“I am supposed to be traveling tonight to Washington, and then I am off to New York on Saturday morning to attend a board meeting, followed by a major industry conference there. Then on Tuesday, I fly to Miami to pick up the family, take a full day of Zooms, and then go on vacation to Brazil the next day.”
This was not an uncommon schedule—back-to-back travel, back-to-back meetings, with a board meeting squeezed between a conference and a transcontinental flight. But then he said something I didn’t expect. “I need to slow things down, or I am not going to be able to show up the way I want for anything, anywhere.”
For years he struggled to admit that his ambitious and often grueling calendar was taking a toll on his health—and longer still before he began to address it. And only hours before his flight, Haio made the deliberate choice to reprioritize, protecting his health and what truly mattered. “I have learned that I need to slow things down to go fast.”
He had learned to treat his well-being as something worth protecting—not a trade-off or an indulgence, but a mindful act of prioritization, and at last to tell exhaustion apart from something more serious. But he had not always been good at saying no. He hadn’t always been able to identify when he was on the brink of burnout.
Haio Barbeito is one of those CEOs whom I wish I could clone. He is visionary, people-centered, and excellent at leading through chaos and transformation, all while delivering results that honor both business demands and people’s humanity. When I met Haio, I was in lockdown in my apartment in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosphorus, wondering what I was going to do with my life and career now that the world had shut down. Haio was looking for a chief HR officer—and we instantly hit it off. We both shared a passion for people, for the future of work, and for making a difference. Before I knew it, Haio was making me an offer, and I was on a plane back to Canada.
But behind Haio’s people-centric, compassionate leadership was his own story and struggle with work. One that he didn’t share with me until after we had both left Walmart. Haio had spent over thirty years at Walmart. He started on March 20, 1991, and never really stopped working—from trainee to CEO of multiple organizations in multiple countries. He worked twelve-plus consecutive years wearing the CEO hat before that moment in a hotel room when he made the call to cancel his presentation at a major conference and his trip to Washington. And even then, it still felt uncomfortable for him. It wasn’t until he was sitting in that hotel chair—on the verge of anxiety—that he opened up to me about his own battles.
Haio had been having anxiety attacks since 2018. He recalled that his first was on a plane—a place he spent a lot of time because most of his roles either involved extensive travel or living apart from his family. He attributed his struggle with saying no and the stress of his job to three key factors:
- Not resting and recharging
- Stretching himself too thin between the domains of his life
- Over-identifying emotionally with his work
Notably, none of his drivers were linked to being in a toxic workplace. Instead, like many, he had developed an unhealthy relationship with work.
One of the key reasons he left Walmart after three decades was that it had become too much of Haio’s identity. Even after leaving Walmart, if Haio goes into a store that is not in good condition, he calls for the store manager and says, “What are we doing here?” He tells me this with a soft smile, then, in the same breath, knowingly admits, “We also need wake-up calls because work is not that important,” which he says both as sage advice and as words he needs to hear himself say out loud.
And here’s the part that still sits with me.
Haio was my boss when I was at Walmart Canada. Though he cultivated a psychological safety that enabled me to openly discuss my unhealthy work relationship and anxiety struggles, he never once revealed his own ongoing battle. As the CEO, he carried positional power, decades of tenure, and it was only when we were both on the outside of the company that he could finally say, “Me too.”
Haio shared that his anxiety attacks appeared whenever he “stretched” himself too thin—when he was trying to be everything to everyone and, as a result, wasn’t fully present anywhere. He took the CEO role for Walmart Canada at the height of the pandemic while his family remained in Chile because of lockdowns, leaving him to navigate a grueling commute and exhausting isolation. These arrangements are common in senior roles, even glamorized as a representation of the CEO’s commitment. I could relate to what he was telling me in so many ways. I remember being on a plane so much that when someone asked my eight-year-old daughter where we lived, she says, “I don’t know. Wherever my mom is.” But these road-warrior lifestyles, celebrated in corporate mythology, are deeply unhealthy—for leaders and their families.
