Why Your Best People Are Burning Out (and What Leaders Can Do About It)

The Burnout Blind Spot

Here is an uncomfortable truth: the people most likely to burn out in your organization are the ones who love what they do.

That runs counter to the assumption most leaders hold, that burnout is a problem reserved for people in bad jobs or toxic environments. Guy opened our conversation with a personal story about his first year in private practice, when he was so consumed by his work that he failed to recognize the signs of burnout in himself. “I thought, well, I like what I do. I’m not at risk for burnout,” he told me. “But we actually know that the more passionate you are about what you do, the more you can lose sight of how much you’re working versus how many areas of your life are going unattended.”

This is a critical insight for leaders. Your highest performers, the ones who volunteer for extra projects, who stay late, who seem energized by the mission, are often the most at risk. And because they appear engaged, nobody thinks to check on them.

The Autopilot Problem

Guy introduced a concept he calls survival mode, and it resonated with me immediately. When people are stretched across a full-time job, a side project, caregiving, or any combination of demands, they stop thinking strategically and start operating on autopilot. They put their heads down and just try to get through the day.

“It numbs you out,” Guy explained. “Unless you are aware that you really need to find the five minutes, the ten, to pause and actually be more thoughtful about your day and how you can manage yourself more effectively, you are likely to fall into all the traps.”

The problem compounds because we tell ourselves it is temporary. We frame the current stretch as a busy period, a sprint that will end after the next launch, the next quarter, the next promotion. But the sprint never ends. And the longer someone operates in autopilot, the harder it becomes to course-correct.

For leaders, this means paying attention to how your teams talk about their workloads. When someone consistently frames their situation as “just getting through it,” that is not resilience. That is a warning sign.

Stress Has a Sweet Spot, and Most People Have Blown Past It

One of the most useful frameworks Guy shared involves what he calls the Goldilocks zone of stress. Some stress is necessary. Without any pressure at all, performance suffers because the stakes feel too low. But as pressure increases, there is a window where people do their best work, where the challenge is high enough to bring out focus and effort but not so high that it triggers self-sabotage.

The trouble is that most professionals have sailed right past that zone without realizing it. And once they have, the effects cascade. “We start to mismanage the stress, and we inadvertently start doing things that make the stress worse,” Guy said. “Our mistakes are going to compound. We default to habits that don’t serve us. And then our performance is gonna start to drop, sometimes precipitously.”

Leaders often respond to declining performance by adding more pressure, more check-ins, more urgency. That is exactly the wrong move. The goal is not to eliminate stress. The goal is to bring it back into a range where people can actually function well.

The Real Cost of Rumination

Perhaps the most damaging pattern Guy described is rumination, the habit of replaying upsetting work events over and over again after hours. A rude comment from a coworker. A public reprimand from a boss. A colleague taking credit for shared work. These incidents follow people home, and the mental replay loop can consume an entire evening.

Guy put it bluntly:

“You just took a task that could take 15 minutes, and you supersized the time you spent thinking and fretting about it into a whole week. You take something bad, and you smear it over the entire week unnecessarily.”

This matters for organizations because rumination is not just a personal well-being issue. It is a performance issue. People who ruminate sleep poorly, eat poorly, and show up the next day less focused and more reactive. Over time, the pattern increases their risk of cardiovascular disease. And as Guy pointed out, all that mental energy spent replaying events is essentially unpaid overtime, with no actual work getting done.

The alternative is structured problem-solving. Instead of spinning on the emotion, ask: Is there something here I need to address? If so, what outcome am I seeking, and what is the best way to get there? Guy’s research shows that shifting from emotional replay to deliberate problem-solving reduces stress and makes the intrusive thoughts less compelling. Once you have a plan, it is far easier to let the situation go.

For leaders, this has direct implications for how you manage conflict on your teams. When difficult incidents occur, helping people move toward resolution rather than letting things fester is not just good management. It is a health intervention.

Your Job Is Probably Not as Stressful as You Think

Guy shared a striking example from his clinical work. A client told him that 90% of her job was stressful. When he walked her through an exercise to identify the specific moments that actually caused stress, the real number was closer to 10%.

The gap between perception and reality matters enormously. When someone believes their entire job is stressful, their body responds accordingly. They spend the full workday in a state of activation, flooded with cortisol, braced for the next problem. “We have not evolved to be in fight or flight all day, all the time, day after day,” Guy said. “That was never the case.”

The fix is surprisingly simple: get specific. Instead of sweeping statements like “my job is terrible” or “my boss is impossible,” identify the actual moments that create stress. Most people will find pockets of their week that are low-key, even enjoyable. Recognizing those pockets changes the entire workweek experience.

This is a coaching opportunity for managers. When a direct report expresses feeling overwhelmed, resist the urge to either dismiss the concern or try to fix everything at once. Instead, help them get granular. Which meetings are actually difficult? Which tasks create the most dread? Once the real pressure points are visible, they become manageable.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

One of the most practical takeaways from our conversation was Guy’s concept of personal early warning signs. When work starts to take over, certain parts of life are always the first to go. For some people, it is exercise. For others, it is the pile of unopened mail, the skipped dental appointment, the dead houseplant.

Guy described noticing these patterns in his clients during video sessions. “Sometimes people will blur their background, and sometimes they’ll forget,” he said. “And sometimes I’ll get a look behind people, and I’ll be like, yikes. The disarray, the dead plants, the piles of mail. You have let things go.”

The key insight is that these signs are consistent within each person. The same things tend to slip first every time. Once you know your pattern, you can catch the slide early, when it takes minimal effort to correct, rather than waiting until the neglect has compounded into something much harder to address.

Guy was particularly pointed about the neglect of health. He now routinely asks clients at every level of seniority when they last had a checkup, blood work, or a dental visit. “If you have to blink hard and really think about it,” he said, “it’s been too long.”

Taking Back the Evening

For leaders concerned about always-on culture, Guy offered a practical framework he calls the red light, green light technique. The core problem is not that employees have to respond to one email in the evening. The problem is that they have to read a hundred emails to figure out which one needs a response. That constant checking destroys any sense of personal autonomy.

The solution involves framing the evening around a “main event,” whatever the person has chosen to do with their time, and building in a single, deliberate intermission for catching up on messages. The timing is the person’s choice. The duration is contained. And the rest of the evening belongs to them.

This reframe is powerful because it restores the feeling of control. The emails still get handled. But the person experiences the evening as theirs, with a brief, intentional pause for work, rather than as a series of constant interruptions.

For organizations thinking about boundaries and after-hours communication norms, this is a framework worth sharing with your teams. It does not require a policy change. It requires a mindset shift.

What Leaders Should Take Away

The through line in Guy’s work is that most of the damage work does to people happens not because the work itself is unbearable, but because of how we think about it, frame it, and fail to create boundaries around it. That is both the bad news and the good news. Bad news because these patterns are deeply ingrained. Good news because they are changeable, often with surprisingly small interventions.

If you lead people, here is where to start. Pay closer attention to your high performers. They are the ones most likely to be running on empty while appearing fine. Help your teams get specific about what is actually stressful rather than letting sweeping generalizations drive their experience. Create space for people to problem-solve rather than ruminate after difficult incidents. And model the boundaries you want your people to set.

None of this requires a massive culture overhaul. It requires awareness, intention, and a willingness to treat your people’s mental bandwidth as the finite resource it actually is.

Brandon Laws is the host of Transform Your Workplace, a podcast dedicated to delivering actionable insights for leaders and HR professionals.