What Six Years of Pressure Has Done to Your Leaders
Do the math with me for a second.
- Then 2021. Then 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025. Count it out on your fingers.
That’s six years. Six years since the world tilted, since the pandemic became what executive advisor Christy Rutherford calls a pivotal turning point for leadership stress. And for a meaningful number of executives, that turning point never actually turned. It just kept going.
Some leaders are now in their sixth consecutive year of heightened workload and constrained resources. Six years of running harder with less. Six years without the kind of genuine reset that the body and mind need to recover from sustained pressure.
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: that’s not resilience. That’s accumulation. And accumulation, eventually, comes due.
Why This Moment Feels Different Than Normal Stress
Every leader has hard years. That’s not new, and it’s not what I’m talking about here.
What’s different about the last six years is the duration without a genuine reset. The pandemic created an emergency. Emergencies are supposed to end. But for many executives, the emergency phase gave way directly into a permanent operating mode — leaner teams, higher expectations, faster cycles, more variables to track, less margin for anything to go wrong.
Seventy-one percent of leaders reported increased stress in 2025, up from 63% in 2022. That’s not a plateau. That’s a trend line still climbing, years after the initial shock should have faded.
And it compounds. The feeling of too much work and not enough time doesn’t reset itself when you push through it. It builds a baseline. And each new disruption — economic uncertainty, restructuring, the accelerating pressure to adopt AI, leadership transitions, board scrutiny — lands on top of a foundation that’s already strained, not on solid ground.
The Quiet Toll Nobody's Counting
Here’s what six years of sustained pressure without adequate recovery actually does.
It changes your baseline for what feels normal. Chronic low-grade stress starts to feel like the ambient condition of leadership rather than a signal that something needs to change. You stop noticing the tension in your shoulders. You stop registering how rarely you actually feel rested. The exceptional becomes ordinary, and the ordinary becomes invisible.
It erodes the margin for error. When you’re operating at sustained capacity for years, there’s no slack left to absorb the next crisis. Decision quality suffers under chronic load in ways that are well documented — not because leaders get less capable, but because cognitive resources that should go toward strategic thinking get consumed by the baseline effort of just keeping up.
And it accelerates the exodus. A record 2,221 CEOs left their positions in 2024 — the highest executive turnover in more than two decades. Some of that is board-driven. But a meaningful portion is leaders who simply reached the end of what they could sustain. Sixty-nine percent of C-level executives say they’ve seriously considered quitting their jobs for one that better supports their well-being. That’s not a fringe sentiment. That’s most of the room.
Why Pushing Through Stopped Working
For years, pushing through was the playbook. It worked, more or less, because the pressure eventually let up and gave the system room to recover.
That assumption doesn’t hold anymore. There hasn’t been a real letup. And the strategies that got leaders through year one and year two of sustained pressure are not sustainable strategies for year six. What was once a sprint has become the new pace of the marathon — except nobody updated the training plan.
This is where I think a lot of well-meaning advice misses the mark. Tips about better calendar management or quick breathing exercises treat this like a tactical problem. It’s not. Six years of compounding pressure is a structural problem, and it requires a structural response — not another productivity hack squeezed into an already overloaded day.
The leaders I see navigating this most successfully aren’t the ones with the best time management. They’re the ones who’ve been honest about the scale of what they’re carrying, and who’ve made real changes — in how they delegate, in who they let close, in what they’re willing to say no to — rather than just gritting their way through another quarter.
What Honest Acknowledgment Looks Like
If you’re reading this and recognizing your own six years in it, here’s where I’d start.
Stop measuring yourself against a pre-2020 baseline that no longer exists. The comparison itself is part of the problem — it frames sustained extraordinary effort as a personal failure to return to normal, when normal, for many leaders, genuinely changed.
Get honest about what you’re actually carrying, with someone who has no stake in the answer. Not your board. Not your team. Someone whose only job is helping you see your own situation clearly.
And take stock of which blind spots might be quietly compounding the load — the Denial Tax that keeps you from seeing the warning signs, the Isolation Trap that keeps you carrying it alone, the Focus Fallacy that has you spending your limited energy in the wrong places. Six years of pressure doesn’t just test your stamina. It tests every blind spot you haven’t yet addressed.
The Ten Blind Spots assessment at TenBlindSpots.com takes a few minutes and gives you a real starting point for seeing where the load is actually landing.
Six years is a long time to run on adrenaline. You don’t have to keep doing it the same way.