You Don’t Burn Out From Doing Too Much

In 2021, the tennis world called Naomi Osaka a diva. She was the highest-paid female athlete on the planet, four Grand Slam titles, and she refused to sit in front of a room full of reporters and answer their questions. Difficult. Too big for the room.

The story came in two versions. She was a diva. Or she was fragile. Too much, or not enough. Difficult, or broken.

Both versions missed the same thing. Neither was asking the right clinical question about what burnout actually looks like from the inside.

Listen to what she, actually said — not about the press conferences, not about the withdrawal. About winning. “When I win, I don’t feel happy. I feel more relieved. And then when I lose, I feel very sad.”

That’s not pressure breaking someone. That’s a person whose inner life had gone completely offline. Success had stopped registering. The win landed not as joy but as the absence of disaster. Something had been draining quietly, below the level of performance, below the level anyone could see — including her. And it took a single question, in a room full of people, to make the gap visible.

She was at the top. And she felt nothing like it.

I heard a version of this in my office three times this week.

Not from an athlete. From the executive who just got the global role she spent fifteen years building toward. From a founder the moment his term sheet closed. From the leader whose name is on the press release.

The global role executive sat down across from me and said almost exactly what Osaka said on that court. 

“There’s not a lot to look forward to in the day.”

That’s it. That’s the signal. Not collapse. Not breakdown. Just the quiet disappearance of felt experience inside a life that looks, from the outside, extraordinary.

The feeling had a name. It just wasn’t the one anyone expected.

It’s a Wednesday morning. You open your calendar and something in you goes quiet in the wrong way.

Not quiet like focus. Quiet like recognition — the particular stillness of realizing that not one thing in the day ahead feels like it came from you. The meetings were placed there. The travel was arranged. Somewhere between the ask and the answer, a commitment formed before you’d finished deciding whether you wanted to make it.

You are working at the highest level of your career. And you feel, inexplicably, like a bystander.

This is the quiet tension that precedes burnout. Not the collapse — that comes later. This is the earlier signal, the one most high performers are trained to override, the one that gets named adjustment period or transition or just a hard month until the body makes its own argument.

We have a cultural story about burnout that goes something like this: you worked too much, you took on too much, and eventually the system broke down. The prescription that follows is equally blunt — do less, say no more, protect your energy. Take the vacation. Set the boundary.

It’s not wrong, exactly. But it misses something important. And for the executives, founders, and leaders I work with, it often misses the thing that’s actually happening.

 

The Variable We Keep Getting Wrong

Several years ago, I was asked to give a talk on burnout to a group of physicians. I did what any speaker does before standing in front of a room full of exceptional Harvard Medical School Sports Medicine and Orthopedic physicians — I went into the literature. They like data and they like slides.

What I found surprised me.

The research on burnout consistently identifies autonomy as one of the most powerful protective factors. Not workload. Not hours. Not even the difficulty of the work itself. The variable that predicts whether someone burns out isn’t how much they’re doing — it’s how much agency they feel in the doing of it.

Put plainly: you can work at extraordinary levels and not burn out, if the work feels chosen. And you can work at moderate levels and flame out completely, if it doesn’t.

This distinction matters enormously for the people I work with, because the cultural story — you’re tired because you’re doing too much — leads them to the wrong intervention. They don’t need to do less. They need to feel more authorship over what they’re doing.

 

What It Actually Looks Like

I’ve been working with a senior executive — I’ll call her Clara — who recently stepped into one of the most demanding leadership roles in her field. She now leads at the global level of one of the world’s most competitive professional services firms, overseeing multiple high-stakes practices across industries and geographies. She has, by every rigorous external measure, arrived.

She arrives on screen almost perfectly punctual — unless a call is running over. Meticulously dressed, with an on-screen presence curated to match the clients she serves at the highest level of the placement industry. Her nail color precisely matching her attire. Jewelry perfectly placed. Her auburn hair without a strand out of place. Every detail saying: I pay attention.

And she is exhausted in a way she can’t quite name.

When we started pulling it apart, the pattern became clear. Her calendar was being filled by EAs responding to an influx of meeting requests — without her input. She was saying yes to things before she’d finished deciding whether she wanted to do them. Events, trips, calls — accumulating at a pace faster than her own reflection could keep up with.

“I think I need to commit to less,” she said.

“Commit less doesn’t give you anything to do,” I said.

What she actually needed wasn’t fewer commitments. It was to slow down the pace at which she made them. “Commit less” is a destination without a road.

“What you need is something to practice — a pause between the ask and the answer long enough to actually decide.” When I put it that way, her eyes opened and she exhaled.

Here’s what’s easy to miss: Clara had more autonomy than she was using. She independently decided to push a New York trip from Monday to Tuesday when she wasn’t feeling well. She restructured a multi-day event so she wouldn’t have to travel on Sunday. She identified which meetings could be delegated, which calls consolidated, where her chief of staff could absorb the volume that was absorbing her.

These were acts of agency. She just wasn’t registering them as such.

But here’s the part the research doesn’t always make explicit: autonomy isn’t protective simply because it exists. It has to be exercised consciously to function as a buffer.

What I see far more often than an absence of autonomy is what I’d call unreflected autonomy — the freedom to choose, deployed on autopilot. You say yes because the ask came in, because the role seems to require it, because the opportunity is real and the reflex is faster than the reflection. The calendar fills. The trips accumulate. The commitments compound. And because you technically chose all of it, the exhaustion is harder to name.

