When we think about burnout, we tend to think about workload.

Long hours, relentless deadlines, back-to-back meetings and an inbox that never seems to get any smaller. The obvious solution, therefore, is to reduce the workload: take some time off, delegate more, work fewer hours, create better boundaries.

All of that can help. But it doesn't fully explain why someone can have a relatively manageable diary and still feel completely exhausted.

I see this quite often with my clients. Someone will tell me that, objectively, things aren't that bad. They aren't working until midnight every night. They may even have managed to carve out some time for themselves. Yet they feel depleted. Their concentration isn't what it was. Small things irritate them. Decisions that would once have been straightforward feel disproportionately difficult. And even when they stop working, they struggle to properly switch off.

What they are describing isn't always the exhaustion of doing too much. Sometimes it is the exhaustion of carrying too much.

And I think there is an important difference.

The weight we don't necessarily see

There is a particular kind of mental load that comes with being the person other people rely on.

At work, seniority often means carrying far more than the tasks listed in a job description. A leader may be thinking about the performance of the business, the wellbeing of their team, a difficult relationship with a colleague, an upcoming restructure, the consequences of a decision that hasn't yet been made, or the expectations of a board or CEO.

The meeting may have finished at 4pm, but the thinking about it hasn't.

That is one of the things we sometimes underestimate when we talk about workload. A one-hour meeting doesn't necessarily consume one hour of energy. A difficult conversation can occupy our thoughts before it happens and for hours afterwards. An unresolved decision can sit quietly in the background while we are doing something completely unrelated.

There is a concept in psychology known as the Zeigarnik effect, which describes our tendency to continue holding incomplete or interrupted tasks in our minds. In real life, of course, those "unfinished tasks" aren't always tasks in the traditional sense. They can be unresolved conversations, concerns about someone we care about, decisions we haven't made or situations over which we have very little control.

Individually, none may feel overwhelming. Collectively, they create noise.

And for people who are conscientious, capable and accustomed to taking responsibility, there can be an additional layer: the internal expectation that they should be able to cope with all of it.

When several lives are happening at once

I recognise this in my own life too.

I am running a business and doing work that matters enormously to me. I am also a mum to a tween daughter, at an age where parenting is changing and where being available and present matters in different ways than it did when she was little. At the other end of the generational spectrum, I have an ageing parent.

Like many people in midlife, I find myself somewhere in the middle.

The term "sandwich generation" makes it sound rather neat: children on one side, ageing parents on the other. The lived experience is considerably messier. It can mean switching between a client conversation, something happening at school, a concern about a parent and the ordinary logistics of running a household—sometimes within the space of an hour.

And importantly, none of those things needs to be going badly for the combination to be tiring.

That is something I think we don't acknowledge enough.

We can love being parents and find parenting exhausting. We can feel fortunate that our parents are still in our lives and worry about their increasing needs. We can be deeply fulfilled by our work and still sometimes feel consumed by it. Gratitude and exhaustion are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, some of the things that require the most from us are also the things we care about most.

That can make it harder to recognise when our capacity is stretched, because there isn't an obvious thing we want to remove.

The hidden cost of being "the capable one"

Many of the people I coach have spent years building an identity around competence. They are the person who gets things done. When something goes wrong, they find a solution. When somebody needs support, they provide it. When circumstances become difficult, they keep going.

These are qualities that contribute enormously to professional success.

But strengths can become liabilities when they are overused.

Reliability can become an inability to disappoint anyone. High standards can become perfectionism. Independence can become reluctance to ask for help. Resilience can become an expectation that we should simply keep enduring.

And because capable people often can continue functioning under considerable pressure, it can take a long time before anyone—including themselves—realises what it is costing them.

This is where I think we need to be more careful with the way we talk about resilience.

Resilience is not simply the ability to withstand more.

My work is strongly influenced by positive psychology, and one of the things I find important about genuine resilience is the role of recovery. Human beings are not designed to operate indefinitely at maximum capacity. We need periods in which the psychological and physiological systems activated by effort and stress are allowed to settle.

In other words, recovery isn't what we do when resilience has failed. Recovery is part of resilience.

Yet many high performers treat rest very differently.

