Srinivasan S. Pillay, a psychiatrist and an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who studies burnout, recently surveyed a random sample of 72 senior leaders and found that nearly all of them reported at least some signs of burnout and that all of them noted at least one cause of burnout at work.

The article quoted one chief executive for a multibillion-dollar company who put it this way: "I just felt that no matter what I was doing, I was always getting pulled somewhere else. It seemed like I was always cheating someone—my company, my family, myself. I couldn't truly focus on anything.