By Gala Grigoreva – Co-founder of Integrated Professional Growth, Corporate Wellbeing Expert, C-level executive

I was invited to run a workshop on burnout and boundaries for one of the Cyprus women communities. We started with a simple but hard exercise: practice saying no to an unwanted request. Anything counted – an impolite “urgent” ping, the casual “can you stay late?”, the weekend “quick favor,” the classic “could you do this for them – they’re swamped.” We picked one scenario to role-play: saying no to overworking.

One participant surprised the room. “I don’t mind,” she said. “If you want to achieve something and become better, overworking is good.” A few heads nodded. Another voice added: “In our industry (author – in fact, so many), it’s normal. We love our work. Our companies have great cultures. People are valued and cared for. So we’re happy to overwork.” The kicker: it’s not “sometimes.” It’s almost always.

I carried that conversation with me. I replayed my own career path –- how I used to think about hustle:

• “I’m ready for everything, give me work.”
• “I want this cool place, I can overwork.”
• “For this money, I’m ready.”

I often loved what I was doing. It felt like serving something bigger — belonging. And here’s the uncomfortable realization: work cultures evolved from raw transactional capitalism (“I pay you, you do anything”) to curated, caring capitalism (cookies in the office, 300 sunny days in a year, meditation apps, “family” values) — yet the implicit expectation to overwork stayed put. It’s the same demand in a nicer outfit.

When Care Is a Cover Story

We’ve wrapped extreme work in the language of love: passion, craft, mission. In games, it even has a name which can be relevant to similar industries: crunch –- sustained periods of long hours, often unpaid, to hit milestones. The latest IGDA Developer Satisfaction Survey (2023) shows how stubborn it remains: among those who experienced crunch, 30% worked more than 60 hours/week, 29% worked 50–59 hours, and many respondents felt long hours were “expected as a normal part of the job.” (International Game Developers Association. 2024)

Research is catching up to reality. Scholars describe the seductive idea of “good crunch” (overwork that feels noble because you love the work) as “cruel optimism”, a belief that keeps people attached to conditions that undermine their well-being. And framing any crunch as “good” sustains harmful patterns and delays reform. (SAGE Journals, 2021)  

The paradox is broader than games. In the 1990s, sociologist Arlie Hochschild called it the Time Bind: even at “family-friendly” companies with flexible policies, people spent more time at work because work felt easier, more structured, more rewarding than the emotional demands of home. Work became “home”, home became “work.” We created cultures where it feels normal to stay. (Los Angeles Times, 1997)

The Hidden Cost: Golden Benefits, Quiet Loneliness

Today’s great cultures often include wellness stipends, mindfulness sessions, and generous snacks. I’m a wellbeing professional, and oh I love good benefits. But when staying late is celebrated, benefits become band-aids on structural wounds.

The health data is blunt. A WHO/ILO study found that working 55+ hours per week is associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of death from ischemic heart disease versus 35–40 hours. Long hours literally shorten lives. (World Health Organization, 2021)

And beyond disease risk, we’re breeding loneliness in high-performing adults. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory equates lacking social connection with the health risks of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. If work swallows evenings and weekends, when, exactly, are people supposed to build relationships? The bill arrives in our 30s and 40s: impressive titles, strong benefits — thin lives. (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2023) 

Japan shows how widespread this is: in 2021 the government even appointed a Minister in charge of Loneliness and Isolation. Recent Cabinet Office data says about 40% of people feel lonely at least sometimes, and an estimated 1.46 million working-age people live in social withdrawal (hikikomori).

I meet so many high achievers who confess: “I don’t know how to date anymore.” “I cannot meet anyone who’s adequate.”, “ I don’t have time for personal life, as my work is too demanding.” Work gradually and invisibly expands to fill the time we don’t fiercely protect.

The Achievement Myth: More Hours, Better Results (…Not Really)

Let’s pressure-test the evergreen claim: “To achieve more, you must overwork.”

Evidence disagrees. Economist John Pencavel (Stanford) showed the relationship between hours and output is non-linear: beyond a threshold, productivity diminishes sharply. In other words, after 50–55 hours, extra time adds little, and can even reduce total output due to fatigue and errors. Later work confirms decreasing returns as hours stretch. 

Real-world trials echo this. Microsoft Japan’s month-long four-day week raised productivity by ~40%, cut electricity by 23%, and slashed printing by 59%. Meetings shrank, focus improved. Fewer hours, more value. (The Guardian, 2019)

Across advanced economies, hours tend to fall as labor productivity rises. That’s part of development. Recent OECD and research briefs highlight the inverse correlation between hours and productivity over time. It turns out rest is a feature of high-performing systems. (VoxEU, 2024)

Shorter hours don’t just protect health, they improve work quality: sleep, stress, and life satisfaction go up when hours come down. Sustainable achievement is a design choice, not an endurance test. (PubMed Central, 2022)

Why Smart People Stay Late (Even When They Know Better)

If the data is clear, why do so many of us still overwork?

• Identity and Belonging
  Work offers a tribe, a scoreboard, a sense of purpose. For ambitious people, especially in creative or tech sectors, work can feel like the arena where we matter. Saying “no” can feel like saying “I don’t care.”
• Moral Narratives
  We’ve been sold the virtue of self-sacrifice. Overwork becomes a character test, proof of grit, loyalty, and leadership potential, and again…LOYALTY. 
• Cultural Scripts
  If your leaders send midnight emails, modeling hustle, the signal is heard: “This is how we win here.” People are exquisitely sensitive to peer norms.
• Good Intentions, Bad Systems
  Wellness apps don’t fix workload, unclear priorities, or chaotic planning cycles. As organizational psychologist Adam Grant puts it: burnout is rarely a personal problem–- it’s an organizational one. Solve it at the system level. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adammgrant_burnout-is-rarely-a-personal-problem-to-manage-activity-7329132312141459458-omkB/

What I Suggest

Back to that workshop. When someone says, “Overworking is fine if you want to grow,” I hear a belief that deserves respect and a system that deserves scrutiny. And it’s so deeply ingrained in us (or maybe it’s just a millennial thing), that I replied that for me, overworking from time to time feels okay, because I truly love what I do. But it’s all about the balance again, because “when you start sacrificing so much of your personal life and mental health in the name of work, it becomes your social shield,” like one of my team mates wisely noticed. 