Rest becomes conditional.

I'll slow down when this project is finished.

I'll take some time for myself once things settle down.

I'll exercise again when work is less busy.

I'll deal with this after the next board meeting, after the children go back to school, after this quarter, after Christmas...

The problem is that life rarely provides a clean gap in which nobody needs us and nothing important is happening.

If rest is the reward for finishing everything, we may wait a very long time.

Energy deserves the same attention as time

Most senior professionals are very familiar with resource allocation. Businesses don't have unlimited capital, unlimited people or unlimited time, so choices have to be made about where those resources will have the greatest impact.

Yet we don't always apply the same logic to ourselves.

Personal energy is also finite.

Every decision, difficult conversation, emotional concern, interruption and transition between roles draws on it to some degree. That doesn't mean we should try to eliminate demands from our lives. A life without demands would probably also be a life without much meaning.

The question is whether the demands and the recovery remain in some kind of sustainable relationship.

For me, this shifts the conversation away from the rather simplistic idea of "work-life balance". I am not convinced that life divides itself neatly enough for balance to be a particularly useful goal. There will be periods when work requires more from us, periods when family does, and periods when our own needs have to take priority.

A better question might be:

Am I managing my capacity deliberately, or am I simply hoping there will always be enough of me to go around?

That question can lead to some uncomfortable answers.

Perhaps there are responsibilities we have taken on simply because we have always taken them on. Perhaps we are solving problems other people could solve for themselves. Perhaps our standards are consuming energy without creating proportionate value. Perhaps we are saying yes because disappointing someone feels harder than exhausting ourselves.

Or perhaps nothing obvious needs to change except our willingness to recognise that we, too, need support.

Who carries the person everyone relies on?

There is a question I sometimes find myself returning to with clients:

Who is carrying you?

For someone accustomed to being self-sufficient, the question can feel strange.

It isn't about expecting another person to take responsibility for us. It is about recognising that being supported is a normal human need, not evidence that we are failing to cope.

Support might come from a partner, a friend, a colleague, a coach, a therapist or a wider community. It might mean practical help, a place to think aloud, or simply having a relationship in which we don't have to be the person with the answers.

And sometimes the support we need comes from ourselves: allowing ourselves to say no, lowering a standard that doesn't need to be quite so high, leaving something until tomorrow, or resting without first producing evidence that we have earned it.

Those choices can feel surprisingly uncomfortable when our sense of self is closely connected to being productive, dependable and useful.

But there is a cost to continually ignoring our own capacity.

We may still perform. We may still deliver. We may still appear to everyone else to be managing perfectly well.

What changes first is often something subtler: the quality of our experience.

We become less patient. Less curious. Less able to enjoy what is happening in front of us. We listen while thinking about the next thing. We spend time with people we love while part of our mind remains at work. We get through the week rather than really inhabiting it.

And that, to me, is one of the saddest consequences of sustained overload. It isn't only that we become exhausted. We can become absent from a life we have worked very hard to create.

What are you protecting your energy for?

There is a phrase that is often used in conversations about burnout: you cannot pour from an empty cup. It has become something of a cliché, but perhaps clichés sometimes survive because they contain an uncomfortable truth.

I would take it one step further.

The purpose of protecting our wellbeing isn't simply so that we can return to work refreshed and become productive again.

We are not machines undergoing maintenance so that we can produce more output.

Our energy matters because our lives matter.

Yes, organisations benefit from leaders who are rested, thoughtful and able to make good decisions. But our families also deserve our presence. Our friendships deserve some of our attention. And we deserve to experience our own lives rather than continually managing them on behalf of everybody else.

Most organisations, however much they value us, could eventually replace the role we perform.

Our families cannot replace the person we are.

That thought puts wellbeing into a different perspective for me.

Looking after ourselves isn't something to squeeze in after everything important has been dealt with.

We are one of the important things

Perhaps, then, the question isn't whether you can carry everything you are currently carrying.

If you are a capable, conscientious person, the answer may well be yes. You probably can.

The more important questions are what carrying it is costing you, whether all of it is genuinely yours to carry, and whether you are leaving enough capacity to be present for the people and the life that all this effort is ultimately meant to serve.