Chronicle of a CEO Burnout

© 2025 by Alan AtKisson

Update 4 Aug 2025: This article has now been complemented by a second one, "How I recovered from burn-out", at my personal website.

This is a cautionary tale. I tell it so that others might successfully avoid the kind of health-related collapse that I experienced after a long period of unrelenting stress and overwork, which occurred during my final professional position before retirement, serving in a chief executive role.

The story I tell is linked to a very specific organisational situation. But there are two key points I ask you to keep in mind as you read: (1) All organisations, and all leadership situations, are unique; but the stress they create in the body is a general, and all-too-common, biological phenomenon. (2) At no time leading up to my collapse did I feel myself to be experiencing “stress”. I just kept working, stubbornly doing my (very challenging) job, not aware of any real danger signs. Until my body stopped me.

Whether you are a CEO, a senior leader or manager, or simply an ambitious person trying to do good in the world – whatever role you find yourself in – I hope this short, simplified chronicle of my recent experience will be of some use to you. And please pay close attention to my closing message.

The Collapse

I used the word “burnout” in the title of this article because it’s a word most people relate to. But as a summing-up word for what actually happened, I prefer “collapse”.

Think of Atlas, holding up the globe. (Or, to make this analogy more universally relatable, picture any mythological figure you choose, holding up any heavy burden you prefer, but I’ll stick with the familiar Atlas for now.) Now, imagine that the burden has actually been too heavy for Atlas for a long time. Imagine it grows steadily heavier. To make matters worse, imagine that a number of angry-looking figures begin circling around Atlas, poking, shouting, and slinging the occasional insult or threat.

Atlas tries to ignore or minimize the impact of these distractions, and to keep focused on the main priority: holding things up. Keeping things going. But eventually, and rather suddenly, some sort of limit is reached, and Atlas just crumples to the ground.

This image is a more accurate parallel to what I experienced than “burnout”.

Before I tell you a little about what led up to a sudden collapse in my personal (and much less mythologically dramatic) case, I want to describe the collapse event itself, in physical terms.

One morning, I awoke feeling unusually tired. As I made my way to the office through my city’s bus and subway system, I noticed that I was unable to walk normally. I could walk, but only very slowly, as though I were trudging through mud in a strong headwind. Climbing stairs was extremely taxing, so I took available elevators. I felt like I had aged 20 years overnight, and I later calculated that it took me nearly three times as long to walk from my final subway station to my office. (The following day, I actually took a taxi for that final 700 meter distance.)

Once parked in front of my computer, I opened a strategy document that I had been working on. I tried to read it, but soon gave up. I could no longer fully understand what the text was saying. When I pushed myself to focus, and tried to concentrate my mind harder on making sense of the text, nothing happened – except an uncomfortable, physical feeling in my brain. It reminded me of trying to squeeze water out of a dry sponge.

Later I opened an Excel spreadsheet, with budget scenarios we were considering for the coming year. These were scenarios I had designed myself, based on different possible financial situations. I had been working with this spreadsheet for months. I needed to make some decisions based on those scenarios, and take action. But suddenly, I could no longer understand this document, either. The columns, labels, and numbers in the spreadsheet made much less sense than I remembered they had before. Again, if I tried harder, there was just that weird, dry-sponge feeling in my brain.

This situation continued all day, and I began to take note of more symptoms, including dizziness, fighting to stay awake in meetings that I was leading, going blank in mid-sentence, and experiencing a general heavy feeling of deep fatigue, among others.

Within 24 hours I was sitting with a doctor, holding in my hand a list of all the symptoms I had noticed and my concerns about them. I described my situation at work – basically, a constant barrage of problems to solve, as well as threats to manage, as I note below. Soon I had a formal diagnosis: “adaptation disorder”. I had never heard of this before, but it is a fancy way of saying (I learned later) that my body had exhausted its ability to deal with stress. Especially the kind of stress associated with bad things happening, in either personal or professional life.

The only thing to do, said the doctor, was to temporarily separate myself from the source of the stress, to which my body and brain could no longer adapt (hence the fancy diagnosis label). The doctor’s recommendation was that I should immediately go on 100% sick leave for at least a month, and then slowly rehabilitate myself back into working life, starting at 25% and building up. The process involved adding the stressful bits back in slowly, as my ability to handle normal stress was slowly restored.

