You are the one everyone looks to, and you have not had a single safe place to say how heavy it has become. Burnout is an energy problem that rest can fix. What you may be carrying is leadership trauma — a nervous system worn down by years of isolated, high-stakes responsibility. Here is what it is, written from twenty-five years inside the C-suite, and what healing the collapse actually involves.

The cultural diagnosis has settled on burnout. But burnout is the symptom, not the source. The real story underneath most high-achiever collapse is a nervous system that learned, in childhood, that survival required performance — and a workplace that rewarded that adaptation until the body could no longer carry it.