Part 1 - Executive Burnout Recovery: When You Run Out of Fuel

How I recovered from burnout and moved from surviving to thriving.

TL:DR: Burnout is when your ‘spark’ or drive to be creative or curious has gone out and you are feeling emotionally numb and frozen in the dark. You have lost sight of your purpose and passion, along with your capacity or willingness to do the things you need in order to change that situation. The good news is that you can recover from burnout and I’m here to help you do just that. with practical, easy tips to get you started.

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“I am overwhelmed. I don’t know how to organize myself. I don’t know where to start or how to proceed. It is all too much. All of it. I am swamped and sinking into freeze. I just want someone else to show me what to do. No, better yet, to do it for me. I don’t have the capacity to think for myself anymore or to make decisions, for me or for anyone else. And there is this constant pressure to do so. To perform. To be articulate, decisive, useful. Right. I have to be right. I don’t want to fuck it up. I DON’T WANT THIS RESPONSIBILITY!!!”

This snippet from my stream-of-conscious journaling was from November 2021. I'd left my last eight-year corporate role at a major tech company only a few months prior, already exhausted and emotionally spent. Yet, instead of self-care and re-energizing, I somehow decided to write a book and help start a new business at the same time—both of which I’d never done before.

At a certain point, my exhaustion shifted into something darker. After almost three decades in the corporate world and then starting my new ventures, I wasn’t just tired; I was completely depleted.

You probably know the feeling. Once you reach a level of seniority in your career, the pressure to be an expert, to know everything, along with the responsibility to implement it all at impossible speeds and to ever higher standards, starts to feel overwhelming and never ending - and all that was even before AI was thrown into the mix.

If you are anything like me, your sense of self-worth becomes intrinsically tied to what you can produce, whether that’s a product or profit. But what happens when the desire to produce - your spark to invent and create; to dream, plan and do - is extinguished?

This is burnout.

It is when your access to your fuel source of energy, creativity, confidence and curiosity has been blocked. You are down to the dregs, and suddenly, when you try to reach for it one more time, you find it's run dry.

You also might recognize this as the point when you ran out of fucks to give.

It’s when everything feels too big, too hard and too much effort. It’s when you’re so overwhelmed with the pressure, the responsibility and the pace that you just can’t anymore and you ‘nope’ out.

If you are staring down the barrel of that reality as I was, I’m going to explain what is happening to you, why you can't just "work your way out of it," but how you can recover.

I thought the way out of burnout was to get more organized, efficient and proficient at what I was trying to do - I was wrong.

The Causes of Burnout: The Pressure to Perform, Perform, Perform

In the corporate world, there's usually no time for learning curves or upskilling on the job. To perform, you need to already know how to do what they want of you, or be able to pick it up quickly.

It’s also not enough to just keep doing it as you have always done; you have to constantly innovate, keep pace with evolving technologies, budgets, and resources, and then outperform your competitors, or worse - your co-workers.

In these jobs, you are expected to improve or work within complex processes that cover multiple departments, technologies, and teams. Maybe you are trying to understand and balance the business and customer needs, or manage a team, project or a product.

And if that’s not enough, management adds the pressure of constraints and deadlines that—seriously—can feel like they get pulled out of somebody's arse just to meet some goal on a six-page planning and projection report.

Then, just to make it fun - while you are busy trying to implement all these goals, they pull the rug out from underneath you.

Usually, they do it without any warning and without any regard to how it impacts your daily life. It happens constantly: you change managers, teams, projects, directors, departments, or buildings.

The only constant is change.

The environment makes it impossible to stabilize, forcing you to recalibrate. Again, and again, and again.

And that's fucking exhausting.

The Downward Spiral: The Freeze State

When you are bombarded by this sheer volume of information and constant upheaval, all while you are under pressure to perform and produce, your brain and body get overwhelmed. It gets harder and harder to keep your head above water, and when it is time to learn, adapt, grow, and get new skills, you simply do not have the energy or capacity to do it anymore.

This downward spiral leads to being stuck in the freeze state. Your nervous system doesn’t have time to rest and regulate; instead, it is permanently stuck in survival mode.

When this happens, the parts of you that are curious, calm, confident or creative become increasingly inaccessible.

In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, this is called losing access to your "Self Energy"—the driving force of your ability to perform, and the fuel in your tank to learn, grow, dream, plan, or move into action. In IFS, the self is seen as having ‘parts’ that are sub-personalities or personas within us, which are often created as protective mechanisms in childhood to ensure safety.

So instead of having access to all the helpful qualities of Self Energy, when you’re in the spiral to freeze state, you are overrun by the anxious protective parts of yourself, and they are freaking the fuck out. That is not conducive to functioning; that is conducive to shutting down.

And then the shame spiral starts causing those parts to be even more entrenched, even more validated in their negative thinking. Their instinctive and usually unhelpful protective behaviors (like procrastination, avoidance or confrontation) lead to negative reactions from your bosses, threatening your career and finances, and consequently, your home, health and relationships; and ultimately, your emotional well-being. With every downward spiral you find your spark getting more and more dimmed.

It's a flywheel no one wants to talk about.

The Trap: Why Don't We Just Leave?

When you hit this level of burnout, people inevitably ask: Why didn't you just leave?

I can’t talk for everyone, but for me, the truth was because I was so burned out I didn’t have the capacity to look for another job. By this stage I was too exhausted and too far down the fear and shame spiral to believe that I would be able to get one somewhere else so I couldn’t muster up the energy or confidence for interviews.

For you, it might be a sunk-cost fallacy combined with "better the devil you know", or maybe it’s the golden handcuffs of vesting shares or insurance coverage that keeps you ensnared.

So instead of leaving, I adopted the old, tried-and-true “Move-Distract-Do” approach. I looked for temporary relief by finding new roles within the same organization. But with every move the lifespan of my enthusiasm and productivity got shorter and shorter. Every turn on the new job treadmill kept me in the same place, just more worn down and depleted.

I felt like a failure. I felt like a fraud. And that shame flywheel spun faster. By the time I left, and even for years after, every fiber of my being resisted going back into that corporate situation, because my system now reacted to it like a trauma.

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Your Next Step (The 60-Second Action)

Right now, you don't need to fix your entire career. But I do want you to take 60 seconds to simply check in with your body.

Are your shoulders up by your ears? Are you taking shallow breaths? Are you clenching your jaw? Just notice the freeze state. You don't have to fix it yet; just acknowledge that it is happening.

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But if the "Move-Distract-Do" loop is actually making us worse, why do we stay stuck in it? Why do we know we need to rest, but physically can't let ourselves do it?

The answer involves a subconscious trap most executives don't even know they are running. We break down exactly what it is—and how to stop it—in Part 2 - Executive Burnout Recovery:Why you can't just quit and Part 3 - Executive Burnout Recovery:How to reignite your spark.