Haio told me that the literal and figurative stretching of himself across thousands of miles pushed him beyond normal exhaustion into burnout and anxiety. “It usually happened when I was trying to be everywhere for everyone,” he says. “I wasn’t there as much as I wanted for my family. I wasn’t there for my team. I wasn’t there for my energy. When your energy is all over the place instead of where it’s most important, you become depleted. We talk about being present—but it’s difficult.”
It took Haio nearly three decades and five years of anxiety attacks before he started saying no and talking about his anxiety. In my case, it took me over thirteen years before I could recognize the difference between normal exhaustion and burnout or being on the verge of triggering my anxiety. And it’s precisely because we have failed to educate people about what an unhealthy relationship with work looks and feels like that people struggle to tell the difference between normal exhaustion and burnout. This is also difficult because we’ve gotten used to burnout and constant exhaustion. It’s also blurry because the medical world has provided a very narrow definition of burnout, with no simple way to assess it. It’s blurry because even if we could tell the difference between normal tiredness and burnout, most people don’t know how to engage in restorative rest or recovery.
But it doesn’t have to be that convoluted.
Haio’s story, my story—it’s all too common. I am sure you could easily generate your own version of this story: being on the precipice of burnout and exhaustion, regularly wondering if what you are experiencing is “normal” or something that you should be concerned about—that is, when you stop long enough to notice at all. People are so time-starved and stretched so thin across the domains of their lives that they operate in a constant state of feeling scattered, fatigued, and depleted. And like Haio, they often do not even know it’s happening until they get slapped in the face with shortness of breath, a moment of dread, and tightness in the chest, when the body finally moves from whispering to a full-blown tantrum to get your attention.
And we can never achieve thriving if we cannot distinguish between normal work-related exertion and chronic, accumulated, unhealthy stress that leads to burnout.
How Do I Know?
I see this all the time in my work with top performers. People ask me, almost verbatim, the same question: “How do I know if I am just tired or if it’s something more serious?” It becomes a hard question for people to answer because they have lost a baseline comparison of what healthy tiredness and exertion feel like. So many people have confined themselves to a level of stress, loneliness, overstimulation, and depletion that they genuinely cannot tell when fatigue has crossed into something deeper. Then, like with Haio, there is stigma and shame. The voice that tells us we should be able to handle this, while telling us we are failures for feeling tired in the first place. That hitting a limit renders us weak. That stopping makes us losers. A voice that incessantly asks, “Why are you unable to do what everyone else appears to manage?”
This voice is the “work-hard monster.” According to this monster, a lack of success stems from laziness, unproductivity, and feeling not deserving of rest. This is the worker-as-villain story playing nonstop in our heads. The other part of the confusion comes from how burnout emerges. Burnout is not like a cold; you don’t go to sleep well and wake up the next day with a fever, sore throat, or runny nose. Burnout builds over time—it accumulates; it creeps in slowly. As it progresses, it establishes roots in various aspects of our lives. It disrupts sleep, impairs cognition, drains energy, and causes irritability. It weakens our immunity and ability to maintain our health. And it pulls us away from or even fractures the healthy relationships we need to thrive. We lose sight of our worth and value, becoming ineffective. The work-hard monster is ruthless and couldn’t care less about us; yet so many people allow it to dictate how we think about our worth and identity, and how we take care of ourselves.
