How to Avoid Burnout as a CEO Before It's Too Late

On a Monday morning in February 2020, I couldn't get out of bed.

Not wouldn't. Couldn't. My brain and body had disconnected, like a phone line cut in a storm. I was the CEO of Holo, Europe's largest autonomous vehicle operator. 70 employees across five countries. And I couldn't make sense of my own calendar.

I called my sister Esther, who is a psychologist. She listened for about a minute and said: "This is stress. You need to call in sick." I was away from work for twelve weeks. During those weeks, the board let me go. Nothing personal, they assured me. Just business.

The stupid part is that I knew the warning signs. I'd read the articles. I could have written the articles. And I still drove straight through every one of them, because burnout doesn't announce itself to people like us. It dresses up as commitment.

You're not the exception. That's the trap.

Some numbers, since CEOs respect numbers more than feelings. 55% of CEOs say they've experienced a mental health issue, up 24 points in a single year (Businessolver, 2024). Nearly 70% of C-suite executives have seriously considered quitting for a job that better protects their well-being (Deloitte, 2022). Among founders, 81% hide their stress from the people around them (Startup Snapshot, 2023).

In early 2020 I was in all three groups at once. Struggling, hiding it, and telling myself I'd rest after the next milestone.

The signals I missed

Looking back, my body had been sending the same message for years, and I had a track record of ignoring it. In my time at UBS on Wall Street I gained weight, lost hair by the handful and watched my personal relationships suffer, while earning twice what I'd made in my previous job. It took me fourteen months to walk away from that one.

At Holo the signals were quieter and easier to explain away. The relentless stress of growing a company in an industry that barely existed. The pressure to project confidence while dealing with daily technical setbacks. The weight of 70 people's livelihoods. And underneath all of it, the belief that my worth as a human being depended on my performance as a leader. Each of these looked like normal founder life at the time. Together, they were a countdown.

What I do differently now

I now coach 63 founders and CEOs across 13 countries, and the work keeps coming back to three shifts I had to make myself after the collapse.

From an external to an internal scorecard. I built my entire sense of safety on being "the CEO who built something from nothing." When the board removed that title, there was no foundation underneath it. The fix isn't abandoning ambition; it's defining success in terms that survive losing the job.

From episodic to systematic self-care. Rest that only happens when the calendar allows isn't rest, it's a rounding error. Recovery has to be built into the structure of the week, not promised for after the next milestone. The milestone never comes. I said "after the next funding round" for three years.

From individual to relational safety. 81% of founders hide their stress. I did too, from my board, my team, my family. The leaders I see stay healthy are the ones with places where they don't have to perform. A peer group, a coach, a marriage where the truth gets told.

During my twelve weeks off I sat by the water at my summer house, doing nothing, which at first felt unbearable. The waves didn't care about my achievements. Somewhere in those weeks I experienced, for the first time in years, the feeling the Danish language calls "nok." Enough. Not everything. Enough.

If you're reading this at 2am

One thing before anything else: burnout is not a discipline problem, and it doesn't respond to the tools that built your company. Pushing harder is the disease presenting as the cure. And if you're past the point of self-management, the next call isn't a coach or a book. It's a doctor or a therapist.

I wrote a book about the whole arc, the collapse and the rebuild: The Whole Human Leader, published by Wiley in August 2026. If this article felt less like reading and more like being described, it was written for you.

Not sure where you are on the curve? I built a free 12-question burnout risk self-check. Ten minutes, no login, a straight answer.