The Cult of Busyness: How High-Performing Leaders Burn Out Without Noticing

Why do so many high-performing leaders feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and strangely unaccomplished, even after incredibly busy days?
In Season 2, Episode 2 of Beneath the Busy, Lauren Davis explores the hidden psychology behind busyness, burnout, leadership pressure, productivity dysmorphia, and chronic urgency.

You’ll learn:

• Why busyness has become a status symbol in modern work
• How leaders mistake motion for momentum
• The nervous-system impact of “hurry sickness,” “busyness disorder,” and constant pressure
• Why high performers struggle to slow down
• How avoidance, fear of failure, and visibility pressures drive overwork
• The subtle ways burnout builds in leadership roles
• The critical difference between capacity and capability
• A practical system to identify “meaningful work” vs “noise”
• A red/yellow/green audit to protect your highest-value work
• How leaders and HR can design more humane, sustainable cultures
• Simple weekly practices to rebuild clarity, calm, and impact

If you’re a leader, HR professional, or high performer who wants to work with more clarity and less chaos, this episode gives you the mindset, language, and tools to reset your rhythm.

Resources Mentioned:

• Red/Yellow/Green Work Audit
• Thinking Time Block Framework
• Daily Review Prompts
• Episode from Season 1: Busy is the New Lazy
• Season 2 Episode 1: The Resilience Trap

Who This Episode Is For

• Senior leaders
• Executives & founders
• HR & People Partners
• High performers navigating burnout
• Coaches & wellbeing leads
• Anyone holding a system together while feeling unsupported

Thanks for listening!
If you’re ready to take this further, here are a few ways to connect or go deeper:

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→ Sign up here to receive a simple yet powerful resource to combat burnout and reclaim your energy.

Join Laurens Newsletter
→ Thoughtful, grounded reflections on navigating workplace pressures, supporting mental health, and leading with impact. Sign up here.

Say hi / share a takeaway
→ Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn.
→ Message Lauren directly here.

Work with Lauren
→ See how Lauren supports senior leaders and HR professionals in building mentally healthy teams and organisations.

Chapters

• 0:00 The illusion of busyness
• 10:04 Understanding Leadership and Wellbeing
• 20:06 Shifting Mindsets for Effective Leadership

Transcript

Are you busy or just afraid to stop? Hi, and welcome back to Beneath a Busy, the podcast where we go beneath the surface of workplace productivity and explore what really sustains us.

And in today's episode, we're looking at how sometimes doing more doesn't necessarily lead us to feeling more, more fulfilled, more enough, and how sometimes even on our busiest days, we are still left with a strange sense of emptiness. But before we dive in, let's take a moment to pause together. Wherever you are, in motion or at rest, let's just stop.

and take a deep breath in.

and hold it for a little bit and let it out.

and just allow yourself to be fully present.

You know that strange end of the day feeling where you've responded to all your emails, you've ticked all the boxes, attended back-to-back meetings, and yet you still have that feeling that you haven't accomplished anything? Anything that really actually matters? You were busy, for sure, but were you productive? Maybe not. Let's face it, busyness warps the mirror. It inflates what really doesn't matter sometimes, and it hides what really does.

Kind of like one of those mirrors of the fun fair, except it's really not fun and it's definitely not fair the way that these things get warped in our perception. And so today I'm gonna really uncover how we've created this treadmill for ourselves and we just don't know how to get off. So we're lifting the hood today around what is underneath our addiction to this busyness. And I wanna highlight some of the leadership burnout warning signs.

that might be an indication that you have subscribed to this cult of busyness and that potentially you are in danger of burning out. Because this cult of busyness, what I also call the busyness syndrome, it's not just a cultural one. mean, let's not kid society definitely fuels it, but it's also a deeply personal one because underneath this pressure to keep being busy is something a bit more deep seated.

