Steve Muscat Azzopardi is a leadership mentor and author of Your Leadership RIDE, who, after 25 years spanning Financial and Corporate Services, RegTech start-ups, and serving as a Partner at a top-tier global advisory firm, has made it his mission to help others grow as leaders.
From the operational trenches to the boardroom, Steve has led teams through turnarounds, rapid scaling, and periods of crisis. He now mentors leaders, founders, and executives to lead with lasting impact.
I couldn’t breathe.
It felt like a hippo was sitting on my chest. However hard I tried to draw in air, my lungs felt squeezed.
Surely I wasn’t having a heart attack in my mid-thirties; I considered myself to be in great health. In fact, it was a panic attack. As I managed to start breathing again, it occurred to me that actually I hadn’t been out on my mountain bike for a while. My yoga and meditation playlists had lain silent for months.
That is how you open the door to burnout. By accepting projects when you don’t have the bandwidth. By saying yes instead of no. BY IGNORING SELF CARE. By dismissing early warning signs as “just a busy period.”
The Invisible Weight of Ambition
Having worked for a tech start-up myself, I understand the extremely fast pace and constant demands. Additional feature launches are pushed back for critical fixes. If you don’t keep on top of emerging tech, it renders your latest development obsolete before you even deploy it. Leaders additionally juggle fundraising, growing pains, and cross-border regulations.
In my mentoring practice, I see this relentless pressure intensified particularly for women.
Women often have extra responsibilities at home alongside their work. For example, they are frequently in charge of household management, their children’s education and extracurricular activities, and perhaps supporting elderly family members. And whilst men are increasingly taking up these responsibilities, it is still predominantly women who find themselves balancing both.
At work, they frequently pull the invisible thread of team care and cohesion whilst feeling the pressure to constantly prove their technical worth in male-dominated spaces. This constant pressure to perform accelerates the time to burnout.
Burnout doesn’t happen because of weakness; it happens because we are running at over 100% capacity in the wrong gear.
How You Feel and Act when Approaching Burnout
Burnout is experienced differently by different individuals, and what follows is not comprehensive. Exhaustion and persistent fatigue stemming from impending burnout are usually seen at various levels that may include the following signs.
At the somatic level, it often starts with sensations such as a clenched jaw, grinding your teeth, or tight muscles. It could progress to physical symptoms including frequent headaches or stomach aches.
Feelings of panic, anxiety, and persistent overwhelm may be emotional signs of burnout, along with mood changes and feelings of demotivation and detachment.
On the cognitive level, people approaching burnout may find themselves frequently fantasising about being somewhere else (beyond the usual Monday morning dreaming of being in Tahiti). More seriously, they may self-doubt and question their purpose to the point that it is detrimental to their decision-making and performance.
Perhaps the most direct warning signs come across through changes in behaviour such as altered patterns of sleep or appetite. Other red flags include repeatedly starting work late, extending lunch breaks, absenteeism, or indeed the opposite of staying excessively long at work and skipping breaks. If you find yourself making recurring mistakes in areas you have mastered, you may want to pay attention.
The Temperature Gauge: 3 Warning Lights of Burnout
The difficulty with realising that you may be approaching the end of your limit is that some symptoms are often considered part of being productive. We normalise it as part of the hustle. I like to use three “Temperature Gauge” questions to assess if burnout is approaching.
- The Reaction Test: Am I feeling an out of character spike of rage over a minor email or error?
- The Cynicism Test: Am I sneering at or dismissing a project, a colleague, or a mission that I usually value?
- The Hero Test: Do I secretly (or openly!) believe that if I step away for a day, the whole project will collapse?
If you answer “Yes” to any of these questions, you might need to step away from your desk for a moment to assess how well you’re handling things.
Practical Burnout Prevention: Visor Down Moments
In essence, my approach to avoid burnout is to set in place boundaries that safeguard my downtime to recharge, and build routines to help me focus and drive impact at work. It takes a level of discipline to codify good intentions into enduring habits, but persevering with this empowers professionals to enjoy a healthy balance between career trajectory and personal fulfillment.
Some of the tips I suggest in my book Your Leadership RIDE, or that I use in my mentoring practice, are as follows:
Refocus
- Re-evaluate your purpose: We often continue to do something out of habit and comfort. A visualisation exercise helps you to re-align your values and goals. You can then start to work towards them with energy and enthusiasm.
Set boundaries
- Kill Switch: Create a hard stop for digital devices before bed. Yes, if you’re a product manager deploying a key upgrade tomorrow, you might need to work late tonight, but make that the extreme exception, not the norm.
- Visor Down Time: Create physical cues, such as moving to another room or putting headphones on, for yourself and your team to block out noise and allow deep focus. Multitasking kills both efficiency and performance.
Make time for self-care and rest
- The 60-Second Reset: Stress triggers our fight or flight response: helpful to tackle a sabre-toothed tiger, but disastrous for professional decision-making. Learn to recognise the physical symptoms of stress in your body, maybe a clenched jaw or tight shoulders. When you feel the stress building, just take a minute to pause. Breathe. Unclench your fists. Get up, walk for a glass of water, or look out of the window for a minute.
- The 60-Minute Reset: When a minute is not enough, take a longer break. Go out for a stroll, get some stretches in, or read a book. If you feel guilty taking a break when “we’re so busy,” remember this: you owe it to yourself to rest. You can only show up at the level you want to, both at work and at home, if you recharge when you need to.
- Restore Yourself: Identify those activities that boost your energy and help you find your flow, and make time for them regularly.
Endurance Over Speed: Your Duty to Rest
While we often approach work as though it’s a sprint, it’s actually an endurance event. Rest is simply an operational necessity to ensure you last the distance, which is why I call it a duty to yourself. By choosing to recharge, you aren’t just helping yourself, you’re setting a standard for a healthier, more sustainable tech community.
Burnout is often overlooked by the person living it. Look out for yourself and those around you.
Make It Happen: A Commitment to Yourself
You know what your typical week looks like, with meetings locked in for product, sales, and bugs. Right now, where are you going to start fitting in some downtime to recharge yourself – every single day?
Disclaimer: This article is based on my lived experience and my work on helping professionals to avoid burnout through a healthy approach to work. If you feel you are suffering from burnout, please do not delay in seeking support from a mental health professional.
