Last week I met an old friend, an executive, exhausted and overwhelmed. The conversation reminded me how common burnout has become. And an important truth I keep coming back to.
Burnout is a choice.
Not the circumstances, the pressure, or the board. Our choices.
I know — I’ve been there twice.
When I was going through burnout many years ago, building two businesses, my weight increased to 102 kg – twenty kilos over my normal weight back then. And it was my choice.
I was the one choosing pastries over sleep, choosing to push through instead of recover, choosing to ignore the signals.
Leaders and professionals don’t burn out because the job is hard. They burn out because they keep choosing:
→ One more meeting, one more task — instead of rest
→ To be available 24/7 instead of setting boundaries
→ Speed over sustainability
→ Looking strong instead of being honest
→ Pushing through instead of stopping and rethinking
Burnout isn’t a future risk. It’s happening right now. Quietly in leadership teams, and in the people who report to them, across every industry.
Some of you are on the brink of burnout right now, and you’re either not recognizing it, or ignoring it.
Why it matters
Circumstances vs Choice
Whether you call burnout “circumstance” or “choice” isn’t just a philosophical or wording preference with no consequences. It’s not two labels for the same thing. It actually determines what you do next — waiting or acting.
If burnout is purely circumstance, there’s nothing to do but wait — for the board, the market, or your company to change first.
If it’s a choice, even a limited one, exercised inside real constraints, you have somewhere to start today.
That’s why the framing matters: one version keeps you a passenger. The other hands you the wheel back.
Burnout steals the quality and joy of work, and, more importantly, of life. It’s tough, believe me. But it’s possible to change. And “possible to change” only holds up if choice is real.
Some people I’ve talked to about this misread “burnout is a choice,” so let me be precise about what I’m actually saying.
The WHO’s ICD-11 defines burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”. Notice the phrase: “not successfully managed.” Not “impossible to manage.”
The pressure is real. The toxic boss is real. The understaffed team is real. I’m not arguing that circumstances add to burnout — they do.
What I’m disagreeing with is that circumstances decide the outcome.
You rarely get to change the deadline, the board pressure, your boss behavior or the market directly — those aren’t yours to choose. What you choose is what you do inside them. And you still get to choose your response, in any circumstance. That includes the choices people skip past when they talk about burnout only as something that “happens to” them:
- You can set a boundary, even with a demanding boss
- You can say no to the ninth meeting, even in a culture that rewards saying yes
- You can have the honest conversation instead of absorbing it silently
- You can stop working on weekends, after hours, and during vacation
- You can say no to rising overload and unrealistic demands
- And if the environment is genuinely toxic and won’t change — you can leave.
That last one is the choice most people won’t let themselves consider. They’ll accept exhaustion, cynicism, and a shrinking sense of their own competence — the three things burnout is actually built from — before they’ll consider that staying is also a choice.
It doesn’t stop with you
A study tracking managers and their teams in a Danish municipality found that a stress contagion effect among managers and their employees can be traced a full year after the manager reports symptoms of occupational stress — with roughly 10 percent of the manager’s stress transferring directly into employee stress. Not a feeling. A measured effect, still detectable twelve months later.
Your team and your family mirror your energy — whether you want them to or not. So this was never only your problem to carry. It was always your responsibility to interrupt for their sake as much as yours.
Where you are today is the result of your choices. If you want different results — make different choices.
The question isn’t “am I at risk of burnout?” The question is: “What choices am I making today that are already costing me?”
Your action this week
Reflect and take action this week:
1. Set one boundary out load
Name one meeting now to decline or shorten. Decide the hours you will not be working — after business hours, on weekends — and tell one person that boundary exists.
2. Protect one recovery habit and one evening as non-negotiable
Sleep, movement, or a proper meal — pick one and treat it like a meeting you can’t cancel. Choose one evening this week: no laptop, no work apps, after a fixed hour.
3. Protect one block of time for family this week
No phone, no work talk. Put it on the calendar like you would a client meeting — because it matters at least as much.
4. Choose one task to stop, and one to delegate
Not “someday.” This week.
5. Have the honest conversation you’ve been avoiding
With your boss, your team, or yourself. And if a specific relationship or environment is the real problem, name it plainly, even just to yourself: is this something I fix, or something I leave?
What different choices do you need to make going forward — in your life, at work, in business, in your relationships, about your dreams?
Cheers, Andrey Sergeyev
For short ideas on leading, living and scaling business with focus on what matters – follow me on Linkedin
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