One of the strange things about becoming more senior at work is that fewer people tell you when you have done enough.
Earlier in your career, somebody else may have decided what needed doing, when it needed doing and what a good job looked like. As you become more experienced, you usually gain more freedom. You decide what matters most, whether the presentation is ready, whether the email can wait until tomorrow and whether another hour preparing for the meeting will make any real difference.
Most of us probably see that freedom as one of the benefits of becoming more senior. I certainly did.
But it leaves you with an interesting question.
Who decides when you have done enough?
I spent most of my working life in business before becoming a counsellor and, looking back, I recognise this in myself and in many of the people I worked alongside.
We usually associate work stress and burnout with having too much work. Sometimes that is exactly what is happening. There are too many demands, too few people and expectations which are difficult to meet.
But work-related stress can also develop in people who have considerable control over what they do, are still performing well and appear from the outside to be coping perfectly well.
That is the part I find particularly interesting.
Work stress and burnout involve more than workload
The World Health Organization describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It includes exhaustion, becoming more distant or cynical about work and feeling less effective professionally.
Occupational psychology also looks at the balance between the demands placed on somebody and the resources they have available to deal with them. Those resources include support, feedback, autonomy and having some influence over how the work gets done.
That helps explain why two people doing equally demanding jobs can experience them very differently.
One person may be working extremely hard while feeling trusted, supported and able to influence what happens. Another may be working similar hours while carrying responsibility for outcomes they have very little power to change.
The number of hours only tells us part of the story.
Autonomy, responsibility and work stress
Having control over our work is generally associated with better wellbeing. Most of us would probably prefer some freedom over our working day to somebody closely controlling what we do.
That is why I was interested in a longitudinal study by Michael Clinton and Neil Conway, who followed Church of England ministers over several years.
People who generally had greater autonomy than others tended to experience less emotional exhaustion, which is roughly what we might expect.
The surprising finding came when the researchers looked at changes within the same person. When somebody’s autonomy increased over time, greater exhaustion tended to follow.
There are clear limits to what we can draw from one study. Church ministers are a particular group and the research does not establish that increased autonomy causes burnout.
It did get me thinking about senior working life.
Greater autonomy means that more decisions become yours.
You decide what needs your attention and what can wait. You decide whether the report is good enough. You decide how much preparation is enough. You decide whether the problem you are still thinking about at eight o’clock can stay where it is until tomorrow.
As responsibility increases, some of the boundaries which used to come from somebody else gradually become your responsibility as well.
For somebody who is comfortable setting those boundaries, that freedom may work very well. For somebody who is conscientious, responsible and used to being relied upon, it can become harder.
Earlier in your career the question might have been:
Have I done what was asked of me?
Later it can become:
Have I done everything I could reasonably have done?
The difficulty sits inside that word reasonably.
Reasonable can stretch a surprisingly long way.
Perfectionism, high standards and burnout
Senior jobs often have very few natural finishing points.
There is another person you could speak to, another scenario you could prepare for, another version of the presentation you could improve or another problem somewhere in the organisation which would benefit from your attention.
Nobody has specifically asked you to spend another hour on it. You simply know you could.
For somebody who has built a career around being dependable, competent and well prepared, stopping can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.
There is a difference between knowing intellectually that something is good enough and actually feeling comfortable leaving it there.
Research into perfectionism gives us an interesting way of looking at this.
A 2025 meta-analysis by Aishwarya Bellam and Thomas Curran looked at 28 samples involving 9,560 people and compared perfectionism with both hours worked and workplace performance.
They distinguished between perfectionistic striving, the drive to set and achieve very high standards, and perfectionistic concerns, which involve greater worry, self-criticism and concern about mistakes.
Both were associated with working longer hours.
Only perfectionistic striving showed a positive relationship with performance. The more worried and self-critical side of perfectionism was associated with additional hours without a corresponding improvement in performance.
The researchers concluded that perfectionism appeared to generate considerably more additional effort than additional performance.
I found myself thinking about how easily that extra effort can disappear into an ordinary working day.
How much better does the presentation become during the final hour of changing it?
How much does checking the email again improve it?
At what point does preparation become a way of reassuring ourselves that we have covered everything?
High standards have helped many people become successful. The question I find more interesting is what happens when the person setting the standard also finds it difficult to accept that the work is good enough.
You have the freedom to decide when the work is finished, alongside an internal standard which keeps finding reasons to carry on.
Burnout when you are still performing well
There is a familiar picture of burnout where somebody gradually becomes disengaged from their work, loses motivation and eventually reaches a point where they can no longer continue.
There is another route.
Two longitudinal studies looking at work engagement found that people who began highly engaged were initially less exhausted, while greater initial engagement was also associated with increasing exhaustion over time. The researchers were careful about the complexity of the relationship, but it suggests that caring deeply about your work does not guarantee protection from exhaustion.
The person struggling with work stress may still be producing excellent work.
They may still volunteer to sort something out, answer quickly and be the person everybody else turns to when something needs doing. They may enjoy much of their job and take considerable pride in doing it well.
From the outside they can look like somebody who is coping extremely well.