This is where Haio’s story becomes a mirror. What he experienced—the scattered energy, the overidentification with work, the sense of being everywhere and nowhere, the fatigue, the sense of dread he was feeling as he looked at his calendar—are precisely the signs you should pay attention to. If it feels like the world is spinning, like the ground beneath you is shifting, and you’re having a hard time keeping your balance, that is a sign you should not ignore. Haio had to get past the work-hard monster that instructs us to just “push through,” and he had to ignore the social stigma that tries to convince us we are not good enough. But that was just the beginning. Haio then needed to pause and pay attention to what his mind and body were telling him. Knowing that his experience surpassed normal tiredness, he had to fight the numbness he had conditioned himself to feel. He then had to get guidance and support. He communicated with family, contacted his boss to inform him of his experiences, and spoke candidly with his team. And the last part is the part Haio is still working on—the ongoing work of protecting himself from the slow, insidious nature of burnout and overwork, the practice of building a protective shield so that he doesn’t re-enter the loop.
Here’s the simplest distinction I can offer to differentiate between regular tiredness and burnout or exhaustion, should you ever find yourself in a situation like Haio’s: Is the fatigue or exhaustion you’re experiencing something that can be resolved with rest? Assuming the answer to that question is yes, you likely remain in the safe zone. If the answer to that question is no, then you need to pause and act. Normal tiredness and exhaustion can be eased by catching up on sleep, taking an extra day off, or practicing other restorative practices. Burnout cannot.
When Haio looked at his calendar, he knew that if he pushed himself to work as he had planned, he would create a state of burnout that resting alone could not fix. He was standing at the edge of burnout with his toes nearing the cliff, and he caught himself before he fell. He had learned through several years of anxiety attacks that he needed to intervene, and he did.
A Better Performance Model
Haio’s story is one of trial and error of learning how to recognize the signs of burnout and exhaustion only after years of battling the symptoms. But we need a better way. We need a mechanism, guidance, and support that helps people understand the difference between burnout and exhaustion long before they are standing at the cliff’s edge.
And I knew just the place to look for that guidance: the world of sports. That is why I was nearly giddy, like a fan girl of workload management, when I got the chance to speak with Lauren Buschmann. My excitement came from a simple hope: that Lauren could help me see burnout, performance, and exhaustion differently—through a lens that actually works. Lauren met me over Zoom, wearing a red zip-up training top, with her hair pulled back—typical office attire when you are the Director of Sport Science with Canada Basketball.
Lauren grew up playing basketball, but a series of injuries transformed her love for the game into a fascination with injury reduction. That curiosity led her into the science of recovery. She became a certified strength and conditioning specialist, studied cardiovascular physiology and rehabilitation, and now works with elite athletes performing at the highest levels.
Recovery and Regeneration
In the sports world, athletes and their support teams—people like Lauren—are obsessed with recovery and regeneration. Everything starts by working backward. They identify a key moment in the future: a major game, a playoff tournament, or the Olympics. They then evaluate the volume and intensity required during those critical periods—moments when optimal performance is nonnegotiable. From there, they build a training plan designed to increase endurance and capacity while minimizing injury risk. Workload is monitored relentlessly.
The goal is not just to improve cardiovascular performance or muscle durability, but to do so without overloading the athlete. Coaches constantly adjust training based on the athlete’s response. As athletes approach a key competition, the sports science team closely monitors for outliers: increased soreness, unusual fatigue, nagging injuries, or elevated stress. When signs appear that fall outside an athlete’s normal baseline, the sports science team immediately provides feedback for adjustments to training.
This approach prevents acute load spikes—sudden surges in intensity that the body is not prepared to handle. Instead, capacity is built intentionally and gradually.44
And here is the part that matters most: this is a multiyear process. Lauren’s team works to build an athlete’s load tolerance over one, two, three, even four years. It is a slow build.
As Lauren describes it, building resilience without injury, exhaustion, or burnout is a “slow simmer.” “Realistically, you would never expect an athlete to do no training for a year and then say, ‘Okay, go play in this tournament and see how you perform,’” she tells me. “We are always aiming to build a person’s tolerance to endure the right volume of stress and load.”45
No, You Can’t Do It Alone
Lauren emphasized another essential pillar of performance science: deep relational awareness. “We really try to know our players in our environment,” she explains. “We are always trying to understand the people we’re working with.” When an athlete who never complains, who consistently pushes through discomfort, suddenly starts saying they are tired, that immediately registers as a red flag—not because fatigue is unusual, but because it is an outlying behavior for that individual.
