What Does It Take to Switch Off from ‘Always On’ Leadership?

Every summer, we are reminded that Australia is a sunburnt country, the compounding effects of climate change, deforestation, and urbanisation become blazingly evident in the bushfire season. But the other smouldering cumulative effect that doesn’t end up on the news is burnout. The sunburnt country is becoming known globally as a burnt out country.

Australians are among the most burnt-out employees in the world, according to the OECD Better Life Index. We rank 32nd out of 41 countries, and this beyond a critical mental health issue, this is also a critical productivity issue (Melbourne Business School, 2024).

Cognitive overload in the attention economy. 

Burnout is often framed as an individual psychological state; exhaustion, cynicism, reduced efficacy. But this framing is incomplete. What we are witnessing across Australian workplaces is a systemic saturation of attention, driven by the collision of digital technologies, cultural expectations of constant availability, and leadership models that have not evolved to identify the performance risk posed by the attention economy. Our dopamine-fuelled, diary-filling addiction to proving our worth has created leaders who are perpetually occupied, yet increasingly absent from the deeper work of sense-making and direction.

The result is not just fatigue, but impaired cognition at scale.

The Attention Economy and the Limits of Human Cognition

Human cognitive capacity is finite. Attention, working memory, and executive function are constrained resources. Decades of cognitive science research confirm that sustained performance depends on periods of focused engagement and recovery.

Yet modern work violates these principles almost entirely.

Have you every heard a colleague comment, “I’ve got so many browsers open, I just can’t think!” Our brain is exactly the same; caught in a loop of diminishing returns when it comes to switching costs.

Digital tools — email, collaboration platforms, mobile devices — fragment attention into continuous micro-interruptions. Each interruption imposes a switching cost, degrading working memory, decision quality, and problem-solving capacity. Over time, this produces what researchers describe as cognitive overload: a state in which information demands exceed the brain’s ability to process them effectively.

In an attention economy, where responsiveness is implicitly rewarded, leaders are often the most exposed. Their roles sit at the intersection of strategic decision-making, relational demands, and perpetual information flow. The myth persists that seniority confers greater cognitive resilience. Research suggests the opposite: complex decision environments magnify the cost of overload.

AI and the Catch 22 of Cognitive Overload

The growing reliance on human-in-the-loop AI systems introduces a subtle but profound risk when leaders are already cognitively overloaded. In theory, human oversight is intended to preserve judgment, ethics and accountability. In practice, under conditions of attentional depletion, the human role often degrades into passive validation rather than active cognition. Research on automation bias shows that when mental bandwidth is constrained, individuals are more likely to defer to algorithmic outputs, even when errors are evident. This creates a catch-22 of convenience: AI is adopted to reduce cognitive burden, yet its use further erodes critical thinking capacity by displacing effortful sense-making. Over time, leaders risk outsourcing not just execution, but judgment itself, weakening the very human discernment the loop was designed to protect.

Burnout Is a Lag Indicator of Cognitive Failure

From an academic perspective, burnout should be understood as a downstream outcome, not the core problem.

Long before emotional exhaustion manifests, leaders experience:

• Reduced attentional control

• Impaired judgment and risk assessment

• Declining capacity for systems thinking

• Narrowing time horizons and reactive decision-making

This has profound organisational consequences. When leaders operate under cognitive overload, they default to short-termism, over-reliance on heuristics, and excessive control, precisely the behaviours that undermine trust, adaptability, and long-term performance.

In this sense, burnout is beyond a wellbeing issue. It is a performance degradation signal.

Why “Switching Off” Is a Leadership Capability

Disconnection is often mischaracterised as absence. In reality, it is a precondition for higher-order cognition.

When you take a break, your brain can go from tactical tunnel vision to strategic big-picture thinking (Forbes, 2025).

Neuroscience research demonstrates that periods of disengagement activate the brain’s default mode network, critical for sense-making, integration, creativity, and insight. Without this downtime, leaders remain trapped in execution mode, unable to engage in the deeper cognitive work their roles require.

From a leadership standpoint, the ability to switch off is not self-care. It is cognitive governance.

Yet many leaders resist disconnection because they conflate availability with value. In doing so, they inadvertently signal to their organisations that constant responsiveness is a proxy for commitment, embedding overload as a cultural norm.

A Systems Leadership Lens on Disconnection

From a systems perspective, the inability to switch off is an emergent property of how work is designed, rewarded, and led.

Leaders who operate as systems thinkers recognise that:

• Attention is a shared organisational resource

• Overload in one part of the system propagates elsewhere

• Recovery is not inefficiency; it is maintenance

In this context, disconnection becomes a lever for system health, not a personal indulgence.

Why the Australian Summer Matters

Festive commitments aside, extended breaks (aka the Australian summer) offer a rare opportunity for deep cognitive recovery, not just short-term rest. This is qualitatively different from weekends or brief leave, which rarely allow attentional systems to reset.

For leaders, this period represents a strategic intervention point:

• To interrupt chronic cognitive load

• To restore executive function

• To re-enter work with greater clarity, perspective, and adaptive capacity

A Provocation for Leaders

If leadership is fundamentally about judgment, sense-making, and long-term value creation, then chronic connectivity is not neutral, it is corrosive.

The question is no longer whether leaders can afford to switch off.
The evidence suggests they cannot afford not to.

This summer, disconnection should be treated not as retreat, but as deliberate cognitive investment.

Because in an attention economy, the scarcest leadership resource is not time.
It is clarity of mind.