Burnout

For 20 years, I've performed strength for a living. Nursing, law enforcement, emergency services— environments where doubt was not an option. Or so I thought. Because behind every decision, every shift, every room I walked into, there was a voice telling me I wasn't enough. I just never told anyone. That voice isn't weakness. It's your inner edge, if you know how to use it. Welcome! I'm Louisa Tostrop, the founder of Tostrop Consulting, a mental coach and a motivational speaker, and I help CEOs, COOs, and executives break the silence around the inner voice that tells them they're not enough. This is mental awareness, the inner edge, for leaders who are ready to stop performing confidence and start leading from the inside out. Now let's get into today's episode. She's up at 4:15, before the kids, before her husband, before anyone in the house needs anything from her. She makes coffee in the dark, opens her laptop, and works for more than 1 hour in silence because it's the only window of the day that belongs entirely to her cases. By 6:30 AM, she's helping pack lunches, signing permission slips, fielding questions about where the things for the school are. By 8:30, she's in client calls. By noon, she's answering emails she didn't get to yesterday. By 6 PM, she's back in the kitchen. By 9:30, after the kids are in bed, she's at the laptop again. She does this 5 days a week, sometimes 6, sometimes 7. And when people ask how she does it, her own firm, 2 kids, a marriage, and a caseload that would challenge a team twice her size, she smiles and says, "You just make it work." She came to me not because she was falling apart, but she came because she was terrified of being found out. Today we're going deep on burnout. Not the obvious kind, not the kind where you're crying in the bathroom and canceling meetings. The invisible kind. The kind that wakes up at 4:15 AM, charges through the day, and then sits back down at the laptop after everyone else is asleep. High-functioning burnout. And if any part of you thought, that sounds familiar. Then stay with me because this episode is for you. Her name isn't important. What matters is that you probably recognize her. 40 years old, self-employed lawyer, built her own firm from scratch, which means she never clocks off because the firm is her. Every case, every client, every invoice and contract and late-night revision is her name on the line. She's good at what she does. Genuinely good. Her clients trust her. Her reputation is solid. And still, every single morning when she opens her laptop in the dark, there is a quiet voice underneath the work that whispers, "Today might be the day someone figures out you're not as good as they think." Imposter syndrome doesn't always look like self-doubt. In high performers, it often looks like relentless effort, like proving yourself again and again through the sheer volume of what you produce, like never ever letting the pace slow down. Because if you slow down, there might be space for someone to see the truth you're convinced you're hiding. For her, sleep was the first casualty. 6 hours became 5, 5 became 4 and a half, and 4.5 became 4. She told herself she was a light sleeper anyway. She told herself she'd catch up at the weekend, but she didn't. The late nights stretched, the early mornings stayed fixed, and somewhere in between, the exhaustion stopped feeling like tiredness and started feeling like just how things are. And that's the moment I want you to pay attention to. Because when exhaustion stops being a signal and starts feeling like your baseline, that's when burnout has moved in. When she first described how she was feeling, she kept using the word fine. I'm fine. I'm just tired. You know, everyone's tired. It took a few sessions before we got underneath it, and what was underneath it was not what she expected. It's not emptiness, it's numbness. She told me she used to love the strategy side of her work, the puzzle of it, the architecture of a good argument, and somewhere along the way the pleasure had just gone flat. She was still doing the work, but the aliveness in it had disappeared. It's not sadness, it's irritability. Small things that she would have let go—a slow email response, a misunderstanding with a client—were suddenly enormous. She'd feel a flash of disproportionate anger and then immediately turn it on herself. What is wrong with me? It's not laziness, it's compulsive busyness. She wasn't doing less, she was doing more. Because more felt safer. And more meant evidence. Evidence that she was good enough, present enough, on top of it all enough. Stillness felt threatening, like if she stopped moving everything she'd been outrunning would finally catch up. And then there's the 3 AM mind, the one that jolts her awake even on the nights She does get to bed early, replaying a client conversation, wondering if she missed something in a contract, and running worst-case scenarios for a case that isn't even a risk. She's exhausted and she cannot rest. So if you hear yourself in any of this, I want you to say this directly. I want to say this directly to you. You're not broken. You're not failing. You are depleted. And those are very different things. Because broken means something is fundamentally wrong with you. Depleted means you have been spending far more than you have been replenishing. For a very long time. And depletion is something you can actually address. But only once you name it. So, here's what most conversations about burnout miss entirely. Because it's not just about the hours. In, in this case, my client works long hours, yes, but if you add up everything