People are far less effective at self-assessment than we like to believe. Athletes may not recognize these changes in themselves. That is why it becomes the team’s responsibility to help the athlete notice the deviation and then identify what might be driving it. Sometimes the cause is physical. Sometimes it is psychological. Often, it is both.
By combining close observation with self-reported data, Lauren’s team can quickly identify and respond to what she calls “maladaptive performance” before it turns into injury, illness, or long-term decline. Now pause and imagine how this might look in the world of work. Imagine managers who truly know their teams. Colleagues who understand one another’s baseline patterns of energy, engagement, and performance. When someone struggles, teammates and leaders do not wait for collapse. They help the individual notice that something is off—supportively and with psychological safety. The individual may not yet recognize they are operating below their best. But through collective awareness and support, they can pause, reflect, and identify the root cause before it escalates.
The Success of Staying Healthy
Lauren measures success in a way that is both simple and profound: athlete availability. If her athletes are healthy and available for selection to an Olympic team, a World Cup, or a national competition, she is doing her job. It is not her team’s role to play the games, but to ensure athletes are healthy, resilient, and capable of performing at their peak when they need to.
The parallels to work are easy to draw. Most countries already have occupational health and safety standards. There are professionals whose role is to keep people safe at work—not unlike, at least in theory, Lauren’s role in sport. And yet, most workplaces still operate in ways that actively undermine long-term human performance.
Figure 3-1 illustrates the Performance Paradox and compares how sports treat development versus how it’s typically viewed in a traditional work setting.
Figure 3-1:
The Performance Paradox: Work vs. Sport
| Work World | Sports World | |
|---|---|---|
| Internal Beliefs | Worth is equated with effort and output | Performance is optimized through cycles of stress and recovery |
| Social Norms | Overwork is socially rewarded; burnout is normalized | Rest, deloading and off-seasons are structurally embedded |
| Measurement and Feedback | Exhaustion is treated as subjective and ignored until a point of failure | Fatigue, readiness and recovery are actively monitored |
| Guidance and Support | Limited coaching, inconsistent or reactive support | Integrated support and disciplined self-monitoring |
| Time Horizon | Infinite performance expected in a finite human body | Performance is seasonal, cyclical and time bound |
Copyright © 2026 by Nabeela Elsayed Consulting Inc. All Rights Reserved
1. Beliefs About Worth and Productivity
In the world of work, effort and output measure worth. Exhaustion has become the baseline. Sleep debt is institutionalized. Being busy is celebrated.
Athletes, by contrast, know their baseline. They understand how their social, physical, and mental health directly affects performance. As Lauren put it, those whose job it is to perform at the highest level understand how their bodies feel when they are at their best—and what supports that state. “You never mess with a basketball player’s pre-game nap,” she reminds me, because they know the positive effect that sleep has on their performance.
2. Stigma, Culture, and Social Norms
In work culture, exhaustion and burnout often come with shame: Why can’t you handle this? Everyone else seems fine. Hustle culture convinces us that productivity should be possible regardless of preparation or recovery. In sports, athletes learn to consider workload, rest, recovery, and psychosocial stress as inseparable. There is a clear mind–body–performance connection—and an understanding that strain beyond readiness leads to breakdown.
3. Measurement and Feedback
Burnout creeps in. It builds quietly over time, masked by pace and pressure. Most people have no tools to measure or assess their physical and mental load until failure forces attention. In sports, athletes and coaches measure everything measurable. Active monitoring of fatigue, readiness, and recovery allows for early intervention rather than crisis response.
4. Guidance and Support
The medical field poorly defines burnout, diagnoses it inconsistently, and offers inadequate support. Work addiction and workaholism remain absent from diagnostic frameworks. The average worker has no guidance or support to assess what is healthy or unhealthy work. Athletes, meanwhile, are surrounded by professionals—sports scientists, medical teams, psychologists—whose sole job is to support sustainable performance. There is both self-reporting and external observation, creating a feedback mirror that helps athletes stay connected to themselves.
