Why Growth (not Rest) is the Real Solution to Burnout
Eight habits of leaders who thrive without burning out, and why your 20s success formula is failing you now
When high performers hit the wall, it's rarely about working harder—it's about working differently. After five years of research with Navy SEALs, surgeons, CIA agents, and business leaders, organizational psychologist Nick Petrie has uncovered a troubling pattern: the very traits that make people successful in their twenties often burn them out in their forties.
"The things which make you successful in your 20s—having an awesome work ethic, saying yes to everything, having no boundaries, being super responsive at all times—those are the things which burn you out in your 40s when the jobs get too big," Petrie explained during a recent Work Forward Forum session.
His research and client work reveal some fundamental misconceptions about burnout. One is that most organizations treat it as a binary condition – you're either burned out or you're fine. In reality, burnout progresses through stages, much like physical burns, and requires different interventions at each level. Another? Rest and recovery doesn’t solve underlying challenges – but growth does.
The Hidden Trap of High Performance
Petrie's team discovered that high performers operate in two distinct modes: perform mode (exploiting existing skills) and grow mode (exploring new territory). Across thousands of assessments, the average split is 61% perform mode and 39% grow mode. But many leaders skew heavily toward performance.
"When you stay in ‘perform’ mode for too long, people go backwards. Doctors and teachers actually get worse over the course of their career, not better, because they get in this mode and repeat the same things over and over," Petrie noted, referencing research by professor K. Anders Ericsson.
One Forum participant recognized this immediately: "I think I'm really in that 85-15, heavy on the performance mode, and it feels way too high. More high-growth moments in my career, while they've been more challenging, I can see the productivity and output that results."
The performance trap is particularly insidious because it feels productive. You're confident, efficient, and delivering results. But as another leader observed during the session: "When I'm in that 85% perform mode, it is draining, and then I have less resources and motivation to do the grow work."
Know Your Early Warning Signs
One of Petrie's most critical findings was how often high performers miss the signals that they're heading toward burnout. "They didn't see the early warning signs, and they said looking back, it was so obvious," Petrie noted about people who burned out completely.
Warning signs are deeply personal, but Petrie shared his own discovery process: "I didn't know what mine were, so I not only thought about it – I asked people close to me, and I realised actually there's three for me: I stop sleeping properly, I get irritable for no good reason, and my wife notices and points it out to me."
Common early warning signs that emerged from Petrie's research include factors like short or snippy behavior with colleagues and family, sleep deprivation, feeling overwhelmed, and working weekends to "get ahead" for Monday (your author sometimes exhibits said traits…). A participant memorably added "rage cleaning and an aggressive vacuum."
The key isn't just recognizing these signs—it's developing what Petrie calls "if-then" responses. "What puts you back into equilibrium quickly?" he asks. For him, it's spending time with friends, playing golf, or going to a movie alone during the day. "I know those three things work for me. What are your if-thens that work for you?"
Beyond First-Aid Solutions
Most workplace wellness programs address what Petrie calls "first-degree burn"—acute stress that comes and goes. But many high performers are experiencing "second-degree burn" (chronic stress) or even "third-degree burn" (full burnout), which require deeper interventions.
"Organizations often provide first-degree solutions to third-degree issues," Petrie explained. "People told us it felt like they were getting gaslit by their boss who said, 'take a day off' when they were experiencing chronic burnout."
The research reveals that rest isn't the long-term solution: growth is. "The people who came out of burnout realized they needed to reinvent a new formula for this stage of life. They experienced post-traumatic growth – they didn't bounce back to where they were, they bounced forward."
That type of personal growth doesn’t come from small adjustments or recovery periods, it’s typically a break-induced life transition – an investment in deeper understanding of how you work. Having participated in Hudson’s Life Forward program (highly recommended), too often in the past I’d gone through what they describe as a “mini-transition:” a brief respite, just to get back on my same patterns. Getting off that wheel takes a bigger effort and taking the time to get “up on the balcony” and look back at what’s working (and not) for you.