It's typically the people who seem the most composed, the highest performers, the high achievers that are addicted to the busyness. It seems like we're allergic to empty space. If there's a gap, we fill it. If there's no metric, we make one up. And if the mirror doesn't reflect progress, instead of adjusting the mirror, we push ourselves harder. But underneath all this effort, there's a quiet fear. And I think the voice underneath the effort

The fear voice is saying something like, well if I stop, if I'm not so busy, will I still be enough? Will I still be approved of? Because there's a big difference between movement and momentum. And I think we stuck in the movement, that if we just keep busy answering the emails, answering the slacks, attending to meetings, solving problems, that we're actually being productive. But that's different because momentum...

is something that keeps us moving forward for sure, but where it actually matters, where we're moving the needle, where we're having a deeper impact. But the reason we keep defaulting to movement is because it's easier to measure. It's easier for me to measure how many emails are answered, how many projects are completed, how many meetings are attended, how many problems are solved. There's the tangible nature to the movement. It's visible, even if we're going around in circles.

As Peter Sloterdijk has called it, hysterical industriousness. I just love that term. It's this hysteria, this frenzy, this hustle culture, this need to be on, on, on, moving, moving, moving. And it's all around industriousness, productivity, performing, filling empty spaces, being busy, being visibly productive. And this hysterical industriousness is causing us to be always on.

in this fast-paced, urgent mode, as if everything is a big deal. We're operating as if the building's on fire all the time. Alan Sieler goes even further. He adds on to this concept of hysterical industriousness by labeling how we are living our lives at the moment as hurry sickness or busyness disorder. He's even named it a disorder, like it's a mental health disorder that we're in. And I tend to agree.

And then he also talks about the mood of seriosity, where everything is feeling so serious and so important and so urgent. And this combination of hysterical industriousness, hurry sickness, busyness disorder, mood of seriosity has created a state where our sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight system is always on. So we are always feeling like we're under threat, like there's big danger out there.

and that we have to self-protect. We've got to fight or we've got to fight or for some of us, we're going to freeze. And in that state, we definitely cannot show up effectively and we definitely cannot lead well. Because in this mode, we're losing perspective. We're just rushing, rushing, rushing, tending to the thing that has the biggest noise, the thing that's most immediate in our face without stopping to consider what actually is important. What would make the most meaning here?

Where could I add the most value? And the thing is, as a leader, your pace, your hysterical industriousness doesn't only affect you, it affects those around you. The way you show up directly impacts the way other people show up. You determine the weather system in your team. So what does this actually look like in the wild? Well, we've come to create busyness with importance, busyness with worthiness.

Back back meetings, replying to emails at 10pm? You're the most committed. Working through lunchtime? That's a real team player. Staying after hours? So dedicated to your job. So this is the cult of busyness. Welcome. We're all card carrying members. The sad thing is, entry is free, it just requires us to abandon our common sense. If you haven't listened to season 1 episode 3, called Busy is the New Lazy, I encourage you to go and listen.

because that provides the foundation for what we're focusing on in today's episode. And I want to refer back to something I spoke about in episode one, which is how athletes train, how top performing elite athletes consider recovery and rest as part of their training. They understand that it is part of what makes them good. It's part of what enables them to perform well. So they don't just train hard, they recover hard. But in leadership,

We often see rest as something that must be earned. We often say to people before they go on holiday, enjoy your leave, you really deserve it. Well, you've worked so hard, you earn this break. Why is time off from work something we have to earn? Something we have to prove that we've worked so hard that then we can rest. It's absurd because this mindset actually erodes our performance and it erodes our capacity.

Because if the answer to your performance dropping is to add more hours, you're not fixing the problem, you're actually just creating more of a problem. You're adding to your burnout and actually causing a decline in performance. Because the longer we push through, the less effective our cognitive capability is and our physical energy depletes. So the myth we often hold is, well, if I pause, I'll fall behind.

I don't have time to stop now. I have to keep going. Otherwise the to-do list will just keep increasing. But the truth is, if you don't pause, you're going to lose direction. You're going to lose perspective. And most likely without even noticing. And again, the impact as a leader on your team is quite profound if you've lost perspective and if you're just spinning in a cycle of movement as opposed to momentum.

So the thing I really want to help land today is that exhaustion is not a leadership strategy. It's actually a leadership risk. Thinking time isn't a luxury. It's a leadership skill. No pause, no perspective. No perspective, no leadership. Leadership is all about having the ability to zoom out, reflect on what's going on, examine what priorities need to be made, making clear decisions, setting direction.