Going on 100% sick leave is not an option, I said. I am the CEO of a global organisation. That organisation is currently experiencing a range of challenging situations, some of which only I can legally manage (or in some cases even know about). Because of managerial layoffs that had taken effect before I started my job (more on this later), I also hold direct responsibility for all major operational, HR, communications, and financial decisions. I cannot just leave my post. I need a few weeks to find others to fill the gap.

I am quite sure that I did not express myself that clearly, at the time; but fortunately the doctor understood, and we made an alternate plan.

So I worked half-time for a month. Despite resting half the day, my symptoms persisted or worsened. I dragged myself to the office and to meetings (thank goodness for elevators). I identified senior people who could take over the bits of my job that I could no longer do, and talked with them in confidence. I reflected with my family and with the caregivers at my local clinic, and I decided rather quickly that there was really just one reasonable solution to this complex situation: early retirement.

The organisation I was leading could not afford a CEO in need of long-term rehabilitation, financially or strategically. By retiring, I would create the space for them to quickly pivot and find a new CEO. This was especially important since the organisation had recently learned that it would have to find a new home for its global headquarters. Probably a thorough global restructuring was also in the cards, and I was no longer the person best suited to lead the whole process.

More to the point, I couldn’t do it, physically or mentally. I explained all this to the organisation’s Chair and operating board in a letter. They agreed with my logic, graciously accepted my early resignation, and immediately began the process of replacing me.

I had received my diagnosis on November 11. By the first of January, I was formally retired –and I was finally starting the long journey of recovery, looking to regain my normal health and functionality.

Why Collapse Happened – the Biology (Very Simplified Version)

I am building up to the part of the story where I explain the specific conditions that gave rise to the collapse. But as I keep emphasizing, it is the general phenomenon that I want to bring attention to. So let me explain – to the best of my understanding – why my body decided to shut me down

For that is exactly what happened. It was as though my unconscious mind pulled the big red handle, activating the emergency brake before the train slams into an obstruction ahead on the track. For me, the normal hormonal processes that allow body and brain to run at higher speeds, powering up both physically and cognitively to handle stressful situations, had been working on continuous overdrive for far too long. My systems had been given no chance to experience the normal cycles of stress-recovery-stress-recovery. It was just stress, all the time. Finally the system broke, and the resulting collapse, when it came, felt like I might have suffered a stroke; but the three doctors I spoke with were quite reassuring in their conviction that I had not.

In fact, as one senior neurologist (a relative) explained to me, this kind of shutdown is something the brain does to protect itself from things like strokes, or other serious health risks – risks that the brain perceives and reacts to unconsciously. These unconscious processes shut the system down to prevent something much worse from happening.

Thank you, brain.

What Happened – the Conditions

Now I come to the specific situation that led to my collapse. Again, this is a very short, highly simplified version of a very complicated story. I wish to downplay the specifics here, in order to underscore the generic nature of my body’s response and the overall message I wish to convey.

In 2023, my appointment as director of a large department in a Swedish government agency (I was a deputy to the Director-General) was approaching its maximum term limit of six years. I loved my work, but I would soon have to find a new position. I was in my early 60s and not quite ready to stop working completely, so I went looking for a job. I imagined that this new position would be my last professional job before retirement, but I did not imagine that retirement would happen so soon.

After a lengthy application and interview process, I was pleased and honored to be offered the Chief Executive Officer role for an intergovernmental agency with its global headquarters in Stockholm and a large network of affiliated offices around the world. I knew I was signing on for a tough assignment – the organisation was emerging from a year or two of serious challenges – but the scope of those challenges was not fully apparent until I had resigned my government post, signed a contract, and begun the onboarding process for the new job.

In January, shortly before my formal start in February 2024, I learned that the interim CEO and the operating board had been forced to take a number of fateful restructuring decisions, driven by reduced financing and declining funding prospects. All the top managers, essentially the entire management team, had either left voluntarily or been laid off very recently, to balance the budget. These positions had not been replaced.

That meant that my responsibilities were not limited to the normal, significant leadership challenge of the global CEO role. I was also responsible for making all senior management decisions and overseeing all organisational processes, from HR to operations to communications and reporting, in a complex, UN-like institution, whose now-minimal secretariat staff was spread across the planet. Add all the associated political, cultural, and organisational complexities that one can imagine based on that short description, as well as many other complexities that are frankly hard to imagine.

Surprised but undaunted, I simply went to work. My mission was to lead a rebuilding effort. I formed a new management team to advise me, drawing on the whole global network. We made good progress. The staff was highly competent and incredibly dedicated. The organisational challenges were extraordinary, but I loved working with the people. And after a few months, our government and international partners were giving us positive feedback and talking about new funding.

