Burnout when you're the one in charge

I was probably the last person to realise I was burning out.

At the time, I was running my own recruitment business. I was used to pressure and responsibility and, if I'm honest, probably quite proud of how much I could juggle. Clients needed things, people relied on me, there were decisions to make and problems to solve. That's business, isn't it?

Except somewhere along the way, being busy had turned into something else.

I wasn't switching off properly. Work followed me around long after the working day had supposedly finished, and my usual response was to push harder. I was also living with undiagnosed ADHD at the time, something I only understood much later and which, with hindsight, may have added another layer to my experience.

But I didn't think I was burning out. I thought I needed to get a grip. And I wonder whether that's particularly common when you're used to being the person who copes.

Burnout doesn't always look like stopping

If you run a business, work for yourself or hold a senior position, pressure probably isn't new to you. You're used to making decisions. Other people come to you with problems. You may manage a team, carry responsibility for a budget, have clients relying on you or know that other people's livelihoods are connected to decisions you make. You may actually be very good under pressure. That's partly why it can be confusing when things that once felt manageable become harder.

You read the same email three times. A decision you'd normally make in ten minutes suddenly takes an hour. You're working longer but somehow achieving less. You close the laptop and continue the meeting in your head for another three hours.

And then there are the 3 am management meetings. Just you, the ceiling and something somebody said on Tuesday. From the outside, you may still look fine. The business is running. The team is being managed. Clients are getting replies. Targets may even still be getting hit. Burnout doesn't always mean someone has stopped functioning. Quite often, they're still functioning at considerable personal cost.

I've dealt with worse than this. Why can't I cope?

If you've built part of your identity around being capable, struggling can feel surprisingly personal. You tell yourself you'll feel better after this deadline, this quarter or this particularly difficult client. Then you get there, and something else appears.

The World Health Organization describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that hasn't been successfully managed. It describes three main features: exhaustion, increased mental distance or negativity towards work, and reduced professional effectiveness (World Health Organization, 2019).

In real life, you might feel exhausted but unable to relax. Perhaps you're more irritable or cynical than you used to be. Your concentration isn't as sharp. Work you once enjoyed has started to feel like something to endure.

Or perhaps the biggest clue is simply that you don't feel much like yourself anymore.

Why can't I just switch off?

Our stress response is designed to help us respond to challenge. When we perceive something as threatening or particularly demanding, the autonomic nervous system is one of the systems involved in preparing the body to respond. And "threat" doesn't have to mean physical danger.

For somebody carrying significant responsibility, it might be an unhappy client, a difficult conversation, falling behind, making the wrong decision, missing a target, or simply having too much to do.

I remember this particularly well from my own experience. There was an almost constant sense of, "Once I've done this, I'll feel OK. Once I've sorted this, I can relax."

Except there was always another this.

People around me could tell me something wasn't that important or that it could wait until tomorrow. Rationally, I knew some things could wait until tomorrow. But they felt urgent, and until I'd dealt with them, relaxing didn't really feel like an option.” Even when the working day finished, my mind and body didn't necessarily get the memo.

That's one of the difficulties with prolonged stress. You sit down but replay a conversation, or go to bed and remember something you haven't done. Poor sleep can leave you with less capacity the following day, increasing the pressure further.

When we're caught up in a heightened stress response, it can also become harder to step back, see the bigger picture and think flexibly about what actually needs our attention.

The prefrontal cortex is involved in functions including decision-making and cognitive flexibility – helping us weigh up information, consider different possibilities and make more considered choices. Creating enough space to think more clearly can therefore be important. Rather than simply reacting to whatever feels most urgent, we can begin to ask: What actually matters here? What can wait? And what would be a useful way forward for me?

When your strengths start costing you

There's an uncomfortable irony here. Some of the qualities that helped you become successful can also make it difficult to recognise when something needs to change.

You're conscientious, so you take responsibility. You're good at anticipating problems, so you're always thinking ahead. You care about standards, so letting go can be difficult. You're responsive, so everybody knows you'll answer.

If you own a business, there may be nobody above you telling you to stop.

For senior managers and directors, you may be absorbing pressure from above while trying not to pass it down to your team. Sometimes the more senior you become, the fewer people you feel able to be completely honest with. You may find yourself waiting for everything to calm down before allowing time for proper recovery. The problem is, everything rarely does.