5. Time Horizon
People treat work like an endless marathon run at sprint speed, demanding infinite performance from a finite body. Sports, on the other hand, are seasonal. Performance is time bound. Intentional cycles of intensity and rest build capacity slowly over years.
Why Burnout Is Hard to Identify
In my conversation with Lauren, a lightbulb went on. It became clear why the average person struggles to recognize burnout: They are navigating their relationship with work on their own. To break the cycle, people must challenge belief systems, fight social norms, self-monitor without feedback, address root causes without guidance, and do it all while keeping the engine running. It’s no wonder that burnout escapes detection until it affects people undeniably.
But what if you had a guide, a process you could follow that allowed you to reimagine and renegotiate your relationship with work, success, and achievement? What if you didn’t have to do it alone? Before we get there, though, you first need to know where you are on the spectrum of exhaustion or burnout.
Recognizing Burnout Before It Breaks You
Exhaustion is like running out of gas. When you refill the tank with sleep, rest, or time off, then energy returns. Burnout is different. It is like the engine breaking down. Even with rest, nothing improves. Ask yourself: Does rest restore me? If yes, you are likely dealing with exhaustion. If not, burnout may be present. Recognizing the difference is not just about performance; it is protective.
Exhaustion
- Short-term overexertion
- Relieved by rest
- Energy returns
- Purpose and meaning remain intact
Burnout
- Chronic, unmanaged stress
- Persists despite rest
- Cynicism, detachment, loss of joy
- Physical and emotional symptoms
One reason burnout is so difficult to recognize is that it doesn’t arrive in a single moment. Burnout progresses in stages. Researchers have identified twelve stages of burnout, first articulated by Herbert Freudenberger46 in the 1970s. Most people do not realize where they are in the stages until they are already deep inside it. Most people don’t go from feeling fine to completely depleted overnight. Instead, they move gradually along a path—often rationalizing, normalizing, and pushing through each stage until their body or mind forces a stop.
Another reason burnout can be hard to recognize is that people do not always progress through the stages in the same order, since not everyone experiences every stage. That being said, understanding how burnout develops provides a powerful map. Below is a simplified overview, not to be used as a checklist, but as an orientation for how burnout most often emerges.
The Twelve Stages of Burnout
1. The Need to Prove Yourself
Work carries more than professional weight. Success, validation, and worth blur together. You feel driven to show up, deliver, and prove yourself to others and to yourself.
2. Pushing Harder
You work longer, say yes more often, and stretch yourself across more roles and expectations. The calendar fills. The pace quickens. Boundaries soften.
3. Neglecting Yourself
Rest, sleep, relationships, and health softly move down the priority list. You tell yourself you’ll get back to them “when things calm down.” But they never do.
4. Ignoring the Signals
Your body is signaling fatigue, tension, irritability, and brain fog. You notice them, but you don’t stop. You push through. This is where numbing begins.
5. Work Crowds Everything Else Out
Work dominates how you see yourself. Other sources of meaning and joy are slowly shrinking. Your life narrows, and work has become the dominant part of it.
6. Normalizing the Strain
What once felt concerning now feels familiar. Exhaustion becomes the baseline. You tell yourself this is just what high performance requires. The work-hard monster gets louder.
7. Pulling Back Emotionally
You’re still showing up, but with less presence. Less patience. Less emotional availability. Relationships start to feel like too much effort.
8. Noticeable Changes
Others begin to see it before you do—erratic behavior, irritability, sharpness, distraction, withdrawal. You may hear comments like, “You seem different lately.”
9. Running on Autopilot
You do what needs to be done, but without feeling connected to it. Days blur together. You feel scattered, flat, or oddly detached from your own life.