Pamela McLean, Hudson Institute “Cycle of Renewal”
Eight Habits of Sustainable High Performers
Through interviews with hundreds of leaders, Petrie's team identified eight key patterns among those who maintain high performance without burning out:
1. Pulse Between Different Modes: "Think about how nature works—you breathe in, you breathe out. Your heart expands, it contracts. Nature continuously pulses and never gets tired," Petrie said. High performers deliberately alternate between focused work and collaborative time, deep thinking and shallow tasks, solo work and group interaction.
2. Schedule Deep Work Daily: Most people spend their entire day in "shallow work" mode—emails, meetings, quick tasks. Sustainable performers protect time for focused, uninterrupted, cognitively demanding work that creates real value.
3. Make Peace with Not Getting Everything Done: "Early in their career, they took great pride in getting everything done. Then they got into roles where it was just too big, and they had to learn how to be at peace with not getting everything done," Petrie observed. This shift is often a major transition point.
4. Create Transition Rituals: For remote workers especially, the lack of commute can blur work-life boundaries. "If you don't create rituals where you detach from work mode and reattach to personal mode, you experience what researchers call 'boundary confusion,'" Petrie explained.
5. Develop a Phone Strategy: Most people have no strategy for their phone usage, leading to constant connectivity. High performers create friction—putting phones in bags, leaving ringers on for emergencies only, and setting clear communication expectations.
6. Know Your Early Warning Signs: "They didn't see the early warning signs, and they said looking back, it was so obvious," Petrie noted about people who burned out. Warning signs are individual—disrupted sleep, irritability, working weekends to "get ahead" for Monday.
7. Use the 1/1/1 Strategy: Take one long vacation per year, one short vacation per quarter, and one day off per month. Regular recovery prevents the accumulation of stress.
8. Find Your "Opposite World": Perhaps the most powerful pattern: having activities that engage completely different parts of your brain and body than work. One tech executive told Petrie that Argentinian tango saved his career: "When I go there, my work world disappears. I'm in my heart, I'm in my body, completely absorbed."
The Organizational Challenge
Individual strategies alone aren't enough. As one Forum participant noted, workplace conditions often work against sustainable performance.
"If you wanted to create conditions for people to be effective, you'd do the opposite of what we have at the moment," Petrie said, citing feedback from his sports research team members.
The most common organizational challenges include meeting overload, constant interruptions, collaboration overload, and difficulty prioritizing. "Workers switch tasks every 3 minutes during the workday, and after an interruption, it takes 23 minutes to refocus," according to University of California research cited in Petrie's work.
Companies that address these systemic issues see remarkable results. In Petrie's six-month interventions with teams, organizations were able to "both increase productivity and performance and decrease stress levels at the same time."
p.s. more to come here…I promise.
The Path Forward
The solution isn't choosing between performance and wellbeing, it's redesigning work to enable both. As I noted during the session, "Too many executive teams fall into the trap of thinking we need all those hours for meetings because meetings are important, instead of putting boundaries around them.”
Worse, that we can’t limit to top priorities because of loss aversion: the fear that they might not get the last erg of effort out of a team. But in doing so, they pile on more than realistic, which impedes progress through diffuse priorities and burnout.
For individual leaders, the first step is honest assessment: What's your current perform-to-grow ratio? What are your early warning signs? Do you have an "opposite world"?
For organizations, it's about creating conditions that support sustainable high performance rather than burning through talent. As Petrie concluded: "People can actually change quite a lot without trying too hard. We just helped them think about design experiments and gave them light coaching every couple of weeks."
The companies that figure this out won't just retain their best people—they'll unlock performance levels that seemed impossible under the old paradigm of grinding harder.
What's your experience with the performance-burnout paradox? What’s worked for you?
I think an over-developed Need for Achievement and an underdeveloped Need for Power are likely playing a role here. A pretty big one actually.
I like your insight that burnout is rarely solved simply by rest, but rather by meaningful, intentional growth. Your distinction between perform mode and grow mode aligns with what I've experienced. In my newsletter 'AI for Humanity,' I've been reflecting on similar principles, emphasizing how real sustainability and effectiveness emerge not from pushing harder, but from deliberately cultivating reflective environments and psychological safety.
Your research reminds me strongly of what I've described as a 'Gardener Mindset,' where leaders thoughtfully cultivate organizational conditions that support genuine human growth, rather than continually extracting productivity.