Beyond burnout: Why mid-career professionals are struggling in the age of constant change

As companies accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence and restructure for efficiency, pressures in the workplace are intensifying. New expectations around productivity, performance and constantly evolving roles are creating heightened uncertainty and anxiety. Beneath these shifts lies a growing mismatch between how work is changing and how people have long been conditioned to think, decide and operate.

This tension is most acutely felt by mid-senior professionals. They are no longer entry-level employees with structured learning pathways, nor are they senior leaders with the authority to shape organisational direction. Instead, they are often responsible for translating strategic change into execution, managing teams, navigating ambiguity and absorbing pressure from both above and below.

“Decision-making layers are thinning, expectations are rising, and timelines are shortening,” said Nancy Ho, a Singapore-based Life Strategist and Transformative Coach who has worked with over 15,000 professionals across the globe. “Mid-senior executives often find themselves holding greater complexity with less margin, while still being expected to deliver stability, performance, and leadership.”

While organisations promote reskilling initiatives and agile workflows, the lived reality for many mid-career professionals is a rapid expansion of responsibilities without clear guidelines for navigating this new landscape of work, together with limited influence over structural change and years of established habits and assumptions.

Even senior leaders are still grappling with how to integrate AI effectively; a recent MIT study found that 95% of generative AI pilots deliver little to no measurable impact, underscoring how organisations themselves are still learning to adapt, let alone those within their ranks.

How professionals react

In response, many mid-career professionals default to pushing themselves beyond their limits, working harder, adapting faster, and enduring more. They fall back on the belief that effort and perseverance will ultimately produce success. For some, this approach may yield results. More likely, it deepens the strain and mismatch they feel with modern work, as they struggle to force fit traditional ways of thinking into fundamentally new organisational structures.

“What is perceived as the problem is usually something concrete: workload, organisational change, team dynamics, or career uncertainty. These pressures are real and shouldn’t be dismissed,” said Ho.

“So the difference isn’t between a false problem and a real one. It’s between addressing symptoms at the surface and resolving what’s shaping how those problems are experienced in the first place.”

Another perspective

Rather than focusing solely on action, Ho believes that individuals must recalibrate how they interpret responsibility and success. Creating space to step out of constant reaction, interrogating long-held assumptions about achievement, and engaging in honest reflection can help professionals realign how they operate under uncertainty. This will give them a core to rely on, especially as past successes and existing work routines cease to be relevant.

For some, this internal recalibration may lead to a realisation: that growth may require leaving an organisation that no longer aligns with how they want to think and work.

“The moment to consider moving on is rarely marked by a single event. It tends to show up as a pattern,” Ho said. “People often notice that despite effort and competence, their thinking feels increasingly constrained. Decisions feel heavier rather than clearer.”

“This isn’t about dissatisfaction or impatience. Many people remain in objectively good roles, yet sense that continuing in the same environment will slowly cost them more internally than it gives back.”

Recognising these signals early allows professionals to make more deliberate decisions about their future, whether that involves redefining their roles, repositioning within an organisation, or exploring new paths.

As organisations continue to pursue efficiency and innovation, the challenge for individuals may lie less in working harder and more in rethinking how they understand responsibility, success and alignment in an evolving workplace. In that sense, the issue goes beyond burnout. It is a question of whether the internal frameworks people rely on can keep pace with the external transformations reshaping the modern economy. And if so, if they can keep finding space to readjust, and readjust some more.