The Andarta Way

Burnout Isn’t About Weakness. It’s About Load and Recovery

In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky explores the physiology of chronic stress. His work explains why humans—unlike wild animals—struggle with prolonged cognitive and emotional stressors that never quite resolve. We carry the load longer. And our bodies pay the price.

Burnout happens not because someone is unfit for their role, but because their accumulated load eventually exceeds their available capacity to recover. It is not a failure of resilience. It is the predictable result of sustained imbalance between demand and restoration.

Spotting Burnout in Yourself

Most high performers don’t wake up one day and realise they’re burnt out. It creeps in. Often, the first signs are mistaken for normal fatigue or an unusually busy season. Over time, these “blips” become baseline.

Ask, quietly:

- Am I sleeping, or just closing my eyes?

- Has my usual sharpness become harder to access?

- Do I feel like I’m moving through my day in second gear?

- Am I still engaging with people – or just managing them?

The psychological signs often emerge subtly: reduced empathy, a growing sense of detachment, or an inability to feel satisfaction from a job done well. Physically, persistent low-level illness or slow training recovery may point to a system no longer compensating.

How to Spot It in Others – Especially in Teams

Burnout is rarely announced. It shows up in patterns.

A colleague becomes less reliable – but, at first, only in the small things. A leader loses patience. Someone who used to bring creative ideas now only delivers the minimum required. The social glue that binds a team starts to dissolve.

This matters not just for wellbeing, but for mission outcomes. A leader who has lost empathy starts making worse decisions. Their team feels it. One person leaves. The load intensifies for those who stay. Performance suffers. And the cycle deepens.

Burnout at the top tier isn’t a personal failing – it’s a systems risk.

The Consequences Are Measurable

Burnout is not just about tiredness. It has documented links to cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, reduced immunity, and premature mortality (Salvagioni et al., 2017). Cognitively, it leads to impaired decision-making, reduced executive function, and emotional dysregulation. Socially, through its impacts on personal empathy, it erodes the culture and cohesion of the teams high performers are often relied on to lead.

And the effects can linger. In one study, nearly a third of individuals remained clinically exhausted seven years after their original diagnosis, despite having received treatment (Glise et al., 2020).

Recovery Doesn’t Have to Mean Stopping

For many high performers, being told to “do less” isn’t helpful. The problem is not their output—it’s that their system is absorbing stress faster than it’s discharging it. What’s needed is not retreat, but recalibration.

There are ways to intervene that don’t compromise ambition.

Cold water immersion and contrast therapies, for example, are increasingly used in our practice not for muscle recovery but to modulate stress reactivity and support parasympathetic tone. There’s data that the effect isn’t just physical. It demonstrably shifts the body’s response to psychological load.

Performance coaching that integrates structured recovery isn’t about slowing down. It’s about removing hidden drag from unresolved or unrecognised issues—friction points, emotional reactivity, poor boundaries—that erode clarity and personal efficacy over time.

Novel techniques such as integrated eye movement therapy (IEMT) or bilateral stimulation-enhanced coaching use principles drawn from EMDR and positive psychology to reduce background cognitive noise and facilitate recovery, without requiring people to reduce their workload. By lowering allostatic load, they help preserve access to creativity, patience, and sound judgement even in high-demand environments.

What links these approaches is not sentiment, but strategy. They don’t assume the person wants to – or even can –  step away from the work. They’re designed to help them stay on-mission. Clearer, healthier. Professionally effective, and personally intact.

Read Time: 5mins

Author:
Dr Jonathan Clark-McKellar

A Final Thought

In my experience – first as a UKSF Medical Officer, and now working closely with civilian high performers in demanding leadership roles – very few people ask for help early. Many don’t even notice what they’ve lost, until sharpness, empathy, and satisfaction have already slipped away.

If that feels familiar, it’s absolutely not a moral failure. It’s not a character flaw. It’s an early warning.

You don’t have to have fallen apart for something to need repair. The earlier you notice, the less you’ll have to fix.

Article by Jon Clark McKellar & Eleanor Shanahan

References

- Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111.

- Sapolsky, R. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt & Co.

- Salvagioni, D. A. J., et al. (2017). Consequences of job burnout. PLOS ONE, 12(10).

- Glise, K., et al. (2020). Long-term follow-up of residual symptoms in patients treated for stress-related exhaustion