You Know How to Accelerate. Do You Know How to Brake?

15 Aug

Most high performers are excellent at mobilising energy and comparatively poor at standing down. Burnout is often a deactivation problem, not a workload problem.

In short:
Burnout is usually discussed as a workload problem, which does not explain why two people under identical demands have different outcomes, or why someone can cut their hours and still feel unrecovered. A large part of the picture is asymmetry: many high performers are excellent at activation and comparatively poor at deactivation. They know how to accelerate and not how to brake. Recovery is a distinct skill, and it can be trained.

The executives I work with are rarely bad at pressure.

That is usually the whole problem. They are extremely good at it. They can mobilise energy on demand, hold composure through a difficult board meeting, absorb bad news at 6pm and still chair the offsite the following morning. The capacity to accelerate is precisely what got them where they are, and it is genuinely valuable.

What they are often much less good at is stopping.

Not stopping in the sense of leaving the office — most of them manage that eventually. Stopping in the sense of the body actually standing down. The meeting ends and the jaw stays clenched. The deal closes and the 3am wake-ups continue. The holiday begins and the first four days are spent coming down rather than resting.

This asymmetry — excellent at activation, poor at deactivation — explains more about executive burnout than workload does.

Why "work less" often doesn’t work

Burnout is usually framed as a volume problem. Too many hours, too many demands, not enough recovery time. Sometimes that is exactly right, and the answer is to reduce the load.

But the volume framing does not explain two things I see repeatedly.

First, two people can face near-identical demands and have completely different outcomes. Same role, same hours, same pressure, and one is deteriorating while the other is not.

Second — and this is the one that tends to unsettle people — someone can genuinely reduce their hours and still fail to recover. They take the leave. They delegate. They protect the weekend. And they remain exhausted, irritable, unable to sleep properly and vaguely resentful about the whole thing.

If burnout were purely a function of input, reducing input would reliably help. Often it does not, because the problem is not only how much is coming in. It is what happens after.

A stress response is supposed to end

When something demanding happens, your physiology coordinates a response across attention, heart rate, muscle readiness, hormones and behaviour. That response is adaptive. It is what allows you to think fast, absorb risk and act decisively.

The design assumption is that it winds down afterwards.

Recovery is not a switch, though. Different parts of the response have different time courses, and people vary considerably. Researchers increasingly look not only at how strongly someone reacts to a stressor, but at how long the response persists — because prolonged or inflexible recovery appears to matter at least as much as the size of the initial reaction.

For a lot of high performers, the reaction is efficient and the recovery is not. The accelerator works beautifully. The brake is the part that has never been trained.

Four reasons the brake fails

1. Nothing signals the end

Modern executive work rarely finishes cleanly. One meeting blends into the next. The difficult conversation stops because someone had to leave, not because anything resolved. The workday ends with a notification at 9:40pm.

Without any transition, your system receives very little information that this moment is different from the last one. It is not being stubborn. It has simply not been told.

2. Your mind keeps the stressor present

Rehearsing a conversation in the shower is not a neutral mental activity. Repeated worry and rumination — what researchers call perseverative cognition — has been linked in meta-analysis with sustained changes across heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol and heart-rate variability.

Thought is part of physiology. As long as you keep representing the problem, some part of your system stays organised around it.

3. Overriding is not the same as regulating

This is the one most specific to high performers.

You can be tired and keep working. Anxious and still deliver. Depleted and still chair the meeting. That override capacity is real and it is useful, and it is also frequently mistaken for resilience.

The difficulty is that overriding the body works by reducing your contact with its signals. Do it for long enough and the signals become genuinely harder to read. Fatigue gets answered with caffeine, tension gets ignored, sleep gets negotiated downward, irritability gets attributed to workload. The person remains highly capable while becoming progressively less informed about what they are actually carrying.

4. The baseline has drifted

If you have been running at 90 per cent activation for two years, 90 per cent stops registering as elevated. It registers as normal.

This is why so many senior people are genuinely surprised when something gives way. By their own internal measure, nothing had changed. The measure had changed.