10. Emptiness
Joy, happiness, and achievements don’t feel meaningful anymore. There’s a sense of hollowness, like you’re pouring energy into a system that gives little back.
11. Collapse
Anxiety, despair, or hopelessness surface. The body or mind forces a panic attack, illness, or emotional shutdown.
12. Burnout
The system has broken down. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Recovery now requires more than rest; it requires repair.
From Recognition to Orientation
If the twelve stages felt uncomfortably familiar, that’s not an accident. The stages can help you recognize patterns, but this is also where most people get stuck. Something feels amiss to them, but they cannot articulate what. They feel they might have crossed a line, yet they’re unsure of its location. And without a baseline or feedback mechanism, it’s easy to second-guess yourself or dismiss what your body and mind are telling you.
In the sports world, this is exactly where measurement, feedback loops, and support come in; in fact, research shows that athletes who have strong positive communication with the people around them have fewer injuries and higher availability. Athletes don’t rely on gut feeling alone to determine whether they’re ready, strained, or at risk. They track fatigue, readiness, and recovery so they can intervene before injury or collapse occurs. They have people around them who help them recognize when they are not themselves and support them in catching and repairing whatever they are struggling with before it affects their performance or health.
Yet the average person suffers, only to be told that when they can’t self-recognize and self-repair, something is wrong with them. That’s why it’s helpful to introduce a tool, not as a diagnosis or a judgment, but as a mirror.
The Burnout Assessment Tool
The Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT)47,48 is a research-based instrument developed to capture burnout symptoms. Rather than asking only how tired you are, it looks across the dimensions that burnout affects. Specifically, it assesses patterns across four interconnected areas:
- Exhaustion: Feeling physically and mentally depleted
- Mental Distance: Emotional withdrawal, cynicism, or disengagement
- Cognitive Impairment: Difficulty concentrating, remembering, or thinking clearly
- Emotional Impairment: Irritability, emotional volatility, or not recognizing yourself in how you respond
Together, these dimensions reflect how burnout shows up not just in how we feel, but in how we function, relate, and make sense of our lives.
The BAT is not a clinical diagnosis, but it is a scientifically validated tool that is used around the world and is, thankfully, gaining more traction. It doesn’t tell you what to do next. What it offers is orientation—a way to move from “this resonates” to “this is where I may be.” If your results suggest you’re still in a zone of exhaustion, that information matters. If they suggest you’re moving into burnout, that information matters even more. Either way, the purpose is the same: earlier awareness, earlier intervention, and less damage over time.
| A PRACTICAL EXERCISE | THE BURNOUT ASSESSMENT TOOL How to Use This Tool Step 1: Complete the self-assessment. The following statements are related to how you feel. Please state how often each statement applies to you. Step 2: Score your self-assessment to determine if you are experiencing burnout symptoms. Step 3: Discuss your symptoms and experiences with a trained medical professional qualified to support your burnout recovery, such as your primary care physician or mental health professional. Note: If you want to complete a digital version of this assessment, please visit: www.breakingburnoutbook.com |
| Never | Rarely | Sometimes | Often | Always | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I feel mentally exhausted* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| Everything I do requires a great deal of effort | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| After a day, I find it hard to recover my energy* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I feel physically exhausted* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| When I get up in the morning, I lack the energy to start a new day | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I want to be active, but somehow, I am unable to manage | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| When I exert myself, I quickly get tired | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| At the end of my day, I feel mentally exhausted and drained | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I struggle to find any enthusiasm for my work* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I feel a strong aversion toward my job* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I feel indifferent about my job | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I’m cynical about what my work means to others* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I have trouble staying focused* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I struggle to think clearly | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I’m forgetful and distracted | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I have trouble concentrating* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I make mistakes because I have my mind on other things* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I feel unable to control my emotions* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I do not recognize myself in the way I react emotionally* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I become irritable when things don’t go my way | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I get upset or sad without knowing why | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| I may overreact unintentionally* | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
