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Burnout in senior people rarely looks like the version in the magazines. It is not collapse. It is not someone walking out of a meeting in tears. It is a thousand small things, most of them deniable, most of them familiar enough that you have stopped noticing.

Here are seven I see most often. None of them is conclusive on its own. Three or four together, and we should talk.

One. The weekend that does not restore you

You used to come back to Monday with something in the tank. Now Sunday evening feels like Friday afternoon. A whole weekend off and you still feel as tired as when you started. The recovery system has stopped working at the rate the demand is asking of it.

Two. The third coffee

You did not used to need it. Now you do, and you stopped noticing when that changed. The third coffee is the body asking for energy it cannot generate on its own, and the answer should not be more caffeine. It should be a closer look at why the system has fallen behind.

Three. The second glass

Wine on weeknights. A nightcap that used to be a treat. A creeping pattern that you have promised yourself you will look at when things calm down. They are not calming down. You know they are not.

Four. The body sending up flares

Headaches. Gut issues. A heart that does the strange thing on bad days. Tightness in the chest you have been telling yourself is stress. Sleep that wakes you at four. The body talks to people who will listen, and gets louder with people who will not. None of these are diagnoses. They are signals worth paying attention to.

Five. The decisions you are no longer making well

This one shows up in two opposite ways and they are the same problem. Either you are taking thirty-minute decisions in three minutes because there is no time, or you are putting off important decisions for three months because you cannot face them. Both are decision fatigue. Both come from the same place.

Six. The conversations at home that have not happened

The one with your partner about how you are. The one with your children about why you are not there. The one with yourself about whether this is the life you wanted. These conversations are the canary in the mine. The longer they have gone unspoken, the louder the warning.

Seven. The pleasure that has left things you used to love

You still go to the gym. You still see friends. You still take the holiday. But you are doing them like an item on a list. The pleasure that used to be in them has gone quiet. You notice you are going through the motions. This is one of the most reliable signs that something has been wrong for longer than you have admitted.

If three or more of these landed

It does not mean you are broken. It means something has been working harder than it can sustain for longer than it should. The body and the mind both repair themselves when given the right conditions. The work of burnout coaching is to identify those conditions, build them into a life that is already full, and walk the change with you until it holds.

If any of this felt familiar, the first conversation costs nothing. Thirty minutes, online, no obligation. We talk, I listen, and we work out together whether the work would help.

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Almost every senior person who comes to me sleeps badly and has stopped noticing. They tell me they get by on six hours. They tell me they wake up at four and answer emails until the alarm goes. They tell me they fall asleep in front of the news with the wine glass still on the side table.

None of these is sleep. They are coping, and the body is keeping score.

Why sleep is almost always first

Decisions, energy, mood, appetite, immune function, blood pressure, the ability to handle a difficult conversation without overreacting. All of these run on a body that is rested. None of them run on a body that is not.

When people come to me exhausted, we do not start with goals. We do not start with vision. We do not start with the dramatic thing they think the problem is. We start with sleep. Because almost every other piece of the work depends on it, and almost no piece of the work holds without it.

What we work on, in practice

The hour before bed. The hour after waking. The patterns around wine, coffee, screens, late dinners. The decisions you are taking at ten at night that should be taking at ten in the morning. The reasons you have been telling yourself you need only six hours when your grandmother needed seven and your great-grandmother needed eight.

Most of this is unglamorous. It is also the most reliable change I see in the first month of working with someone. The energy comes back. The edge comes back. The mood steadies. The conversations at home soften. And the bigger work becomes possible, because the foundation is back underneath you.

The thing senior people get wrong about sleep

They treat it as a luxury. As something to fit in around the real work. As what soft people do. The body does not care how senior you are. It does not care how important the meeting is. It does the repair work overnight or it does not, and over years the difference is the difference between a person who arrives at fifty-five in good shape and one who arrives there held together by caffeine and habit.

If you are sleeping badly and have been telling yourself it is fine, this is your honest invitation to look at it. The first conversation costs nothing.

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One of my clients runs a private equity firm. Smart, experienced, the kind of person you would want in a difficult board meeting. A few months in, he told me something that stopped me for a moment.

"I am taking decisions in three minutes that should be taking thirty. And I am sitting on decisions for three months that I should have made in three weeks. Both, in the same week. I cannot work out which one is worse."

That is decision fatigue, in two sentences. It shows up at both ends. The fast end and the slow end. The shape is the same.

Why it happens

Decisions cost something. Each one draws on a finite pool of mental energy that gets refilled, mostly, overnight. Senior people make hundreds of decisions a day. Most of them small. Some of them very large. By Thursday afternoon, the pool is empty, and the brain falls back on whatever pattern is closest to hand. That pattern is either snap-decide-and-move-on or freeze-and-postpone, depending on the person and the topic. Often both, depending on the topic.

This is not a character problem. It is not lack of discipline. It is biology. The pool refills slowly, and most senior people are drawing from it faster than it can refill, for longer than it can sustain.

What changes it

Three things, in roughly this order.

First, the conditions for refill. Sleep, energy, the quality of the hour after waking and the hour before bed. The pool will not refill without these, and most of the conversation about decision-making is a distraction until they are in place.

Second, the volume of decisions. Most senior people are taking decisions that should not be theirs. Not because they are bad at delegating, but because the structure has shifted under them and they have not redrawn the lines in a while. We look at the lines. We redraw them. The number of decisions going through you drops, and the quality of the ones that remain rises.

Third, the relationship with the decisions you have been avoiding. The three-month ones. The ones you keep meaning to look at. We find out what is behind them, because there is always something. Fear of the answer. Loyalty to a person who depends on the current shape. A belief that the situation will resolve itself if you wait. None of these things go away by being ignored. They get heavier.

What this client did

Six months later, the same client told me he was making fewer decisions, taking longer on each one, and that the ones he had been avoiding were either made or in the process of being made. His team was happier. His sleep had come back. He still ran the firm. He just ran it as the version of himself he used to be, before the pool ran low.

That is the work. Not heroic. Not dramatic. Just the right things, in the right order, with someone in your corner who knows the terrain.

If any of this felt familiar, the first call costs nothing.