Posted by It’s Mental Health Awareness Week 2026, and anyone who’s listened to the podcast or read this blog will know how important this topic is to me. I went through the wringer back in 2008 and count myself lucky to have come out the other side.
Mental Health Awareness Week exists for a reason. Despite decades of growing awareness, improved language, and reduced stigma, we’re still failing a significant portion of the population, and evidence suggests that the people we’re failing most are often the ones we least expect: driven, capable, high-performing individuals who have built their identity around getting results.
This is an important issue, and until we understand the specific dynamics at play, and take deliberate steps to address them, we’ll keep treating the symptoms while the root causes go untouched.
The identity problem
For many high achievers, performance isn’t just something they do, it’s who they are. Their sense of self-worth is closely bound to their output, their status, and their ability to handle whatever’s in front of them. That’s not a character flaw, by the way: in many cases, it’s exactly what’s driven their success.
But it creates a huge barrier to seeking help. When struggling feels like a threat to your identity, rather than simply a difficult period to get through, the natural response is to ‘just push through’. An admission of not coping doesn’t feel like a statement of fact: it can feel like a judgement on your worth. The longer that pattern goes unchallenged, the more entrenched the problem becomes.
It’s a dynamic that plays out across genders, though it manifests differently. For men, social conditioning around stoicism and self-reliance make admitting difficulty feel like a failure. For women in high-performance environments, the pressure is often to appear unshakeable, not being ‘too emotional’ and not doing anything that might undermine credibility that was hard to come by.
Identity and performance
Start by separating your identity from your performance. That’s easier said than done, but a practical first step is to schedule a weekly ten-minute check-in with yourself. Not to review your to-do list, but to honestly assess how you’re actually doing. Journalling, even briefly, can help create the distance needed to see things more clearly.
Think as well about the language you use when you’re talking to yourself. If your default framing of a difficult period is that you’re failing, rather than you’re under pressure, the distinction matters. The words you use matter more than you think: one takes you somewhere useful, the other keeps you stuck. That’s never more true than when hustle culture has been telling you the wrong story for years.
What hustle culture gets wrong
Hustle culture romanticises a particular version of ambition: one that prizes relentless output, treats rest as laziness, and frames burnout as a badge of honour. That’s a dangerous narrative that’s shaped how entire industries think about work, leadership, and what it means to be serious about success.
But is there any evidence to support that? Chronic overwork can really damage your ability to make good decisions, and there’s research out there suggesting that the longer you work without a break, the less effective you are. One study found that productivity per hour drops sharply after 50 hours a week, and falls off a cliff after 55. Yet the culture carries on, because working yourself to the bone feels right, even when the long-term results tell a different story.
At a deeper level, I think that hustle culture has really distorted our understanding of resilience. Real resilience isn’t the ability to absorb unlimited challenge without showing strain. It is the ability to recover, adapt, and sustain high performance over time, which means you have to know when to rest, when to ask for support, and when something genuinely needs to change.
Escaping the hustle
If the above is something you struggle with, it means you need to learn how to properly rest. If you feel guilty for taking breaks, can’t switch off in the evenings, or wear your packed schedule as a badge of honour, it’s worth asking why. Rest isn’t the absence of work, it’s part of it.
Build non-negotiable recovery time into your week the same way you build in meetings. Treat cancelling it with the same reluctance you would feel cancelling on an important client. Your health is your wealth, after all.
The signs you might be missing
One of the reasons a drop in mental health goes unaddressed in high-performing individuals is that the early warning signs are easy to rationalise. They don’t look like crisis, they look like a busy period or a run of bad luck. Common signs include:
- A noticeable decline in the quality or speed of work that used to be easy
- Withdrawing from relationships and isolating yourself from others
- Disruption to sleep, exercise or eating
- Increased irritability
- A creeping sense this is how things are now, and will stay
The final point needs particular attention. When someone is mentally depleted, continuity bias can creep in and make it hard to properly assess the situation. Understanding that your thinking might be distorted is one of the most important things to know when you’re in the middle of a difficult period.
What you can do
Identify your personal early warning indicators and write them down before you need them. For most people, it’s one or two specific behaviours that creep in when the pressure becomes too much. For me it’s skipping exercise, but it could also be snapping at the people you care about, or losing interest in things that normally hype you up.
Once you know your signals, share them with someone you trust and ask them to tell you when they notice those signs. Outside observation catches what self-monitoring misses, particularly when your judgement is already impaired.
A different definition of success
The high performers who last, who are in it for the long run, tend to have one thing in common. They treat their mental health as part of the job, not separate from it. They build recovery into their week deliberately, they maintain the relationships and routines that keep them grounded, and when they need support, they ask for it.
This is the bit that gets missed in most conversations about mental health and performance. It’s not a case of choosing wellbeing over ambition, it’s understanding that without one, the other isn’t sustainable.
Your mental health isn’t a distraction from your performance, it’s the foundation everything else is built on. Looking after it is just good maintenance.
If you or someone you know is struggling, the following resources may help:
In the UK:
Samaritans — https://www.samaritans.org/
Mind — https://www.mind.org.uk/
Mental Health UK — https://mentalhealth-uk.org/
In Ireland:
Samaritans Ireland — https://www.samaritans.org/samaritans-ireland/
Mental Health Ireland — https://www.mentalhealthireland.ie/
Aware — https://www.aware.ie/