When people read about employee burnout, they often picture someone farther down the organizational chart. CEOs and other senior leaders often disappear from this conversation. As a leader yourself, even you may be more worried about how to prevent burnout in your company than about how it affects you as an individual.
This can create a dangerous cycle. Senior leaders may invest so much in protecting their workforce, but treat their own exhaustion as a private problem. The more you grapple with it on your own, the bigger it becomes.
But the available research suggests that CEOs face alarming rates of burnout and emotional exhaustion, often even higher than the employees they’re trying to protect.
The Lieberman Center provides discreet, concierge-style psychiatric care designed around the needs of New York executives. Book a free consultation call today to get started.
CEO burnout statistics
We desperately need more research on how burnout affects top leaders, not just employees. But the numbers we do have suggest that CEO Burnout is happening at alarming rates.
- Over 80% of CEOs and other senior leaders report a level of exhaustion that indicates burnout.
- Almost 100% of leaders who report high exhaustion levels also say their mental health has declined.
- 40% of leaders have considered leaving their position to prioritize their well-being.
- The CEOs of smaller or startup companies (fewer than 50 employees) are the most likely to experience burnout, with their burnout rate reaching nearly 95%.
- Over 80% regularly leave work feeling physically or emotionally exhausted.
- More than half of senior leaders feel afraid of how stigma would affect their careers if they sought mental health support.
Source: Deloitte Canada, Inspiring Insights: Well-being and Resilience in Senior Leaders — A Risk to Post-Pandemic Recovery, published July 29, 2021
What causes executive burnout risk?
Burnout develops through chronic work-related stress — when the coping strategies you have no longer are enough to deal with the stress you’re under. That stress usually comes from how these roles are structurally designed. Individual factors can also increase your risk for burnout, but that doesn’t mean that burnout is a personal failure.
Organizational risk factors
- Pressure of decision-making: You’re at the top, where all of the pressure converges. You can delegate the work, but accountability still travels upward — and the buck ultimately stops with you. When a deadline is missed or the company underperforms, stakeholders expect you — not your employees — to explain what happened and decide what comes next.
- Long working hours: In recent reports, workload is the most commonly reported source of stress among senior leaders. In reports, the number of extra hours worked have been directly correlated to mental health decline.
- Employee retention: The pressure to protect employee well-being was the second most reported source of stress. You constantly have to juggle shareholder demands with the needs of your workforce. When employees become disengaged or leave, retention becomes another business risk that you are expected to solve.
- Isolation at the top: The role can also be profoundly isolating. There are few people who understand the weight of the pressure, and even fewer people with whom you can safely discuss your internal emotional life.
- Emotional labor of being “always on”: There’s also the pressure of performing, or always being “on.” You may always need to be extremely careful about what you show. Appearing calm and confident becomes part of the job, even when the situation is uncertain.
Personal risk factors
- Little time for yourself: You may be at higher risk of burning out if you don’t take time for yourself. Reports show that many CEOs make little time for their own well-being. Work demands can fill any space you leave open. You may not have time for basic self-care, much less leisure and hobbies.
- Lack of boundaries: Having a personal difficulty with setting limits and boundaries can also heighten your risk. Granted, every issue can feel consequential when you are responsible for the company’s performance. But if you’re the type of person who is strongly averse to letting people down, then you may be more likely to burn yourself out.
- Lack of emotionally safe relationships: Your risk can increase when you don’t have relationships in your life where you can be fully honest. You need people around whom you can discuss your emotional life without having to manage their perception of you.
- Identity fusion: Your company may become central to how you understand yourself. When your identity becomes fused with the business, stepping away from work can feel like losing part of who you are. When the business goes through challenges, you may feel like you, as an individual, have failed.
Warning signs of burnout in CEOs
It’s important to be aware of the early warning signs of CEO burnout. Your performance and productivity may be some of the last things to change. You may continue hitting targets and being a reliable leader, which can cover up how much burnout is affecting you. Even if you’re productive, that doesn’t mean your cognitive and mental health aren’t in decline.
Warning signs can include:
- You feel like you have no cognitive space left over for long-term strategy. You’re just trying to stay afloat.
- Routine decisions begin taking longer. You may also make major decisions impulsively because you want the issue off your plate.
- You become more controlling or micromanaging, and start revising work that you previously trusted your team to handle.
- You lose patience with capable senior employees or react strongly to relatively minor mistakes.
- You feel guilt and helplessness when you think about your employees. They may tell you what a great leader you are, but you find that hard to internalize.