Being capable of carrying on can sometimes mean that you carry on for much longer.
I think that is particularly relevant to people who have spent years becoming good at functioning under pressure. You learn to absorb pressure because experience has taught you that you can. Other people learn that too and increasingly rely on you.
The same can happen with tiredness. Somebody who has become used to pushing through it becomes very good at pushing through it.
Someone who finds disappointing people difficult becomes very good at fitting in one more thing.
Someone whose confidence comes partly from being dependable may find saying I can’t take that on much harder than the people around them realise.
That ability to cope can hide the cost of coping.
Why it can be difficult to switch off from work
The boundary between work and home has become much less clear for many people.
You can close the laptop at six while a large part of your attention remains at work. You are making dinner while thinking about tomorrow’s meeting. You wake during the night and remember something you need to do. You are sitting with your partner while still trying to solve a problem from earlier in the day.
For some people experiencing work stress, finding it difficult to switch off is one of the first signs that work is taking up more space than it used to.
Research has repeatedly linked psychological detachment from work during non-working time with lower exhaustion, better wellbeing and better sleep.
One large meta-analysis brought together 91 independent samples involving more than 38,000 employees and found a consistent relationship between psychological detachment and better recovery.
More recent evidence points in the same direction. A 2026 systematic review of longitudinal research into work-family conflict included 82 studies, with more than 112,000 participants contributing to the meta-analysis, and found that conflict between working life and family life predicted subsequent burnout and other forms of psychological distress.
Sometimes the effects of work stress become easier to see at home.
Your patience becomes shorter. Small things irritate you more. Weekends become largely about recovering enough to start again on Monday. Your partner can see that you are physically there while your mind is still somewhere else.
By then, simply counting working hours misses quite a lot of what is going on.
How the workplace contributes to burnout
Any discussion about personal boundaries and perfectionism also has to include the environment in which somebody is working.
There are workplaces with relentless workloads, too few staff, poor leadership, bullying, constant change or people being held responsible for outcomes without enough authority to influence them.
Those conditions place genuine pressure on people.
I have always struggled with the idea that resilience is the main answer to unreasonable working conditions. There are times when something in the workplace itself needs to change.
For me, work stress and burnout make more sense when we look at the person and their environment together.
The workplace places demands on us and we bring our own expectations, habits and ways of coping into that workplace.
Sometimes the environment carries most of the problem. Sometimes our own way of responding adds considerably to it. Often the two become tangled together.
When the pressure to keep working comes from within
Imagine your workload is demanding but broadly manageable. You have control over your work. Your boss would be happy with the presentation as it stands and nobody expects you to answer emails at ten o’clock.
Yet you still keep going.
It may then be useful to become curious about what makes stopping difficult.
What would it feel like to leave something until tomorrow?
How comfortable are you with somebody being slightly disappointed?
What happens when another person thinks you could have done more?
How much of being good at your job is tied up with being the person who can always be relied upon?
And what would it mean to you if, after years of being somebody who copes, you found yourself unable to cope with everything?
These questions take us beyond workload and into confidence, identity, responsibility and the way we measure our own worth.
For some people, being dependable becomes so closely connected with who they are that reducing what they do can feel like reducing who they are.
Saying I can’t take that on can feel very different when you have spent much of your working life being the person who always could.
That may also explain why work stress and burnout can take a long time to recognise.
For months the question may be:
How can I get everything done?
At some point another question may become more useful:
Why does everything have to get done by me?
Work stress, burnout and deciding when enough is enough
I started thinking about this because of that unexpected research finding about autonomy.
As our careers progress, we usually gain more freedom to use our own judgement. Along with that freedom comes responsibility for decisions which used to be made for us.
What deserves my attention?
What can wait?
How good does this need to be?
When can I stop?
Experienced people make these decisions repeatedly, often without giving them much thought.
We tend to ask ourselves how much work we have.
Perhaps we should also ask:
Who decides when I have done enough?
For many of us, the answer is increasingly:
I do.
The harder question is whether we ever really learned how to decide that enough is enough.
If some of this feels familiar, you can read more about how I work with work stress and burnout in counselling.
Research and further reading
- World Health Organization (2019). Burn-out an occupational phenomenon. WHO source
- Bakker, A. B. & Demerouti, E. (2017). Job demands-resources theory: Taking stock and looking forward. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), 273–285. Research source
- Clinton, M. E. & Conway, N. (2025). Within-person increases in job autonomy linked to greater employee strain. Work & Stress, 39(1), 44–65. Research source
- Bellam, A. & Curran, T. (2025). Perfectionism and work performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 98(3). Research source
- Junker, N. M. et al. (2021). Is Work Engagement Exhausting? The Longitudinal Relationship Between Work Engagement and Exhaustion Using Latent Growth Modeling. Applied Psychology, 70(2), 788–815. Research source
- Wendsche, J. & Lohmann-Haislah, A. (2017). A Meta-Analysis on Antecedents and Outcomes of Detachment from Work. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. Research source
- Liu, D. et al. (2026). Work-family conflict and mental health: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS Medicine, 23(7). Research source