How solution-focused therapy may help

This is one of the questions at the heart of solution-focused therapy. When we're overwhelmed, our attention can become dominated by what's gone wrong, what hasn't been done and what might happen next. A solution-focused approach also encourages us to consider what we'd like to be different. If things were beginning to improve, what might you notice?

Perhaps you'd finish work and actually feel finished. Make a decision without revisiting it repeatedly. Delegate something and leave somebody else to do it. Sleep more consistently. Have dinner with someone and realise you've actually listened rather than mentally composing tomorrow's email.

We might also look for exceptions. When does the problem have slightly less influence? What's different on a day when you cope better? What are you already doing that helps?

These aren't necessarily dramatic changes, but they can help identify strengths, resources and small steps that might otherwise be overlooked when our attention is fixed on everything that's wrong.

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) has a growing evidence base across a range of psychological and psychosocial outcomes, although this shouldn't be taken to mean that it has been proven specifically as a treatment for occupational burnout (Vermeulen-Oskam et al., 2024; Żak and Pękala, 2025).

How can hypnosis help with burnout and stress?

Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy combines solution-focused therapeutic conversation with hypnosis.

Hypnosis isn't about being unconscious or losing control. It's a state of focused attention, and some people find that the experience helps them feel calmer and less caught up in the constant analysing, planning and problem-solving that can accompany prolonged stress.

For someone who has spent much of their time thinking about what needs doing next, what might go wrong or what they may have forgotten, that opportunity to slow down can be an important part of the therapeutic process.

Within Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy, hypnosis can include relaxation, imagery, therapeutic suggestion and mental rehearsal. Alongside the conversations we have in therapy, hypnosis may offer an opportunity to focus less on repeatedly rehearsing the problem and more on the changes someone would like to make and how life might begin to feel different.

And sometimes, simply experiencing what it feels like to properly slow down again can be significant in itself.

The aim isn't to make life's pressures disappear. It's to help someone find a different way of responding to them, while also recognising where something in their life or work may genuinely need to change.

Sometimes something external needs to change

Therapy shouldn't simply make somebody better at tolerating the intolerable. If you're doing the work of three people, relaxation doesn't remove the workload. If you're working in an unhealthy organisational culture, learning to feel calmer doesn't make the culture healthy. And if your business depends heavily on you, advice to "just set some boundaries" may completely ignore commercial reality.

Sometimes something external needs to change: workload, staffing, delegation, expectations, working practices, boundaries or perhaps the role itself.

There may also be personal patterns worth understanding. Perhaps you've always been the dependable one. Maybe saying no is difficult, or achievement and self-worth have become rather tangled together.

Being solution-focused doesn't mean ignoring the past. Understanding why a pattern developed can sometimes help us decide whether we still need it.

Moving forward doesn't mean becoming less ambitious

This is something I would have wanted somebody to tell me. Recovering from burnout doesn't necessarily mean giving everything up or becoming somebody who no longer cares about their work.

For me, hypnotherapy became part of my own journey, and years later I changed career and trained as a therapist. That's my story, though. It doesn't need to be anybody else's. For one person, improvement might mean changing career. For another, it might mean enjoying the career or business they already have again.

Perhaps it's thinking strategically rather than constantly firefighting. Sleeping better. Rediscovering some creativity. Being more present with the people around you. Taking a holiday without secretly running the company from your phone. Or simply reaching the end of the working day with something left for the rest of your life.

If you've spent months telling yourself you'll feel better when things calm down, perhaps a more useful question is: what might you notice if things were already beginning to get a little better?

If burnout or prolonged stress is affecting your wellbeing or day-to-day functioning, support might include speaking with your GP, exploring workplace or occupational health support where available, or talking with a suitably qualified therapist about the options appropriate for you. If you’re considering hypnotherapy for stress or burnout, you can explore how hypnotherapy may support you and find a qualified hypnotherapist who suits your needs.

References

Vermeulen-Oskam, E., Franklin, C., van’t Hof, L.P.M., Stams, G.J.J.M., van Vugt, E.S., Assink, M., Veltman, E.J., Froerer, A.S., Staaks, J.P.C. and Zhang, A. (2024) ‘he current evidence of solution-focused brief therapy: A meta-analysis of psychosocial outcomes and moderating factors, Clinical Psychology Review, 114, 102512. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102512.

World Health Organization (2019), Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases. Geneva: World Health Organization.

Żak, A.M. and Pękala, K. (2025), Effectiveness of solution-focused brief therapy: An umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, Psychotherapy Research, 35(7), pp. 1043–1055. doi: 10.1080/10503307.2024.2406540.