The signs of burnout you won’t recognise

A little while ago, we secured some funding I’d been chasing for a long while. The money landed and the term sheet was signed, but I remember reading the confirmation, waiting for the rush. Instead, I felt absolutely nothing. 

I’ve since learned that this is what burnout actually looks like. It’s  a far stretch from the classic picture of a founder face-down on the keyboard.. Instead, it’s an inability to engage with even the smallest things, like my daughter babbling about a snail she’d found in the garden. 

I suspect a lot of you are nodding. A recent Virgin startup survey found that more than half of founders (51%) had experienced more burnout over the past year.  Here lies the unglamorous reality of scaling a business – currently, I can’t plan a one-week holiday. 

When there’s a team banking their careers on my judgement, and a calendar that looks like a thousand-piece jigsaw, it’s hard to justify resting. The problem with burnout is that we’ve been sold a caricature of it. In reality it shows up long before you’re falling asleep at your desk. Here are some signs worth considering:

• Joy turns grey. The wins that used to light you up register as items to tick off. 
• Everything becomes irritating. Things as small as a Slack ping start  feel like a personal attack.
• You stop being able to be in the room. You’re at bath time physically, but your head is in the deal sheet.
• You outsource your own standards. You’d never let a team member run at the pace you’re running at. You’d sit them down and tell them to go home.
• The Sleep you do get doesn’t recharge you. You aren’t switching off at night, and end up waking up drained anyway.

So I’ve built in some boring, unsexy checks – including a weekly check-in with the team where people can be straight about how they’re actually doing, not just project updates.

A proper conversation with my partner every Sunday about how I’m actually doing, not the founder-face version, is also essential. You often can’t spot burnout in yourself so having people around you who will tell you when you’re off is really valuable. 

Protecting a few non-negotiables like family time and exercise has also helped me. They’re the meetings I’d never cancel. 

But the bottom line is this: if you don’t spot the subtle signs you might need a break, you’ll end up failing both your business and the people at home. And staying present enough to feel that stuff again? That, it turns out, is the metric worth protecting.

This content is contributed by a guest author. Startups.co.uk / MVF does not endorse or take responsibility for any views, advice, analysis or claims made within this post.