A short clip has been doing the rounds on social media. A high profile business coach Natalie Dawson sits opposite Stephen Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO and tells millions of viewers that hard work is “never burnout inducing”, that burnout is a “misconception about hard work”, and that “you are not a candle, you cannot burn out.”
It is slick, confident and optimised for virality.
This is not a clever PR moment. It is a betrayal.
Because while some women build brands on the idea that burnout is a mindset issue, others tell a very different story with their bodies and careers.
When experts with big platforms tell the world burnout is not real, they are not just debating semantics. They are asking us to ignore what women have already told us in blood tests, resignation letters and hospital discharge summaries.
Arianna Huffington famously collapsed from exhaustion in 2007, hit her head on her desk, broke her cheekbone and woke up in a pool of blood. She has since called it a wake up call and rebuilt her life around sleep and rest.
Jacinda Ardern stepped down as New Zealand’s prime minister saying she “no longer [had] enough in the tank” to do the job justice, a phrase that instantly resonated with burned out workers around the world.
Pop star Camila Cabello has described being “really burnt out”, working “pretty nonstop” since she was fifteen and feeling like she was “running a marathon with a broken leg”.
These are not women who lack grit. They are women who hit the limits of human biology.
So when another successful woman looks into the camera and declares that burnout is a myth invented by people who do not want to work hard, it is not an edgy soundbite. It is a form of erasure.
Burnout is not a vibe
Burnout is not a mood, a trend, or a lack of gratitude for having a job. The World Health Organization classifies it in the ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon caused by chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It lists three core features: exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism about work, and reduced professional efficacy.
In other words, burnout is a pattern. A predictable, repeated response to prolonged stress at work. It sits in the same international classification system that codes strokes, heart attacks and depression. Researchers have linked burnout and job strain with higher risks of coronary heart disease, poorer health related quality of life and serious mental ill health.
When a woman with a platform insists burnout is not real, she is not just disagreeing with a word. She is telling millions of other women that what is breaking their health, thinning their hair, disrupting their sleep and pushing them out of careers is simply bad branding for ordinary stress.
Why minimising burnout hurts women most
Globally, women still do far more unpaid care and domestic work than men. UN data estimate that women undertake about two and a half times as many hours of unpaid care work each day.
In Australia, women in heterosexual couples do around 50 per cent more housework and nearly double the hours of caring compared with men, even as women’s paid work hours have risen sharply over the last twenty years.
On top of this “second shift” at home, women are more likely to:
- Work in people facing, high stress sectors such as health, education and social care
- Shoulder invisible “glue work” at the office: mentoring, emotional support, diversity work, note taking, birthday organising
- Carry the mental load for children, ageing parents and, often, sick partners
The result is entirely predictable. The 2021 Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn found that 42 per cent of women and 35 per cent of men reported feeling burned out often or almost always, and that the burnout gap between women and men had nearly doubled in a year.
Deloitte’s Women @ Work 2022 report found that more than half of women said their stress levels were higher than a year earlier and almost half felt burned out. Burnout was the top reason women gave for actively looking for a new employer.
These numbers are not women “being dramatic”. They are boringly consistent across large, rigorous surveys.
So when a woman with money, microphones and a massive audience dismisses burnout as a misconception, the message that lands in many women’s bodies is simple: if you are struggling, you are weak, not overworked.
Leaders who deny burnout often create it
When bosses insist that burnout is fake, three things usually happen.
Workloads stay impossible.
If burnout is a myth, there is no need to redesign roles, hire more staff or reduce chronic overwork. Yet job strain research shows that high demands plus low control is a toxic combination for both mental and physical health, including higher risks of heart disease.
The message from the “burnout is not real” school is: the workload is fixed, your reaction is optional. That is not motivational. It is a quiet way of saying “we will not change”.
Flexibility becomes indulgence, not prevention.
Global and Australian studies have shown that when workplaces limit flexible work, women are more likely than men to cut their hours, turn down promotions or leave the workforce entirely.
Label burnout as a fiction and flexible work starts to look like pampering, rather than a basic risk control that keeps people in their jobs.
People leave rather than speak up.
If your boss publicly rolls their eyes at burnout, you are unlikely to tell them that you are not coping. You are much more likely to quietly update your CV and hope another workplace will treat you as human.
