#6 Why Your Best Performance Practices Are Quietly Burning You Out
The practices that made you successful could now be slowly undermining you.
And you can't see it happening.
You've done everything right.
You set ambitious goals.
You wake up early.
You say no to distractions.
You treat your calendar like a fortress, protecting time for deep work.
You measure everything.
You optimize relentlessly.
And yet, something feels off.
You're hitting targets, but you're exhausted.
Your results are solid, but your energy is depleted.
You look successful on the outside—promotions, recognition, respect—while feeling increasingly hollow on the inside.
This is the sustainability paradox, and it's one of the most dangerous traps successful leaders fall into.
Here's what I've discovered after working with hundreds of leaders:
The very practices that fuel short-term performance often erode long-term well-being.
Worse, they eventually undermine the performance itself.
The problem isn't that you're working hard or being disciplined.
The problem is that you're treating your leadership like a sprint when it's actually a marathon. Or worse, a marathon run at a sprinter’s pace!
The False Equation We've Been Sold
Somewhere along the way, we absorbed a cultural narrative:
Excellence requires sacrificing well-being.
If you're not burning out, you're not ambitious enough.
If you have time for sleep, relationships, or recovery, you're not serious.
This equation gets reinforced everywhere—in business books celebrating the “hustle”, in office culture that rewards visible exhaustion, in leadership models that equate being overextended with importance.
I bought this narrative completely. I treated rest like a luxury I'd earn once I "made it,” or retired. I measured my worth by how many fires I could put out, how many critical initiatives I could juggle, how little sleep I could function on, how constantly I could be available.
Then I hit a wall.
And I realized something jarring: I wasn't actually performing at my best. I was performing at my desperate. There's a difference.
When you're running on fumes:
Your decision-making deteriorates.
Your creativity flatlines.
Your emotional intelligence—the very thing that makes you an effective leader—gets hijacked by anxiety and stress.
You become reactive instead of strategic.
You lose the very capacities that made you successful in the first place.
But there's something else that happens, something I rarely see named directly—you have to devote enormous energy just to managing the inner experience of burnout.
When you're chronically stressed, your nervous system stays in threat mode. Everything feels urgent. Everything feels like it could go wrong. Underneath the surface of "managing well," there's a constant low-level panic. You're not just working hard. You're fighting a running internal battle against negativity, self-doubt, and reactivity.
A leader in this state spends mental energy you can't see:
Managing the voice that says "you're falling behind" (even though you're not)
Fighting the urge to respond defensively to feedback
Resisting the impulse to catastrophize about problems that are actually manageable
Controlling the irritability that makes you snap at people you care about
Managing the shame about not being able to keep up
Battling the anxiety that wakes you up at 3 AM
This is exhausting. And it's invisible to everyone around you, including yourself.
You're burning energy on an internal firefight while simultaneously trying to perform at your best. You're not just tired from work. You're tired from constantly managing your own mind.
Here's what's insidious:
The harder you push, the worse this gets.
The more depleted you become, the more negativity and reactivity flood in.
So, you push harder to manage it, which deepens the depletion, which intensifies the internal struggle.
It's a vicious cycle.
The energy you'd normally have for creativity, strategic thinking, relationship-building, and actually enjoying your work gets redirected into this internal management project. You're no longer performing at your best because you're operating at your desperate—and a huge portion of your desperation is devoted to just holding yourself together.
This is why sustainable practices aren't luxuries. They're necessary.
When you build genuine recovery into your system, when you eliminate the extractive practices that keep you in chronic stress, something shifts neurologically. Your nervous system gets the signal that you're safe. That threat response stands down. And suddenly, you have access to all that energy you were using just to manage yourself.
You stop fighting your own mind. And you get back your capacity for real leadership (and enjoyment).
Why Your Best Practices Are Secretly Sabotaging You
Let me be specific. Here are three performance practices that often become sustainability killers:
Practice #1: Relentless goal-setting without recovery cycles.
Goals drive focus and motivation—until they don't. When goals are constant, with no seasonal variation or built-in recovery, your nervous system stays in perpetual activation mode. You're always "on." There's always something to chase. Your brain never gets the signal that you've arrived, that you can rest, that you're safe. Over time, this creates chronic stress, not high performance.
Practice #2: Always-on availability.
You respond to Slack at 10 PM. You take calls during dinner. You check email before bed. The logic is seductive: responsiveness equals reliability. But what actually happens is that your brain never fully disengages. Your recovery time gets colonized by work. The boundaries that protect well-being get obliterated in the name of speed and access. And paradoxically, constant availability often means slower, less creative problem-solving because you're never giving your subconscious the space it needs to synthesize and innovate.
Practice #3: Treating rest as laziness.
This is perhaps the most insidious one. High achievers learn to interpret rest as weakness. If you're resting, you're not working. If you're not working, you're falling behind. So rest becomes something you do only when you're sick or broken. By then, it's too late. You've already accumulated a stress debt so massive that a weekend away can't fix it. Real recovery requires building it into your system—daily, weekly, seasonally.
Don’t believe me? Answer this: How many days into a week-long vacation before you begin to relax and disconnect from work? Four days? Six days? Do I hear eight days?
And how long after you return before the stress comes roaring back? One day? Half a day? The Sunday before your vacation ends?
The Audit: Where Are You Trading Sustainability for Speed?
Try this: Look at your leadership practices over the past month. For each of these, ask yourself honestly:
Which practices feel sustainable? Which ones feel extractive?
Which ones energize you? Which ones deplete you?
Which ones are serving your long-term impact versus just managing short-term demands?
Which ones would you still do if no one was watching?
Pay attention to the gap between the two lists. That gap is where the sustainability paradox lives.
Maybe it's a meeting structure or cadence that's become an energy drain.
Maybe it's a communication pattern that's keeping you reactive instead of strategic.
Maybe it's a set of activities you’re pursuing or metrics you're tracking that don't actually move the needle but consume your attention daily.
Maybe it's a decision-making process that's become so consensus-driven that it's paralyzed real progress.
The point isn't to eliminate rigor or ambition. The point is to identify which of your practices are genuinely serving your impact versus which ones are just creating the appearance of productivity while quietly draining you.
The Real Choice
Here's what I discovered when I redesigned my own leadership system: the false choice between performance and well-being isn't actually a choice at all. It's a choice between short-term results and long-term impact.
When you systematically build well-being into your leadership—genuine recovery, reasonable boundaries, sustainable practices—something unexpected happens.
Your performance doesn't decrease. It actually improves.
Because you're no longer spending half your energy just managing your internal state.
Your thinking becomes clearer.
Your decisions become wiser.
Your energy becomes more consistent.
You become more resilient when things get hard.
You stop operating at your desperate and start operating at your best.
This isn't about working less or caring less. It's about working smarter—and building your personal leadership system the same way you'd reengineer any other system: by eliminating waste, minimizing non-value-adding activity, optimizing overall impact, and building in recovery cycles.
The leaders I work with who've made this shift report the same thing: they achieve more while feeling better. Not instead of. While. Both.
That's not idealistic. That's sustainable excellence.
What To Do This Week
Pick one practice from your audit—something that feels extractive. Ask yourself: could I redesign this to serve both performance and well-being? What would need to change? What would I gain?
Start there. One small shift. That's how real systems change.