she's actually carrying, the real weight, the hours are almost the least of it. Because alongside every other case, every other client, every early morning and late night, she's also carrying this: the performance of someone who has it together. You know, the effort of appearing calm and competent in every client interaction, even on the day when she feels like she's held together with coffee and willpower. The self-monitoring that runs constantly in the background. Am I doing enough? Did I miss something? Do they trust me? Should they? And then there's the fear, the specific exhausting fear of being discovered. Of the day when someone looks at her work and says, "I thought you were better than this." That fear doesn't rest. It works the same hours as she does. And if you recognize it, you perhaps feel it works the same hours as you do too. So what I do call it is the hidden weight. So, and in my experience working with high performers, it is almost you know, heavier than the workload itself. It's just invisible, which is why it never gets addressed. So when I work with my clients, one of the first things we do is to build what I call a depletion map, a way of identifying not just where your energy goes, but what drains it faster than it can possibly be replenished. And again and again, people are surprised by what they find. I was surprised myself, and I still work with that myself because I get overloaded. I get those voices. I hear those voices too. We all do. And for her, it wasn't the caseload that was emptying her the fastest. It was the vigilance, the constant exhausting monitoring of how she was being perceived, the energy it took to perform certainty she didn't feel. So when you can see the map clearly, when you can name what's actually costing you, you can start to do something about it. Not by working less, but by relating to yourself differently. By putting down some of what you've been carrying in silence. And that's where recovery starts. Not with a holiday, but with awareness. And as I always say, You have to be aware to, you know, to create a change. You have to be aware of what you are going to change before you're able to change it at all, right? So, well, I want to give you 3 questions to sit with after this episode, and you don't have to answer them now. You just let them be with you. All right? So, the first question. When did you last feel genuinely energized by your work? Not just functional, but actually alive in it? How long ago was that? I suggest you write it down in a journal because then you can look at it, and sometimes it's better to see it on paper too. I'm a paper girl, right? So I do everything on paper. Do it in a computer first and then on paper because I I need to see it. So write it down and that creates, you know, it positions it stronger in your mind. So, question 2: What are you carrying alongside your workload that no one else can see? What's the performance that runs underneath the performance? And question number 3: If the person I described today, you know, my client, up at 4:15 working after everyone's asleep, afraid of being found out, came to you as a friend and told you how she was feeling, what would you tell her? That last question is the one that tends to crack something open. So because we are almost always more compassionate toward others than we are toward ourselves. And high-functioning burnout lives in that gap. So, if this episode has been landing for you, and if something in you has been quietly saying yes while you listened, I want to tell you about what I'm building. The Next Level Leadership is a membership and mastermind for exactly the kind of persons that we've been talking about today. You know, the high performer who has built something real, who shows up and delivers, and who's ready to close the gap between the person they the world sees and the person they actually are inside. We work on the hidden weight, you know, we build the kind of inner leadership that doesn't collapse under pressure because it's rooted in something real and not just in relentless effort. Besides that, I'm having a mastermind the 19th of May, and the waitlist is open now, and I will set the link in the show notes. And we will in 1.5 hours work with different areas where you will get tools and toys to implement immediately so that you can still work, but work with love and learn how to remember yourself and, and become grounded so that you are not going to burn out. If some part of you is saying, this is what I've been looking for, I love to see you there. Thank you for being here. Um, my client is still working, by the way, the lawyer I told you about. She's still building her firm and it has become even bigger. Yeah, I use the word bigger, and she's become even more aware of what not to do. So that's really a win for her, right? And she's still showing up for her clients and her kids and her husband, but As said, she's also started doing something she hadn't done in years. She started telling the truth about how it actually feels. And that's not a small thing. And I want that for you as well. And that's where everything changes. So again, if this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. Not because they look like they're struggling, but because they might be exactly like her. Looking fine, running on empty, waiting for someone to name what they can't say out loud themselves. So, and remember, once again, I have this mastermind the 19th of May. I put the link in the show notes so that you can sign up already. And yeah, I'll be back next week. And until then, take care of yourself, not as a reward, but as a practice.