be wrong–and that’s ok! Sharing this reality with your team can strengthen relationships and show the people you lead that you share the common human trait of being wrong, which breeds connectivity to the people you see daily. And will lead you to avoid isolation through communication. Remember that your value is not tied to the value of the company you lead and you will successfully maintain your identity. 

Burnout & Workaholism: The Compulsion to Work
In this post and podcast, we talk about workaholism and what drives our compulsion to work. 

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How Executive Coaching Can Help You Recover from Burnout

“Stressed people are creatures of habit who lack the capacity to choose a different response,” writes Margaret J. Wheatley in her book, So Far From Home. “They keep doing what they’ve always done, moving deeper into lostness without any means to recognize where they are.” 

Executive Coaching helps you become aware of the patterns, behaviors, and habits that lead you to burn out. A good executive coach helps you reawaken your brain and your precious human capacity to create the conditions that support reflection and new thinking to emerge. As you learn more about your behaviors and patterns, you also learn skills to navigate the places that keep you stuck in non-generative cycles so that you can find a new way to respond to life, relationships, and work. In the process, you bolster your relationship to yourself. 

Early Warning Signs of CEO Burnout

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

-John O’Donohue, “For One Who Is Exhausted”

Burnout rarely announces itself. Most people who hit that wall say it came out of nowhere — but the truth is, the signs were always there. We just overrode them. We ignored the quiet pleas from our bodies to rest on a weekend instead of cramming in just a few more hours. We dismissed the pull to step outside on a warm, breezy afternoon because we had an imaginary deadline to meet. 

Those small nods from ourselves are the cues that we need to pause, take space, take time, and slow down. But how can we hear those cues over the roar of performance metrics, Slack notifications, and the unrelenting pressure to prove our worth? 

Our bodies are intelligent. They whisper before they scream. But our minds — conditioned by hustle culture — barrel forward, convinced that rest is laziness and burnout is a badge of honor. Even in a world overflowing with research about mental health, stress, and the cost of overwork, we keep running ourselves into the ground.

Very few people who experience burnout once repeat the cycle because they’ve learned to listen to an inner voice, watch for cues, and slow life down. Your well-being is the greatest gift you can give the world and will be the mark of the legacy that you leave behind. 

How can you check in with yourself to find out how you’re really doing? 

• What do you know about what you need to improve your well-being and do your best work? What does that perfect formula look like for you? 

• Be honest about how you’re doing. Give yourself grace when it comes to taking a break or many breaks. 

• How do you repeatedly deplete yourself? Is it agreeing to one more commitment? Asking a friend if you can do anything, even though you cannot? Trying to cover all gaps and complete all work left incomplete by others? Are you grappling with any project, question, or issue handed to you, even if it’s not yours to take care of? 

• Get to the root cause of why. Why do you feel obliged to take on another project, a task, or a commitment? Why do you believe that the story of not getting the work done tonight will impact your life tomorrow? Why do you push yourself past that breaking point? 

Create Your Operators Manual: How Do Your Work Best? Taking the time to reflect on who you are at your best and what you need to be at your best is the self-awareness needed to begin crafting your own user’s guide. Creating your user’s guide can help you understand what you need to thrive.

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Daily Practices That Prevent Executive Burnout

Here are some deceptively simple tools to help you find your ground and stay with yourself and your own experience when stress starts to ramp up from a turbulent world:

Notice and Name: noticing and naming is just that: noticing how you are and articulating what’s happening right now. Ask yourself: 

• How am I doing?
• How’s my body feeling?
• Where is my mind?
• What has my attention?
• Where is my current stress level on a scale of 1 to 10? How does my body let me know?

Tune Into Your Somatic Self: The Three Breaths Exercise
How turning to your breath can work magic on your present state.

 

Decide: making decisions (even small ones) to increase happiness in your life can make a huge impact on how you’re feeling. 

• What’s something specific you’d like more of in your life/work? Focus positively on what you would like instead of negatively on what you want to avoid.

• What is one small step within your power/agency you could take within the next week to get more of what you would like?

Gratitude: practicing gratitude increases dopamine and serotonin, reduces anxiety, improves our sleep and our physical health, and connects us with others. Here’s an exercise to boost your gratitude quotient.

• What do you love?

• What can you be grateful for?

• Write a thank-you letter. Think of someone on the team or in your life who has been especially kind or helpful to you or others. Write a letter or note to them about what they did that impacted you or others. Then, share that letter/note/email with the person.

Resilience is rooted in practices like these and a deep sense of self-care. Such practices allow us to manage our response to stress in our lives. 

Why Burnout Recovery Requires Discomfort

The desire to treat burnout strictly as a medical condition is a strong one. But it’s much more than that. You may not feel physically well, but burnout is a whole body experience, and that means your very being. It might be uncomfortable to do things like gratitude practice and journaling, but those are the very things that have been proven to help people step back from the burnout edge. 

The path from exhaustion to renewal begins with honest reflection – and it’s not going to be comfortable but it is necessary. 

Mountain Meditation

Science tells us that the best time to meditate is often when it’s not easy. Bringing mindfulness and perhaps even a pocket meditation for re-centering to the situations when you are getting off-kilter, ungrounded, and up-regulated are the moments that create lasting change.

​In this short clip, Reboot Coach and Facilitator Chrystal Bell leads a short meditation practice designed to support you in finding your center and returning to stillness amidst turbulent times. May it be a grounding practice for when you encounter the stormy weather of life.

Reflection Questions to Avoid Burnout

In Reboot, Jerry writes, “Burnout isn’t just about being tired. It’s about the soul’s cry for alignment—for congruence between our outer actions and our inner truth.” Where might your inner truth be wanting alignment with your outer life? 

Here are a few questions to guide your inquiry:

• What are the signs—subtle or loud—that my soul is asking me to stop?
• What does rest look like for me now, not as luxury, but as necessity?
• What have I believed about my worth and productivity? Where did I learn that?
• When have I felt most whole, most true to myself? What was present then?
• What would it mean to honor the Sabbath in my life? How might I begin?

May these questions open a gate. And may you find yourself, again, on the other side.