What we're calling exhaustion is often the invisible weight of paying attention. And it asks for a different kind of rest.
Hello friends,
It's Sunday evening. You've slept well, you've had a quiet weekend, you didn't even check emails. And you can't open a book. You can't watch a film. You don't want to talk. You just want stillness. Or something even quieter than stillness.
You're not tired. You're not lazy. You're full.
You've been tracking.
What I think we get wrong about leadership tiredness
Most leadership exhaustion isn't about working too many hours. The leaders I work with are often disciplined about hours. They block focus time. They take their holidays. They go to bed at a reasonable time.
And they're still flattened by Wednesday.
What's actually depleting them isn't work in the sense most people mean. It's the invisible, constant work of paying attention to people. Noticing that someone seemed off in the all-hands. Tracking who hasn't spoken in the last three meetings. Sensing the small shift after the timeline question. Holding three pieces of unspoken team grief about the reorg.
Each of these is small. They add up to a kind of cognitive and emotional load that has no name in most companies (but is doing exactly the thing that makes someone a good leader).
You can be doing all of this brilliantly and still feel hollow by Friday.
Why we mis-name this as "tired"
We have one word, tired, for at least three different states.
Body-tired: too many flights, not enough sleep, ate badly.
Brain-tired: too many decisions, too much new information.
People-tired: too much tracking. Too many small acts of attention. Too many micro-decisions about what to name, what to let pass, who needs you, whose energy was off today.
Most leaders I work with are not body-tired. Some are brain-tired. Almost all of them are people-tired (and don't know there's a name for it).
And so they try to fix it with the wrong tool. They sleep more, and feel the same. They take a holiday, and come back rested-but-not-replenished. They wonder why a "good night's sleep" isn't doing what it used to.
What helps (a little)
This isn't a five-step practice. It's a slightly different posture toward your own end-of-day.
One: download before you close. Three minutes with a pen. Who am I still carrying? What did today actually ask of me? What did I notice and not name? Get it onto paper so your nervous system stops holding it.
Two: reset the body, even a tiny bit. Stand up. Drink water. Stretch your jaw. Look at something further than three meters away. (Trees count. So do clouds.) The body has been frozen in tracking mode for hours. It needs to remember it's a body, not a camera.
Three: be a little bit bored on purpose. Not Instagram-bored. (properly bored.) A short walk without a podcast. Lying on the floor for four minutes. Looking at a wall. The cognitive system that's been tracking all day needs to stop receiving inputs, even good ones, to settle.
Four: have an end. A small ritual that marks "today is done." Close the laptop and physically move it. Change clothes. Write one sentence about tomorrow and stop. Without an end, the tracking keeps running quietly in the background. Through dinner, through bath, through sleep.
The reframe that helps me most
When I notice I'm flattened in a way that doesn't match what I did that day, I try to ask myself a different question. Not "why am I so tired?" That almost always ends in self-criticism. But: what did I track today that I didn't get to put down?
Usually the answer is something small. A face that looked off. A sentence I almost said. A team member I want to check in with but haven't yet. Naming it doesn't always fix it. But it almost always softens the tiredness into something more like fullness. Which my body knows how to release.
A different way of holding this
If you're reading this on a Sunday evening half-flat in a way you can't quite explain, I want to be honest with you about something. The kind of attention you've been paying (to your team, to the room, to the small shifts under the obvious) is a real form of work, and most people doing it never get to see it as work, because nobody named it for them. They just learn to call themselves tired, go to bed earlier, and wonder why bed didn't fix it.
There is another way of holding this. A quiet permission to treat what you do for others as something that takes from you, and that needs to be put down at the end of the day, gently, deliberately, by a real person, with a real ritual that says "today is over and what I carried is not coming with me into tonight." I have watched leaders rebuild their relationship to their own energy this way, slowly, over months. I have done it myself, slowly, over years. And the strange thing is, the moment you stop calling it tiredness and start calling it what it actually is, your body begins to know what to do with it.
You're not broken. You're not behind. You're just carrying something invisible. And there is a way to put it down. 🫰
Have a lovely day,
P.S. Module 6 of our 8-week Emotional Intelligence in Action programme is dedicated to exactly this: healthy ways of working with emotions, intra- and interpersonally, so the tracking doesn't accumulate. Discovery Call is at cal.com/sophie-bachmann/discovery-call when you're ready.