What braking actually involves

The useful interventions here are much smaller and duller than the problem seems to warrant. That tends to disappoint people, which is worth naming.

Mark endings deliberately

Close the laptop and physically put it somewhere. Write down the one unfinished thing and where it will live until tomorrow. Change clothes. Walk through a doorway and stop for ten seconds before continuing.

You are not claiming the problem is solved. You are giving your system a sensory boundary around a moment that would otherwise have no edge.

Let the body complete something

When you have spent a day preparing to respond, push back or solve, and social convention has required you to sit still, the readiness has nowhere to go. It shows up as pacing, restlessness or a clenched jaw at 9pm.

Walking, pushing into a wall for ten seconds, stretching with actual effort — none of this purges a chemical store, and anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling. What it does do is give mobilisation an organised present-day action and shift attention towards current sensation.

Practise recovery when you don’t need it

The Sunday night before a hard week is not when you learn this. It has to be rehearsed when the stakes are low, in the same way that you build physical fitness before the thing that requires it, not during.

This is the logic behind Soma Circuit, the app I built out of the practices I had been recording for clients — short exercises matched to whether you are wired or depleted, on the basis that those two states need opposite things. But the principle matters more than the tool: recovery is a trainable skill, and it gets trained in ordinary moments.

Sequence the day differently

Two hard conversations back to back is a scheduling decision, not a fact of nature. So is taking the difficult call in the car on the way home. So is the 6pm board pack.

A surprising amount of executive recovery is a calendar problem wearing a physiology costume.

What this is not

I want to be direct about the limits, because "resilience" language gets misused constantly in corporate settings.

Building recovery capacity is not a substitute for changing conditions that are genuinely unreasonable. If the workload is impossible, the culture is punishing, or the role has expanded well past what one person can hold, no amount of skilful braking will resolve that — and treating it as an individual training problem is both inaccurate and unfair.

Capacity-building should never become a reason to tolerate something that needs to change. Some situations need a different structure, more resources, a boundary, or an exit.

The distinction is straightforward. Recovery skills help when the demands are real, chosen and sustainable in principle. They do not help when the demands are not.

A more useful question

Most people in demanding roles ask themselves some version of: how do I reduce the pressure?

For many executives and founders that is not a realistic question, and asking it produces mostly guilt.

The better one is: how do I build a system capable of meeting the life I have actually chosen, without losing the parts of it that made it worth choosing?

That question has answers. Most of them are unglamorous, and most of them are about braking rather than accelerating.

You already know how to go. The work is learning how to stop.

Try it in the app

Executive Psychology works with leaders on exactly this — through The Reset Program for individuals, and corporate and leadership work for teams. If you would like to talk it through, get in touch. For short daily practices between sessions, Soma Circuit is free for seven days.

Frequently asked questions

Why doesn’t reducing my hours fix my burnout?

Because burnout is not purely a volume problem. Many high performers are efficient at activation and poor at deactivation — the stress response mobilises well but does not wind down. If recovery is the impaired part, reducing input alone will not restore it, which is why people can take leave and still feel unrecovered.

What is the difference between overriding stress and regulating it?

Overriding works by reducing your contact with the body’s signals so you can keep performing. Regulating means influencing the state itself. Override is genuinely useful in the short term, but sustained over years it makes fatigue, tension and depletion progressively harder to read.

Why can’t I switch off after work?

Common reasons include the day having no clear ending, continued mental rehearsal of unresolved conversations, physical readiness that was never allowed an action, and a baseline that has drifted upward so that high activation no longer registers as unusual. Each has a different practical remedy.

How do you actually train recovery?

Mark endings with a concrete action, let the body complete a simple physical action, practise short regulation exercises when you do not need them rather than in a crisis, and treat the calendar as part of the intervention. The individual pieces are deliberately small and repeated.

Is burnout an individual problem or an organisational one?

Frequently both, and the distinction matters. Recovery skills help when demands are real, chosen and sustainable in principle. They do not resolve impossible workloads, punishing cultures or roles that have expanded past what one person can hold — and treating those as individual training problems is inaccurate.