This habit leads to burnout. Are you at risk?

Burnout isn’t caused by long hours. It’s caused by sacrificing your needs and values to everyone else’s.

I used to think burnout was a scheduling problem.

If I could just restructure my calendar, protect my mornings, say no to one more meeting—I’d find my way back. I was a VP, then a COO. I knew how to optimize. I was good at it. So when I started feeling hollow despite hitting every metric that was supposed to mean success, I did what high achievers do: I worked harder, restructured smarter, and told myself I just needed to get through the next quarter.

I was wrong about almost everything.

Burnout didn’t come from my workload. It came from something I didn’t have a name for yet—a years-long pattern of abandoning my own needs, judgment, and boundaries in order to keep everyone around me comfortable and satisfied. The work was almost incidental. It was the vehicle. The real damage was happening underneath.