What The Bear Gets Right About Burnout (And What Your Workplace Gets Wrong)
TL;DR: Most conversations about sustainable performance start from the wrong premise—that the performance standards themselves are neutral. They're not. Before optimising for sustainability, ask: whose definition of "good" am I trying to meet? The answer might explain why it feels so hard.
You're exhausted. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes—the kind that accumulates despite doing everything right. The productivity systems, the boundary-setting, the rest. You've tried it all.
The advice you get assumes the problem is execution. Work smarter. Delegate more. Manage your energy better.
But here's what that advice never questions: the performance standards themselves.
The Invisible Benchmark
Performance in most organisations is calibrated to a very specific archetype: someone with stable energy, predictable availability, linear career progression, and the ability to recover from stress quickly and invisibly. Someone without caregiving responsibilities that interrupt focus. Someone whose body doesn't change in ways that affect cognition, energy, or presence.
The archetype has a profile. Typically male, neurotypical, unencumbered by dependents during peak career years, operating in a body whose hormonal landscape stays broadly consistent for decades.
Everyone else is performing to a benchmark that was never designed for them.
The standards themselves encode assumptions about who counts as a "normal" worker. Those assumptions stay invisible precisely because they're never stated.
If you've watched The Bear, you've seen the archetype in action. The kitchen that made Carmy—the one that broke him—was calibrated to a very specific kind of performer: someone who could absorb abuse, suppress emotion, and produce flawless output under conditions designed to destroy anyone who couldn't. Chef David Fields wasn't demanding excellence. He was demanding a particular kind of person—and treating everyone who didn't match that template as defective.
The Hidden Variables
Consider what the performance benchmark doesn't account for:
Neurodivergent processing. The ADHD brain that produces extraordinary work in bursts but cannot sustain the steady, predictable output that meetings-driven cultures reward. The autistic professional whose pattern recognition solves problems others miss—but who needs recovery time after the social performance of a workshop. Standard productivity advice—prioritise ruthlessly, delegate more—assumes an operating system these brains don't run.
Hormonal variability. The menstrual cycle affects cognition, energy, and emotional regulation in ways research is only beginning to document. Perimenopause and menopause can strip away the compensatory strategies that used to work—the ability to push through, to mask fatigue, to maintain the performance that once felt effortless. Physiology. Full stop.
Caregiving load. The professional returning from parental leave, whose brain has literally reorganised itself, re-entering a workplace that treats the absence as an interruption rather than a transformation. The sandwich generation managing children and aging parents while maintaining "executive presence."
Cumulative systemic friction. Being the only woman in the room. The only person of colour. The only one whose accent requires extra effort to be understood. Each of these exacts a cognitive tax—the constant low-level vigilance of operating in spaces not designed for you.
None of these require special dispensation. They're realities. The default performance model ignores them.
Performance vs. Sustainability:
A False Trade-off
The conversation usually gets framed as a trade-off: you can perform at the level expected, or you can be sustainable. Choose.
But the framing accepts the premise that performance expectations are rational.
What if they're not?
The Bear makes the irrationality visible in almost every episode. Carmy doesn't fail because he lacks talent or drive—he's drowning because he's internalised an impossible standard. His perfectionism? Trauma wearing a chef's coat. As one psychologist observed, his obsessive attention to detail functions as "a defence against inner chaos"—the only thing standing between him and emotional collapse.
And here's the thing: the restaurant that taught him these standards wasn't actually producing better results. It was producing burnout, addiction, and people who couldn't sustain careers. The "excellence" was a story the system told about itself.
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety shows that teams perform better when people can take risks without fear. Burnout research consistently demonstrates that exhaustion decreases both quality and output. The organisations demanding unsustainable performance often get worse results—they just can't see it because they're measuring activity rather than impact.
Sustainable performance is often the only kind that works long-term.
But here's the harder question: what if your environment isn't set up for sustainable anything?
The Structural Question
When high-performing professionals burn out, the diagnosis usually lands on them. They need better boundaries. They need to manage stress. They need to ask for help.