But the burden of the actual work was enormous, and it kept growing. Then, in September and October of 2024, a series of new crises begun to unfold: unexpected funding cuts, a string of critical articles in the local press (focused on the situation before I arrived), an anonymous email campaign that spread those articles globally, and a couple of surprising political decisions to withdraw from the international governing body were just part of the complicated puzzle. These events included a government-level decision that would ultimately force the global headquarters to move to a different country.

Throughout this period, the second half of 2024, it seemed that some serious piece of bad news, some very angry email, or some seemingly unsolvable problem would arrive every day, requiring my immediate attention. As soon as one problem was addressed, two more tended to show up.

In retrospect, it is painfully obvious why, after months of this kind of daily reality, my brain-body system finally decided to say, “Enough!” I wish to repeat and to underscore, however, that at no time during any of this was I aware of feeling stressed (strange as that may seem) – and I was certainly not aware of any physical risk to my health.

Obviously I was very preoccupied. Occasionally I was very tired. I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night thinking about specific problems, and there were other physical signals, but I simply brushed them aside. Frankly, I considered all that – including things that I now recognise as signs of chronic stress – to be “normal” in a job like mine. And as a senior person with a great deal of organisational leadership, management, and consulting experience, over several decades, I also kept noting to friends and colleagues that I’d “seen worse” in other organisations (which I have).

“Keep calm and carry on” was my watchword, both to myself, and to all my staff. “You are doing a great job,” I kept telling them – because they were. “Just ignore the noise and focus on one thing at a time.” I continued to call wise heads together, consider options, make the best judgment I could, and then execute decisions.

“We’ll get through this,” I assured everyone.

Jump to the present. The organisation is under new leadership and appears, indeed, to be “getting through this”, though of course with major changes under way. I am certainly very pleased to see that.

But unfortunately, I personally did not “get through it”. I got stopped, at significant cost to my health and wellbeing. I am recovering – I can now walk, read, and think more or less normally, for example. But I still tire easily and experience other limitations. Full recovery is taking time.

Conclusion: Please Take Care of Yourself. Seriously.

The purpose of this personal story is to strengthen my general message to people who may suspect that they are at risk of “hitting the wall”, “burning out”, or otherwise collapsing under the burden of an unreasonably demanding job. Even in extreme circumstances, such as those I briefly described above, it is possible to simply ignore or avoid even seeing the seriousness of the situation, from the perspective of personal health. Because, as I kept telling myself, the job has to get done. And of course, it does. But the cost of maintaining that kind of individually stubborn, determined attitude can, in the end, prove to be very high indeed.

So let me offer a little advice, based on experience acquired “the hard way”:

Pay attention to your body. There are non-negotiable limits to what it can take. Assess your situation, seriously and objectively. If you are under prolonged or extreme stress – whether you “feel” it or not – address it early. Don’t wait for a “better time”. Talk to people who can support you. If you need professional help, get it. If you think you need to make changes, make them, before the unconscious systems of your brain and body are forced to make them for you. You will do no great service to yourself, your loved ones, or the goals you are committed to if you allow yourself to be driven beyond your physical limits and into a state of ill health by the work that you do.

That’s my message. Especially if you believe that you are relatively immune to stress, as I did, please read the paragraph above one more time.

Had I gotten (and followed) the advice above, especially the part about not waiting to talk to people about my situation and take corrective action, I might have avoided the collapse described above. My hope is that some of you reading this can avoid a similar outcome. That, for me, would be a way to extract something positive from my own experience.

I close this chronicle with a few words of gratitude. From the moment I tumbled over the cliff into a collapse situation, I was treated with great compassion and understanding by the people with whom I was working directly. People stepped in to fill the gap in work tasks that I was obliged to leave. They expressed heartfelt support, assumed greater responsibilities, picked up the sudden slack. Though my retirement was sudden, I have rarely felt so appreciated by a work team as I did by those colleagues (as well as by other former colleagues and friends), whose outpouring of warmth made it somewhat easier to leave behind professional employment on short notice, and embrace this new chapter in my life, significantly earlier than planned.

If you are reading this, you know who you are, and I thank you.

Postscript: As of April 2025, my recovery has advanced far enough that I am writing a new book and taking on a limited number of (pro bono) speaking engagements. I am also available for strategic consultation. Please contact me via my website or LinkedIn.

For permission to excerpt or reprint this article, please contact me via the same channels.