Burnout in Disguise: The Numbness Behind Efficiency

Burnout doesn’t always look like exhaustion; sometimes it looks like over-efficiency.

I’ve met plenty of leaders who say they’re fine. They’re sleeping enough, hitting their KPIs, and clearing their inboxes before lunch. They’re doing brilliantly on paper, but under the surface, something’s off.

They’ve become so efficient that there’s no room for anything else. No curiosity, feeling, or even discomfort…it’s a signal that something is shifting.

What you sometimes see, especially in high performers, is emotional numbness that hides in plain sight. It’s not the dramatic collapse we associate with burnout but a quiet, compressed way of living. Like they’ve defaulted to execution mode because it’s safer than sitting with emotional pain that is nearly always lurking underneath it.

The trouble is that organisations often reward this kind of burnout. In fact, they promote it because, in the short term, it can be productive. But it’s a zombified life of to-do lists and efficiency that sacrifices something human in us: our creativity, colour, authenticity, and aliveness.

The body knows before the mind does. Relationships may start fraying. Instead of the passion and joy you once had, you may begin to feel brittle, with less capacity for wonder, play, or joy. By the time it hits a crisis point, the pain that caused all this may be so buried under performance metrics and routines that no one can quite name it.

That’s where the work often begins, with a private moment of honesty. A client saying: “I’ve ticked all the boxes. Why do I feel like I’m disappearing?”