And then you can go back into the trenches. But without that thinking time, without the zoom time, to zoom out, you lose the perspective. And then you're just in the trenches with the team and not necessarily being the most effective leader. So the best leaders I know and have worked with are the ones that build a regular pause into their day. Not as a grand gesture, not about taking hours and hours off every week, but they build in regular pause time.

as a checkpoint in their day and in their week. And there's two kinds of pauses that the best leaders I know do. The one is that pause, reflection, thinking, zooming out time, which is this leadership strategy. And then there's the pausing to rest and recover time, which is also a strategic leadership. Because wellbeing is not an indulgence. Being well and taking time to ensure that you show up as your best self, it's not a luxury.

It's not a nice to have. It is a core leadership competence that we really have to start baking into any leadership program, any leadership development we do, and just any leadership philosophy needs to have leadership well-being at its core. And we cannot be well without deliberate thought and reflection. And we're often encouraging leaders to think more strategically, to focus on their executive presence.

to expand their decision-making capability. Because we know that those are core leadership competencies that have an incredible impact on teams and organizations. So on the one hand, we're encouraging leaders to develop these competencies, but on the other hand, we're perpetuating this busyness and these back-to-back meetings and this continuous movement without intention. Many leaders that I work with find themselves in this

paradox of knowing what they need and yet not having the space for it or the permission to create the space. And so my encouragement as leaders is you need to give yourself the permission. You need to start shifting your mindset to be able to say that pausing time, pausing for reflection, pausing for rest is what makes me an excellent leader. Of course, many of you are probably thinking, yes, this all sounds great in theory, but then you look at your calendar,

and you have a heart attack and you think, well, I don't know how to fit this in. But the reality I want to share is that work is designed to be endless. It's never going to stop. The work activities, the organizational movement, it's designed to keep going. That's how it keeps its doors open. That's how it remains profitable. So we can't wait for work to quieten down. We can't wait for this busy period to end because it's never going to end. We are the ones.

that have to, within the busyness, create the space to rest and to reflect. And as part of this, I think what we need to start being comfortable with is incompletion. So being able to end our workday knowing that the to-do list hasn't been completed, that you have unread emails. Because part of what fuels us, and when I've sat with many leaders, they say, well, I can't stop today because if I don't get it all done today, it will just be waiting for me tomorrow.

But it's a bit of an illusion because even if you finish it all today, there will still be more waiting for you tomorrow. And so we have to be okay with saying, I haven't completed everything for today. And that's okay. I will pick it up tomorrow. Because the reality is you are not emergency medical services. If you're listening to this and you are a paramedic or running an emergency room at a hospital, then that's a very different case because you can't leave an unfinished patient treatment.

But for the majority of us in the workplace, we're not dealing with emergency medical situations. And yet we treat it as if somebody's going to die if we don't complete something. And part of that high achieving, performing mindset is that we drive ourselves to a point where we say, only when this is complete, am I good enough. I will only feel that sense of accomplishments once I've done everything on my to-do list.

And we have to start shifting that mindset to say, you are still a high performer. You are still excellent at what you do, even if you don't get through everything, because it's humanly impossible to get through everything that's expected of us, everything that's on our plate every day. So if you want help in being able to work out what's worth paying your attention to, grab the red, yellow, green audit that I've put in the show notes. It's just a simple...

way of categorizing the things that are on your to-do list. So you look at the things that are really gonna move the needle, the things that are gonna make a bigger impact, and those get categorized as green. Those are things like strategies, decision-making, building relationships, the admin tasks, the daily hygiene things. Those are orange. Those are some things that, yeah, they're not gonna necessarily move the needle immensely, but they just have to be done.

So yes, it is checking your emails and doing what we in medical terms called triaging, scanning your emails and checking which ones need an immediate response and which ones can wait. And then the red, those are the things that are the meaningless motion. The things that maybe you're just doing to keep busy, to fill the gap. And sometimes the red things are those things that we do because they're easier, because they're more visible, because they're more measurable.