Sometimes that's true.
But sometimes the conditions themselves make failure structurally inevitable.
Sydney's panic attacks in The Bear are her body's rational response to an irrational situation. She's brilliant, driven, doing everything right. And she's being asked to perform at an elite level in an environment that provides none of the support elite performance requires. Her anxiety is the signal.
Twenty direct reports? Organisational dysfunction wearing a job title. A role that expanded after layoffs without corresponding scope reduction? A transfer of risk from the organisation to you. A manager who moves the goalposts? Documentation trail for a decision they've already made.
In these contexts, resilience advice becomes gaslighting. "Manage your energy better" implies the energy equation is solvable. Sometimes it isn't.
The variable that changed is the system. Not you.
Safety as Infrastructure
Forget performance for a moment. Ask instead: Am I safe?
Not physically safe (though that matters). Safe in the sense that allows your nervous system to function. Safe enough to think clearly, recover from setbacks, do your actual work.
The Bear's third season showed what happens when one person's dysregulation becomes everyone's working conditions. Carmy's trauma didn't stay contained—it cascaded through the entire kitchen. His exacting standards created "a culture of anxiety, dysfunction and resentment." The team couldn't access their own capabilities because they were too busy managing his volatility. Psychological safety means the basic conditions that allow people to think.
Two dimensions matter here:
Internal baseline: Is your nervous system operating from regulation or from survival? The physiological signs are specific: disrupted sleep, irritability that spills into relationships, the inability to stop ruminating on work, physical symptoms your GP can't quite explain. Your body telling you the threat level is too high to sustain.
External conditions: Does your environment permit failure, questions, boundaries? Can you say "I don't know" without penalty? Can you push back on unreasonable requests? Is there room to be human—to have a bad week, to need recovery, to change your mind?
Sustainable performance requires both. Without internal regulation, you can't access your own capacity. Without external safety, you'll exhaust yourself managing threats rather than doing work.
Most burnout conversations focus on the first while ignoring the second. Like telling someone to relax while the building is on fire.
The Questions Worth Asking
Before optimising your performance, interrogate the frame:
Whose definition of "good" am I trying to meet? A standard I chose, or one I inherited? Does it account for the reality of my body, brain, and circumstances—or does it assume I'm someone else?
What would sustainable actually look like for me? Not the general advice. Not what worked for your mentor. What rhythms, structures, and boundaries would allow you specifically to do your best work without paying for it in health?
Is my environment capable of supporting that? Some systems can adapt. Some can't. Some will tell you they can while punishing you for asking. The answer changes what's possible.
What's my baseline for safety right now? Not where you think it should be. Where it actually is. The body keeps score.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Some of you reading this need better boundaries and more sleep.
Some of you need to change jobs.
Some of you need to recognise that the performance standards you've internalised were designed for someone else—and that meeting them was never going to be sustainable, because you were running someone else's race.
And some of you need to stop treating yourself as the thing that needs fixing.
There's a reason The Bear resonates so deeply. Viewers see themselves in Carmy's anxiety, his pressure to be perfect, his fear of not being enough. The show works because it externalises something many of us experience internally: the impossible task of meeting standards designed for someone else, in systems that treat exhaustion as evidence of personal failure rather than structural dysfunction.
The exhaustion you feel isn't always a sign that you're doing it wrong. Sometimes the system is. And no amount of personal optimisation will fix a structural problem.
Sustainable performance requires honesty—with yourself and your environment—about what sustainable actually means.
The first step is asking whose definition of "good" you've been trying to meet.
The second is deciding whether that definition serves you.
Read this again: You might not be the thing that needs fixing.
If you're questioning whether the exhaustion you feel is personal or structural—or if you're navigating high performance with a brain or body that doesn't match the default template—this is what I work on. Learn more about executive coaching for founders and leaders and leadership architecture or coaching for neurodivergent leaders.
This post was inspired by this testimonial on Reddit
