Burnout Isn’t About Workload – It’s About Where Your Energy Gets Stuck

For years, we’ve talked about burnout as if it were a simple math problem: too many hours, too much pressure, not enough rest. The implied solution is equally simple, work less, take more breaks, create better boundaries.

And while all of that matters, we are missing something essential.

Most of the leaders and professionals I work with aren’t burned out because they’re lazy, undisciplined, or incapable of managing their time. Quite the opposite. They are competent, conscientious, and deeply committed. They care about their clients, their teams, and the quality of their work.

What they’re experiencing isn’t exhaustion from effort alone.
It’s depletion from where their energy is getting stuck.

Lately, senior leaders are saying, “The work itself isn’t the problem. It just feels heavier than it used to.”

That word—heavy—is telling.

The heaviness rarely comes from doing more. It comes from carrying forward ways of thinking that no longer fit the environment they’re operating in. It comes from spending enormous amounts of mental and emotional energy protecting what once worked, defending certainty, and reacting to constant change.

In other words, burnout isn’t just about workload. It’s about energy misallocation.

Here’s the through line I see again and again:

Energy follows mindset. When leaders change how they think, capacity follows.

A fixed mindset doesn’t announce itself loudly. It shows up quietly, through habits that once made sense:

• Relying on past expertise instead of staying curious
• Defaulting to certainty when ambiguity is actually required
• Protecting proven models instead of experimenting with what’s emerging

None of these are mistakes. They’re understandable responses to success.

But over time, they become energetically expensive.

In my work with senior leaders, energy often gets stuck when they spend most of their capacity on:

• Reactivity – responding to what’s urgent rather than shaping what matters
• Certainty-seeking – trying to eliminate ambiguity instead of navigating it
• Defending the status quo – protecting systems, roles, or identities that once delivered results

This kind of energy expenditure doesn’t show up on a timesheet. It shows up in decision fatigue, emotional drag, and that persistent sense of being “on” without ever feeling renewed.

The problem isn’t effort.
The problem is where effort is being applied.

The first “energy reset” isn’t about doing less. It’s about seeing differently.

It begins when leaders recognize that their depletion may be less about volume and more about mindset—about the internal posture they’re bringing to complexity, uncertainty, and change.

A growth mindset doesn’t magically remove pressure. But it does something powerful: it frees energy.

It allows leaders to:

• Shift from defending to learning
• Move from reaction to response
• Replace certainty with curiosity

When that happens, capacity begins to return—not because the work disappears, but because energy is no longer trapped in resistance.

If you’re feeling depleted, a more useful question than “How do I work less?” might be:

“Where is my energy getting stuck?”

• What assumptions am I still protecting?
• What ways of working am I defending because they once worked?
• Where am I expending energy to maintain certainty rather than create movement?

These aren’t abstract questions. They’re practical ones. And they point toward a different kind of solution, one that starts with mindset, not time management.

In Part 2 of this article series, we’ll explore one of the most counterintuitive truths for seasoned professionals: why expertise itself can become an energy drain, and how a growth mindset restores capacity by shifting leaders from proving to learning.

Because burnout doesn’t begin with exhaustion.

It begins when energy stops moving.