This is a clinical pattern I observe consistently in high-performing leaders: the freedom to choose, operating below the level of conscious awareness — and therefore providing none of the psychological protection that genuine autonomy is documented to provide.

This is the particular trap of high-performing leaders in expanded roles. They are not powerless. They are, in fact, the ones doing it to themselves — not from weakness, but from the same orientation toward opportunity and obligation that got them the role in the first place. The autonomy is present. It’s just not being claimed.

The antidote isn’t doing less. It’s doing what you’re doing with more clarity — a continuous, honest audit of what each commitment is actually costing you versus what it’s giving you. Not as an accounting exercise. As a discipline of self-knowledge.

That gap — between the autonomy you actually have and the autonomy you experience yourself as having — is exactly where burnout takes root.

 

The Armor We Forget to Put On

“I worry about what people think,” Clara has said more than once in our work together. Not as a confession. As a fact she’d long since accepted about herself.

It’s a thread that runs underneath everything. And as her role has expanded — more visibility, more people watching, more opinions arriving uninvited — the thread has pulled tighter.

This is the part of leadership nobody prepares you for. The volume of other people’s reactions goes up, and a specific kind of fatigue arrives with it that has nothing to do with workload. It sounds like concern.

A close colleague told her directly — “the job was too big, the timing too hard.” The concern was genuine. And Clara carried it into the next week like a second assignment.

A senior partner in one of the practices she now oversees frames every organizational development through the most adversarial lens available. Her CEO sends a message that says it’s your call while someone else is already signaling the room is unhappy.

Three versions of the same situation land in her purview before the role is even announced, and none of them came with a request for her input.

“How much of what you just described is actually yours?” I asked her once.

She stopped.

That’s the question at this level. Not how do I stop caring what people think — that’s not the goal and it’s not possible. The work is more precise than that. To recognize when someone else’s anxiety, territorial frustration, or unresolved agenda is looking for a surface to land on — and to feel it without making it yours.

For a leader moving toward the CEO seat, this capacity isn’t optional.

The higher you go, the more you become a screen onto which others project.

The colleague who reliably delivers the most negative available interpretation of every situation isn’t giving you data. He’s giving you his fear.

The question stops being what do they think of me and becomes whose feeling is this — and does it actually belong to me?

That’s not armor in the defensive sense. That’s the capacity that makes reflected autonomy possible — the pause between what lands on you and what you decide to carry.

When you stop absorbing what isn’t yours, you finally have room to choose what is.

 

The Distinction That Changes Things

When I describe the autonomy framework to high performers, something often shifts in the room.

The version of burnout they’ve been carrying — I’m doing too much and it’s going to break me — has a helpless quality to it. The work is enormous. The role is enormous. What are you supposed to do, stop?

But this version — I have more agency here than I’m using, and the practice is claiming it before I can — is actionable. You can’t change the scope of a global leadership role. You can change how quickly you give yourself away inside of it.

Precision is the road. Not fewer commitments — more deliberate ones. Knowing exactly what you’re being asked to give, deciding whether you’re willing to give it, and communicating from that clarity without hedging. Not asking. Telling.

The calendar that fills without your review. The yes that comes out before you’ve thought. The concern you absorb from someone else and carry as your own. These are the places where agency leaks. And where agency leaks, exhaustion follows — not because of the volume, but because nothing in the volume is registering as chosen.

Osaka didn’t stop playing tennis. She stopped letting the system define what tennis meant to her. But it wasn’t clean. She came back in 2022 and struggled. Lost in the third round, then the first round, then withdrew entirely. Went through coaches. Became a mother. Fell to No. 42 in the world. There were matches where she cried on court. Matches she seemed to give up mid-set. Years where the version of herself that had won four Grand Slams felt like someone else entirely.

Four years later she said something that stopped me: “Tennis is something I live for, but it’s not the reason I’m alive.”

That’s not a comeback. That’s someone who finally knows the difference between what they do and who they are. She didn’t find herself quickly or gracefully. She found herself the way most people do — through the long, unglamorous process of losing the false version first.

What she found on the other side of that was reflected autonomy — not the freedom to choose, but the awareness to know what she was choosing and why. The work was always there. What changed was who was choosing it.

That’s available to you too. Not quickly. Not cleanly. But it starts with the same question she had to answer.

You burn out when nothing you’re doing feels like yours.

 

Journal Prompt

Where Is Your Autonomy Actually Living?

Burnout rarely arrives as a single event. It accumulates in small surrenders — moments when someone else’s urgency became your calendar, when a reflexive yes replaced a considered one, when you absorbed a worry that wasn’t yours to carry.

This prompt is an invitation to look at the ledger.

• Think back over the past two weeks. Identify one commitment you made before you finished deciding whether you wanted it. What was the precursor — an obligation, a reflex, an external pressure? What would a slower decision have looked like?
• Where in your current week do you feel the most agency? Where do you feel the least? What’s the structural difference between those two zones?
• What is one decision — about your time, your calendar, your presence — that you have more authority over than you’re currently exercising?
• Pick one commitment currently on your calendar that you made before you finished deciding. Ask honestly: what is this costing you, and what is it giving you? If the answer is more cost than return — what would precision look like in response?

You don’t have to do less. You have to do it more deliberately. Start there.