| Note: * Short version.How to Score Your ResultsStep 1: Indicate how many times you answer Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, and Always in the “Quantity” box below—the number should add up to 22.Step 2: Multiply the number in the “Quantity” column by the number in the “Value” column to come up with a Total Score.Step 3: Add up all the numbers in the “Total Score” column together to get a total.Step 4: Divide the total score by 22 to get your BAT Score.Step 5: Assess where your BAT score fits in the burnout range provided below.See example below:ScoreQuantityValueTotal ScoreNever616Rarely6212Sometimes133Often5420Always4520Total22 61 / 22 = 2.772.77 falls into the (Orange) At Risk of Burnout Category VALUELEVELWHAT IT MEANSBAT Total Burnout Score<2.58GreenNo risk of burnout 2.59–3.01OrangeAt risk for burnout 3.02+RedVery high risk of burnout |
| Disclaimer:The BAT should not be used for diagnosing burnout; it is a measure to assess burnout complaints. More specifically, the scientific manual states: “Of course, no burnout diagnosis can be drafted solely based on the BAT, or any other self-report burnout questionnaire for that matter. This requires a more extensive assessment, including an anamnestic and diagnostic interview by a trained professional. However, the BAT can be a valuable tool to use in the individual assessment process for estimating the individual’s level of burnout symptoms.” Manual BAT—Version 2.0, p. 124Source: The Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT)49,50 |
Why This Matters Before We Move On
Understanding the twelve stages helps you see how burnout unfolds, how it progresses quietly in the background. Using a tool like BAT helps you understand where you are right now. But neither of these, on their own, explains why so many capable, driven, self-aware people keep finding themselves back in the same place—again and again—across different roles, companies, and life stages. If you recognize yourself anywhere across the process of completing the BAT assessment or learning the twelve stages of burnout, now is a significant moment to pause and give yourself some grace. Don’t judge yourself. Just notice.
The most important thing to understand about burnout is that most people move through these experiences repeatedly across different seasons of life—often without realizing it. A new role. A bigger scope. A crisis at work. A young family. Caregiving. Financial pressure. A world that keeps speeding up. Each time a similar pattern emerges, the experience repeats itself. And that is because the same forces are at play underneath. A set of belief systems that are wired in us to just push a little harder. A voice that keeps telling us, “This is what commitment looks like. This is what success looks like.” In the throes of burnout, the work-hard monster is in the driver’s seat. It tells us we earn our worth through endurance, and it encourages us to minimize, normalize, or numb the signals our body is sending. The cliff’s edge quietly appears.
Burnout is so often misunderstood as a personal failing—but that is another lie; it is, in fact, a systems failure. A foreseeable reaction to a system of beliefs, norms, structure, and reinforcing elements that reward identity enhancement, chronic overextension, and self-sacrifice. The twelve stages help us understand how burnout unfolds—step by step, signal by signal. But they don’t fully explain why we keep ending up in a Burnout Loop even when we know better. That’s where the next layer comes in.
Over time, I could identify the reinforcing loops propelling burnout with an outer loop and an inner loop—a repeating pattern people get pulled into over the course of their lives. A cycle fueled by Success Myths, reinforced by culture, and sustained by short-term relief that never quite restores us. I call this pattern the Burnout Loop.
The Burnout Loop doesn’t replace the twelve stages—the twelve stages fold into the Burnout Loop. It explains how people often move from ambition to overextension, from depletion to recovery, and then right back again—often mistaking temporary relief for real repair. The Burnout Loop explains why so many high-achieving, highly successful people struggle to leave the Burnout Loop permanently despite all their efforts and self-discipline. But once you understand the pattern, it all makes sense.
In the next chapter, we’ll walk through the Burnout Loop and explore how burnout develops across a lifetime, not just within a single job or moment. Because once you can see the loop, you can finally interrupt it and build a healthier, more sustainable relationship with work, success, and yourself.