The irony is brutal. Leaders who argue that “hard work never causes burnout” often create precisely the conditions that drive women out of the workforce, feeding the very talent shortages they complain about.
“It doesn’t exist” is industrial scale gaslighting
There is a crucial difference between saying “I personally have not felt burned out” and declaring “burnout does not exist.”
The first is an individual story. The second erases everyone else’s.
For women, this forms part of a long and well documented pattern. Studies have shown that women’s pain and symptoms are taken less seriously, that women are more likely to have their physical symptoms attributed to anxiety, and that diagnoses for conditions such as autoimmune disease often arrive later for women than for men.
So when a woman with authority calls burnout a myth, three things happen:
- Experiences get invalidated. People who are exhausted, detached and making mistakes begin to question their own reality instead of the conditions causing it.
- Help seeking drops. If burnout is just an attitude problem, why would you ask for workload adjustments, psychological support or sick leave?
- Systemic problems shrink into personal failings. Chronic understaffing, bullying, discrimination and inflexible policies become “resilience issues” instead of health and safety issues.
That is not empowerment. It is corporate gaslighting with a glossy filter.
Point 3: The “you cannot measure burnout” myth
Another popular move is to claim that burnout is not real because it cannot be measured.
This sounds scientific. It is not.
Burnout has several widely used, validated measures, including:
- Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), developed in the early 1980s, which assesses emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation or cynicism, and reduced personal accomplishment. It has been used in thousands of studies across professions.
- Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI), a 16 item scale that measures exhaustion and disengagement and has been validated in multiple countries.
- Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI), which measures personal, work related and client related burnout across three subscales.
None of these tools is perfect. Researchers actively debate how to refine definitions, cut off scores and the boundary between burnout and depression.
But to argue that burnout is not real because it is a “construct” quietly ignores the fact that every psychological concept is a construct. We cannot put happiness in a test tube either, yet no one concludes that joy is imaginary.
In practice, the “you cannot measure it” claim usually functions as a permission slip to ignore what staff surveys, exit interviews and sick leave numbers are already saying.
When chronic stress becomes a health crisis
The stakes here are not abstract. Chronic stress does not simply make people a bit tired and irritable. It rewires bodies.
Long term stress exposure and raised cortisol are linked to higher rates of hypertension, heart disease, stroke, metabolic problems and immune dysfunction.
For women, the load is compounded by lower average pay, higher unpaid care work, higher rates of gender based discrimination and workplaces that often fail to accommodate caregiving, chronic illness or disability.
Burnout is often the red warning light that flashes on the dashboard long before the engine seizes. Treating that warning as drama, or as a branding problem, is how you end up with more women quietly stepping down, stepping back or falling through the cracks.
What women with platforms could do instead
Women in business are not obliged to like the word “burnout”. They are, however, influential. Their words shape how bosses, regulators and young workers think about exhaustion and limits.
A more responsible use of that influence would look like this:
- Acknowledge reality. Accept that chronic workplace stress is real, measurable and harmful, particularly for women and marginalised groups. Use existing burnout and exhaustion scales in staff surveys and take the results seriously.
- Talk about systems, not just mindset. Hard work can be fulfilling when people have autonomy, fair pay and humane expectations. It becomes toxic when workloads are unmanageable, roles are unclear and disrespect is normal.
- Frame flexibility as a safety measure, not a treat. Flexible work, predictable hours and reasonable workloads are not perks for women who “cannot hack it”. They are basic controls that allow people to stay employed instead of ending up in hospital or out of the workforce.
- Centre those at the margins. Women with disability, chronic illness, caring responsibilities and those from marginalised communities often feel burnout first and hardest. If your leadership advice does not work for them, it is not as universal as you think.
Women deserve better than guilt inducing soundbites
Women fought to have unpaid labour counted. They fought to have pain believed. They fought to have harassment named, not brushed off as “banter”. The language of burnout is part of that same struggle: an attempt to give shape to a pattern that has been hurting women for decades.
So when women with microphones and sponsorship deals dismiss burnout as fake or “just stress”, it does not make them edgy truth tellers. It makes them very well paid messengers for the same system that will happily burn them out too, once the cameras stop rolling.
We do not need more women telling other women to ignore the smoke. We need leaders, of every gender, willing to look at the fire.