- You feel emotionally detached from the company and struggle to care about its future. This may be true even if you founded the company.
- You rely more heavily on alcohol or other substances to get through the day or to wind down.
- You experience unexplained physical symptoms, including persistent headaches, digestive problems, sleep disruption, muscle tension, or a racing heart.
- You repeatedly fantasize about selling the company or leaving your industry, even though you haven’t made a realistic plan to do so. Sometimes, those fantasies may include death or suicide.
If you’re having thoughts about hurting yourself or ending your life, call local emergency services or 988. You are not alone.
Keep in mind that many of these symptoms can also occur with depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, or a medical condition. A clinical evaluation can help identify what is contributing to your symptoms and rule out other explanations.
How enduring CEOs deal with depression and burnout
Exhaustion affects almost every CEO, and that is a serious conversation the executive world needs to have. But many CEOs have built resilience and stayed in their roles for years or decades without collapsing. It’s possible to succeed in your role if you decide that’s what you want.
The key isn’t to avoid stress altogether — that may be unrealistic for people who carry so much responsibility — but to build sustainable burnout recovery methods into the way you operate on a daily basis. These tips work much more effectively before you’re in crisis.
Delegate
Delegation is key for burnout prevention.
A CEO in a Reddit discussion about burnout recovery put it bluntly: “Figure out your priorities. Only work on big rocks. Delegate everything else.” Another wrote, “If you aren’t nearly replaceable, you need to hire the right people, install the right systems, and build the right processes.”
Making yourself replaceable can feel counterintuitive. But a company that cannot function without your constant involvement is also a company that cannot give you any meaningful time to take care of yourself. Delegation reduces the number of decisions that require your direct involvement. You may find you feel less overwhelmed if you feel like you can safely step away once in a while.
Talk to your peers
Connect with other CEOs who understand the role and its expectations without requiring a long explanation. Peer relationships give you a place to discuss board pressure or leadership doubt more honestly than you may be able to with your employees or family members. Other people may deeply care about you, but that doesn’t mean they always understand.
Regular social contact also helps you recognize when your experience is no longer reflective of ordinary executive stress. Isolation makes unsustainable conditions feel “normal,” so it’s important to have people in your life who can’t raise the alarm when they’re clearly not.
Take care of your body
Sleep and exercise need to be treated as operational and medical priorities. Sleep deprivation affects attention and emotional regulation. Consistent exercise gives your body a regular way to recover from sustained stress.
Pay attention to substance use as well. Alcohol, stimulants, or sedatives can start to feel like tools for managing your energy. Over time, they can worsen sleep and make it harder for your nervous system to recover.
Find boundaries that work
Boundaries are important. But generic “self-care” advice about signing off at 5 p.m. may have little relevance to your life. Your boundaries need to reflect your role and the actual demands of your company.
For one CEO, this may mean assigning a delegate so you can leave the office at a consistent time a few nights each week. Another may need to work remotely from the mountains for a month. And for some, it might mean making bigger changes like leaving the role altogether.
The important thing is to set boundaries in a way that works for you and actually makes a sustainable difference in your mental health.
Challenge internalized stigma
More than half of senior leaders believe that being open about mental health concerns could damage their careers. That stigma can become internalized. You may start to believe that needing mental health support would be a sign of weakness, or interpret depression or exhaustion as evidence that you are no longer capable of leading.
It may help to view psychiatric treatment as a medical intervention that can help protect one of your most valuable professional assets: your cognitive endurance. It gives you a way to address chronic exhaustion before it compromises your health or functioning. If stigma is a factor, you don’t need to share your decision to seek treatment with anyone else.
Concierge executive burnout treatment for New York CEOs
Burnout recovery sometimes requires mental health treatment. Psychiatric care is a medical intervention that can help protect your cognitive endurance when chronic exhaustion begins to affect your mental health or ability to lead. It can help address issues like poor sleep and anxiety.
At the Lieberman Center for Psychotherapeutics, executive mental health treatment may include:
- A comprehensive psychiatric evaluation to identify what is contributing to your symptoms
- Medication management when clinically appropriate
- Lab testing to assess physical factors that may be affecting your mental health
- Coordination with trusted therapists, medical specialists, or executive coaches when needed
- A personalized treatment plan that accounts for the demands of executive leadership
Our concierge-style model is designed for executives who require a high level of discretion. Because we don’t bill insurance, you can feel confident that your mental health records will remain strictly within our practice.
Treatment is available in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County.
Schedule a 15-minute consultation call to learn more about how we can help.