Here’s what I say:

• Work never ends. Your years do. They pass fast, and many 30+ professionals end up with good jobs and good living conditions –- but thin social lives. 
• You can love your work and still leave on time. Love without boundaries becomes dependency. Mastery thrives on recovery. And again, work smart, not hard. 
• Overwork is not inevitable. It’s a cultural pattern shaped by planning, prioritization, and permissions (explicit and implicit). Change those, and behavior follows.
• High standards aren’t the problem. Unbounded standards are.

And to leaders: if you praise ownership, you must also own the conditions that make healthy performance possible. Make it a rule in your company or team to leave work on time. Encourage people to do so, and actively discourage this kind of “loyal” overwork. Lead by example: stand up and go to the gym, pick up your kids from kindergarten (show that leaders can balance parenthood too), go on a date, visit the theater, or simply go home to get some well-deserved rest. 

The Leader’s Playbook: From Culture-as-Cover to Culture-as-Care

If you’re serious about wellbeing and performance, stop treating burnout as a fitness issue and start treating it as a design issue. Here are a few ideas for testing: 

1) Make Boundaries Explicit (and Enforce Them)

• Stop the midnight ping. Use delayed send. Establish email/Slack cutoff windows. Move critical alerts to on-call rotations.
• Normalize “no.” Write it into the playbook: “If it’s not in this sprint or you’re at capacity, you are expected to say no or propose a trade-off.”
• Protect non-work time. Create visible norms: no-meeting lunch hours; a company-wide sign-off day; a hard stop near the end of day. Leaders go first.

2) Replace “More Hours” with Sharper Focus

• Shorten meetings by default (try 25/50 minutes); insist on clear agendas and pre-reads.
• Defragment work: fewer concurrent priorities, smaller batch sizes, clear “Definition of Done.”
• Timebox sprints with recovery built in. I like the cadence approach – treating work like an athlete’s preparation for a championship, where every high-intensity performance period is followed by dedicated recovery time.
• Experiment with time models: one no-meeting day a week; summer hours; periodic four-day pilots maybe.

3) Measure What Matters (Not Presence)

• Reward outcomes, not hours. Calibrate performance frameworks to impact and craft quality, not desk-time.
• Track capacity like a real constraint: if every roadmap assumes heroic effort, the roadmap is fiction.
• Run pulse checks on workload, autonomy, psychological safety and act on them.

4) Build Belonging Beyond the Office

• Encourage non-work identity: ERGs that hike, run, play, read. Offer stipends for sports or art classes, not just productivity tools.
• End the subtle shaming of people with lives. If someone leaves early to coach or date, say “Have fun” — and mean it.

5) Fix the Project System 

• Treat crunch as a process failure, not a rite of passage. Create post-mortems that look upstream: scope creep, late stage pivots, missing review gates.
• Build buffers into schedules: treat holidays and sick days as assumptions, not surprises.
• Rotate on-call fairly. No one should be hero-ing every week. It’s understandable when you’re a new parent in neverending routine – your child is yours and heavily depends on you, while a project is managed by many adults. 
• Publicly celebrate teams that hit goals without heroics.

“But We Love Our Work”

I believe you. I do, too.

The question is not whether you love your work. It’s whether you want to keep loving it in ten years — with your health intact, friendships alive, maybe a family if you want one, and a life that still feels wide.

There’s a reason Scandinavian models and forward-leaning pilots are so compelling: they organize for both performance and life. Across the OECD, reductions in hours over time track with higher productivity — a reminder that prosperity isn’t built on exhaustion, but on clever design. 

If you truly want to “achieve something and become better,” don’t bet on more hours. Bet on better systems — and a body and mind that can go the distance.

If you as a leader or HR preach “We care,” then care in the design: workload, pacing, priorities, norms. Replace the glamor of heroics with the craft of planning. Stop valorizing the person who answers at midnight. Celebrate the team that never had to be asked.

Here’s a commitment I ask executives to make:

1. We do not expect routine overwork. If it happens, we treat it as a signal of planning issues.
2. We design for a sustainable pace. Buffers, priority discipline, realistic scoping.
3. We model boundaries. No after-hours mail unless it’s truly urgent — and “urgent” means lives or livelihoods, not a jittery timeline.
4. We measure what we mean. We track hours spikes, PTO usage, pulse scores, and attrition risk.
5. We make belonging bigger than work. We actively protect time for relationships, health, and play.

Do this, and you won’t just prevent burnout – you’ll also perform better than competitors who keep running on empty.

A Personal Note to High Achievers (From One of You)

I have lived in the places you’re living. I’ve chased the next title, the next win, the next summit. I’ve told myself the story that overwork is a season – that it will calm down after this week, after this quarter, after this fiscal year. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t.

The courageous act is not to work until you break. The courageous act is to build a life you don’t need a vacation from, and a team that doesn’t need saving at 11:59 p.m. Your future self will not thank you for polished dashboards and ignored doctors. Your future self will thank you for the boundaries that preserved your joy.

You can be ambitious and still leave on time. You can be loyal and still say no. You can love your craft and still live your life.

We don’t need more heroism. We need brave systems. Let people go home. Let them date, lift, sing, parent, wander, rest. They’ll come back sharper.