There’s a phrase that gets used a lot in workplaces. You’ve probably said it yourself, or heard it from a manager, a colleague, a well-meaning friend:
“Just push through it.”
It sounds like strength. It sounds like resilience. And for a while, it works, or at least it looks like it does.
But I want to talk about what happens underneath that phrase. Because in my experience supporting people through workplace stress, “pushing through” is often less a sign of resilience and more a quiet act of self-abandonment. And the cost of it, to individuals and to the organisations they work in, is far higher than most people realise.
Resilience Is Not the Same as Endurance
We’ve conflated two very different things.
Resilience, in its truest sense, is the ability to adapt and recover when things get hard. It involves rest, reflection, and rebuilding. It’s dynamic. It bends, releases pressure, and comes back.
Endurance is something else. It’s gritting your teeth and carrying on regardless. It’s absorbing blow after blow and not letting it show. It might look the same from the outside, but it functions completely differently on the inside.
When we tell people (or ourselves) to “just push through,” we’re usually asking for endurance. And endurance, sustained for long enough without relief, doesn’t build strength. It depletes it.
What’s Actually Happening When We “Push Through”
I think about the people I’ve spoken with who were deep in the push-through cycle. They weren’t lazy. They weren’t weak. Many of them were among the most dedicated, high-performing people in their teams.
But they had learned, consciously or not, that their needs were inconvenient. That asking for help was a burden. That slowing down, even for a moment, was a kind of failure.
So they kept going.
They answered emails at midnight. They came back from leave before they were ready. They sat through meetings with a carefully neutral face while quietly unravelling. And at some point, something gave, whether that was their health, their output, their relationships at work, or their decision to finally leave.
Burned-out workers are 2.6 times more likely to seek a new job than their peers.1 That’s not a coincidence. It’s the result of a culture that consistently asks people to give more than they can sustain, and labels it resilience.
The Numbers Behind the Phrase
The data makes it harder to look away.
Recent research shows that 82% of employees are at risk of burnout, and that Gen Z and millennial workers are reaching peak burnout at just 25 years old, a full 17 years earlier than previous generations.2
Presenteeism, the pattern of employees showing up and working while mentally or physically exhausted, is even more damaging than absenteeism. Research from the Institute for Public Policy Research found that working through illness resulted in an additional 44 days of lost productivity per worker annually. In the UK, 84% of the £103 billion cost of worker sickness in 2024 was due to presenteeism, not absence.1
In other words: the people who push through are costing organisations more than the people who take the time they need.
A 2025 study found that employee burnout costs an employer between roughly $4,000 and $20,000 per worker per year, depending on seniority, through missed workdays and reduced productivity.3
And yet the message in many workplaces remains: keep going.
When “Pushing Through” Becomes a Culture
Individual habits of endurance are one thing. But when they become a team norm, when everyone is doing it, when it becomes what’s expected, when taking time to recover feels like an exception to the rule, something more systemic is happening.
The real driver of burnout isn’t the work setting itself. Burnout levels are similar across remote, hybrid, and in-person staff. What actually makes the difference is the quality of management, support, and workplace culture.4
This matters because it means the problem isn’t individual. You can coach someone all day on breathing techniques and sleep hygiene, but if they’re returning to an environment where pushing through is rewarded and recovery is quietly penalised, you’re working against the tide.
Sustainable wellbeing requires both. Individual support that genuinely helps people understand themselves and build real coping capacity, and organisational culture that makes it safe to use it.
Signs That “Pushing Through” Has Become the Norm in Your Team
A few things worth noticing:
People rarely use their leave. Or they use it only when they’re on the verge of collapse, rather than as a regular, preventative rhythm. When rest becomes a last resort, something has already gone wrong.
Sick days spike in predictable patterns. A team that collectively burns through their leave around the same times, or takes sick days in clusters after intense periods, is likely recovering from something that built up quietly over weeks.
Your highest performers are also your quietest. The people who seem fine are often the ones working the hardest to appear that way. High performance can mask a great deal.
No one asks for help. Not because they don’t need it, but because the culture has taught them not to.
What Real Resilience Actually Looks Like
Real resilience isn’t the absence of struggle. It’s the presence of support.
It’s knowing that when things get hard, there are structures and people in place that help you move through it, not by ignoring it, but by actually processing it.
It’s having somewhere to put the things that are weighing on you, without worrying about what that disclosure might cost you professionally.
It’s building habits that help you replenish, not in a performative wellness app kind of way, but genuinely, sustainably, in a way that fits your actual life.
Employees with supportive leadership are 70% less likely to experience burnout.5 The research is consistent on this: what protects people is not asking them to be tougher. It’s giving them genuine support.
A Note on What This Means for Leaders
If you lead a team, I want to say something gently but directly: the culture you model matters more than any wellness policy you could implement.
When you take your leave and truly disconnect, you give your team permission to do the same. When you acknowledge that a stretch was hard, you make it safe for others to admit the same. When you create space for real conversations about capacity and stress, not just output and deadlines, you build something that a poster on the wall simply cannot.
You don’t have to have all the answers. You just have to make it okay to stop pretending everyone is fine.
If This Resonates With You
Whether you’re someone who’s been in the push-through cycle yourself, or a leader wondering if your team might be, I hope this piece has given you something to sit with.
The goal isn’t to stop working hard. It’s to make sure the hard work is sustainable. That the people doing it have somewhere to go when they’re struggling. That resilience is something that gets built over time, not just demanded.
That’s what I work on with teams. Not the quick fix, but the slow, sustainable kind of support that actually makes a difference.
If you’d like to talk about what that might look like for your organisation, you’re welcome to book a discovery call. No pressure, no pitch, just a conversation.
References
- The Diversity Movement. (2025). The economics of burnout: Chronic workplace stress is a human crisis and a financial risk. thediversitymovement.com
- The Interview Guys. (2025). The state of workplace burnout in 2025: A comprehensive research report. blog.theinterviewguys.com
- Bagasi, A., Al Harbi, E. K., Alabbasi, S. M., et al. (2025). Effectiveness of workplace mental health programs in reducing occupational burnout: A systematic review. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 68(4), 773–783. sciencedirect.com
- High5Test. (2025). 15+ employee burnout statistics in the workplace. high5test.com
- Growthalista. (2025). 25 burnout statistics for 2025. growthalista.com