And they're a distraction from doing some of the deeper thinking work or the deeper strategy work or the deeper relationship work that is harder. It's more challenging and less tangible. So we focus on the red work, the meaningless motion, because we feel some sense of accomplishment, some sense of mastery as a way of avoiding the stuff that's a little bit trickier. Sometimes staying busy is a form of avoidance. If I stay frantically busy,

then I never have to face dealing with that project that could flop. I don't have to risk being exposed for something that I don't feel 100 % competent in. I want to share the story of Lina, a well-respected, highly effective leader that I worked with many years ago as a coaching client. She was the leader that was always on, always available, and yet session after session she would appear frustrated, anxious.

and really critical of herself for procrastinating on a massive project that she knew she needed to spend good quality thinking time on and spend energy making sure that she had put the project proposal in place properly, that she had collaborated with all the relevant stakeholders, that she had done the deep thinking work required to get this project proposal over the line. And yet she kept putting it off. She kept paying attention to the busy work.

And eventually, after many conversations, many months of procrastination, in a really challenging session, when she got properly honest with herself, she ended up almost whispering saying, but if I do this and it fails, then I've got no way to hide. Then I'm exposed. Then they'll see me for the imposter that I really am. They'll discover I actually don't know what I'm doing. And that sentence really landed hard.

What she realized was that the busyness was a place of hiding. Not from hard work. She wasn't afraid of hard work, but it was hiding from being seen, from being exposed. And once she named the fair and we were able to explore it and examine what the worst case scenario could be, she was able to start shifting priorities. She declined some meetings that she knew she didn't have to be in and that she could pass down to her team. She created space in her diary.

for deep thinking work where she could focus on the project. And eventually she submitted the proposal and it got approved and it moved the needle quite significantly in terms of the direction her team needed to go. And yes, that was a success, but equally it could have worked out differently. She could have put the proposal together and it could have not been approved. She could have received a lot of feedback, constructive criticism on how she could have done it better. And that still doesn't mean that she's a failure.

Because often we assume that if we don't get something perfect immediately, then we're a failure and then we've been exposed. Then we don't know what we're doing. But that kind of feedback, if we come from a place of being curious and experimenting and trying because a lot of leadership is around that, then we see that feedback just as an opportunity to grow and learn and not as an indictment on our professional competence or our reputation or our identity.

And also want to share another story from another coaching client, Michael. He had quite a different experience. He experienced both the glory of showing up effectively, getting all the recognition, getting all the accolades and awards, and then the gut punch. And I'm going to just read exactly what he said because I don't want to misquote. You can work yourself to the bone and still get edged out because there was a restructure and he got retrenched.

despite the multiple long hours that he put in, despite the sacrifices he made and the dedication and commitment that he showed. And so he said, you know, people actually forget the long hours, the weekends, the sacrifices. And he eventually came to the conclusion for himself. He said, I've done the long haul hassle now. I've done what I thought was expected of me as a leader was to keep pushing, was to keep sacrificing. And he realized with this

with the sucker punch of getting retrenched, irrespective of the hard work he put in and the dedication he showed. And he's now realized, he said, my time is my time now. He said, earning 1.5 million sounds like a lot, and it is. But he said, and this was such an important reframing, he said, it's not a lot, and it doesn't actually matter if it doesn't come with rest, respect, and real boundaries.

then it's not enough and he's not prepared to sacrifice himself just for the salary or the status or the glory. And so I don't see that as a bitterness or a resentment. I think it was a hard lesson he had to learn around how much to dedicate his life to the busyness, to the hustle culture and really what matters in the end. Because ultimately your job is just a transaction. You're agreeing to do X and get paid Y and your life isn't.

So we have to learn how to put work and our job within a healthy perspective to the rest of our life. And then I just want to pause and reflect on HR leaders who might be listening, because you know this too, and you hold it from both sides. You hold it for the leaders and the staff in your company, and for yourself. There's need to be busy. There's need to prove yourself. They're getting caught up in meaningless movement.

trying to meet everybody's demands and requests and not always being able to focus on what you know is most important. And I'm going to speak a little bit more about this in episode three, where we speak about the difference between proving ourselves and transforming ourselves. So what I know to be true is that we don't fix this just with ad hoc wellness programs, with offering yoga sessions, even with offering employee assistance programs.

or really catchy values and culture slogans, we fix it by looking at the system and by creating sustainable leadership practices. So what do mean by that? We need to start looking at the key performance indicators that we measure and shifting those to not only measure output and performance, but to measure team morale, team wellbeing, measuring the quality of output, not just the volume.

