Statistics

Founder mental health trends 2026

Nearly every founder I coach eventually asks a version of the same question: is it supposed to feel this heavy? The answer lives in how the numbers have moved. Here is what changed in founder and executive mental health between 2023 and 2026, and what stayed stubbornly stuck.

The full burnout numbers All statistics pages

The trends

7 shifts I'm watching, with the data behind them

1. Burnout has plateaued at crisis levels. 53% of founders reported burnout in 2024, 54% in 2025, according to Sifted's annual founder surveys (n=156 and n=138). Sit with that: a coin-flip burnout rate has become the accepted baseline.
2. Founders are quietly deciding to stay. 49% of founders were considering quitting within a year in 2024; by 2025 it was 39%, according to Sifted (same surveys). Intent eased as markets recovered. The stress numbers above didn't.
3. CEOs started saying it out loud. 55% of CEOs reported experiencing a mental health issue in the past year, up 24 points from 31% the year before, according to Businessolver, 2024 (n=3,000+). Part of that jump is disclosure becoming safer, which is itself the trend.
4. The coaching supply keeps compounding. 122,974 coach practitioners now generate $5.34B in annual revenue, up 15% since the 2023 study, which was itself up 54% on 2019, according to the ICF Global Coaching Study by PwC, 2025 (n=10,000+ across 127 countries). Demand for structured support has been climbing for a decade straight.
5. Investors moved from talk to budget, but the gap is still wide. Felicis commits 1% of every first check to founder development, and Balderton runs a wellbeing platform used by 100+ portfolio founders (Crunchbase News, 2023; Balderton, 2024). Yet 56% of founders still received zero mental health support from their investors, according to Sifted, 2025 (n=138).
6. The AI race is dragging extreme hours back into fashion. Multiple 2025 reports document 72-to-100-hour weeks becoming a hiring filter at AI startups, with some companies openly running 9am-9pm, 6-day schedules (Pragmatic Engineer, Fortune, Washington Post, 2025). Journalistic evidence, not a survey; no one has measured adoption rates yet. Watch this one.
7. The workweek is leaking into the weekend. Weekend work rose more than 40% year over year and focus time hit a 3-year low, according to ActivTrak's State of the Workplace, 2026, built on 443M+ hours of digital activity across 1,000+ organizations. Workforce-wide telemetry, and it matches what my clients describe.

My own baseline

The trend line that starts here

A trend needs a first data point. These are mine, set in August 2026. Next time I pull the data, this section becomes a comparison.

76% of the 29 leaders who completed my Whole Human Life Score scored below 75 out of 100 across 8 life areas. Source: Peter Sorgenfrei, Whole Human Life Score data, August 2026, n=29.
28% of my site survey respondents are in a career transition, 27% carry scaling pressure, and 1 in 10 described burnout unprompted. Source: Peter Sorgenfrei reader survey, 2026, n=83 usable responses.

Method: self-reported, small, self-selected samples from my assessment and site survey. Coded by hand, blanks excluded. Quote freely with the sample size and credit to Peter Sorgenfrei, petersorgenfrei.com.

What to do with this

Get ahead of your own trend line

The 10-minute burnout risk quiz tells you where you are before the trend does. For the deeper work there's 1-on-1 coaching and the Whole Human Framework.

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