We need to build in team reflection rituals. So once a month, once a quarter, you pause with the team work and you actually make the time to reflect. What are we doing that's moving the needle? What is just busy work? What are our priorities right now? What do we need to shift? Where can we make our highest contribution? Managers need to give themselves the permission to pause and not just push. And they need to role model that to their teams.

I've often heard horrific stories where managers are saying to their team members, you mustn't work at night, don't work on the weekends, really respect your boundaries. But then they themselves don't leave work on time. They're staying in the office or they're working till late in the evening and sending out emails. And they'll often say, yes, I'm doing this just for me. I don't expect that for you. But what team members pick up is, well, he's saying it's okay for me.

but he's not doing it himself, so it can't really be okay. And I've heard these horrific stories where some employees set their alarm for one o'clock in the morning to wake up and get online and to show that they're online and to respond to some emails to prove that they were also working late at night. So one of the things I also encourage leaders to do is to set email norms and response time agreements to say it's okay to take 24 hours to respond.

not one, two hour expectations. And this is a key one. We don't change behavior without reward. How can you tie rewards to outcomes that are sustainable and not just impressive? Because frantic energy is contagious, but so is calm. So if you're wondering where to begin, just start small. Here are some practical takeaways, some ideas just to incorporate one of these into your daily weekly practice.

will really shift the needle. So start with rule number six. Don't take yourself so seriously. That's to help with that mood of seriosity, the hysterical industriousness. Alan Seeler offers this as a powerful anecdote. He says not everything needs to carry a huge weight. Not your title, not your calendar, not your to-do list, and not even your wellbeing habits, because even those,

can end up weighing us down and actually draining our energy. Start a weekly done list. So at the end of the week, look at the things that you actually did accomplish as opposed to, well, I still have to to-do this. Because the to-do list constantly triggers a fight or flight response in our brain. It's a threat of, I've still got so much to do. I've still got so much to do. As opposed to saying, wow, this is what I did. This is what I've completed.

And start with your team a kill list. What are the things that we can just cut? What are the things that are not adding value? Remember the red, yellow, green audit that I shared earlier? And that will be in the show notes. Do that once a week with yourself, with your team. And then I think if you don't do anything else that I've shared, what I really urge you to do is just at least put one 30 minute reflection thinking time block in your diary a week.

and honor it as if it was the most important meeting. If you have to move it, move it, don't cancel it. But try and honor it as if you were having a meeting with your CEO or with a very important key stakeholder that you wouldn't just cancel or reschedule for no purpose, because it is. It's probably the most important meeting you're going to have that week. And then lastly, you could try using morning and evening prompts. So every morning when you get to your desk,

sit down and ask yourself what would make today the most meaningful of everything that's on my plate. What is the one key thing that I need to focus on? And then in the evenings, give yourself 10 minutes before you log off, just to quickly check through your day and check what you have on for the next day and ask yourself what created impact today? What created noise? And what can I leave behind? So building in these small moments of being able to reflect,

will help you really focus on what's important and be much more intentional around where your energy goes. And it'll just slow things down so that you don't get caught in that loop of the busyness that hopefully after listening today, you realize is actually just making us more and more ineffective. So if you want a checklist of all of these practical ideas I've suggested, you can go into the show notes and grab the download.

So maybe the invitation after today's episode is not to stop striving for excellence, not to stop being ambitious, but to stop spinning and to remember that movement is not the same thing as momentum and that your worth isn't evaluated by how many browser tabs you've got open or how many meetings you've attended. And here's a reflection question I want to leave you with. What would change for you if you treated slowing down

not as a luxury, not as an indulgence, but actually as your leadership edge. If you know that something needs to shift and you're done with quick fixes, you'll find different ways of working with me in the show notes. Please reach out. And finally, please remember, it's okay to not be okay, but it's not okay to stay that way. You are not alone. Help is always available. And please.

Be gentle and kind with yourself and others. Until next time, be well and take care.