Alison Campbell is the founder of unBurnt Unburnt and Executive in Residence at Bentley University’s Center for Health and Business. She is the author of When Burnout Looks Like Productivity: The New Risk to Innovation Capacity (2026) and brings nearly 20 years of experience spanning finance, eCommerce, and HR technology. Throughout her career—including leadership roles at Morgan Stanley, Wayfair before its IPO, and Workhuman—Alison has helped organizations use strategy, analytics, and organizational design to drive innovation, growth, and healthier, more sustainable ways of working.
TAKEAWAYS
Your Body Isn’t Overreacting
In the final months of my corporate career, I normalized headaches and stomach pain the same way I'd been taught to normalize everything else — just push through, rest after the next board meeting, maybe it's a food allergy. I'd worked my whole life to reach that role. The idea that the role itself was making me sick didn't fit the story I'd been sold about what success was supposed to feel like.
The body keeps a more honest ledger than our calendars do. If you're managing escalating physical symptoms and finding reasons to defer them, that pattern is data — not a scheduling problem. You don't have to wait for the emergency room to take it seriously. The earlier you treat your body's signals as information worth acting on, the more options you have.
Busy Is Not the Same as Capacity
The research my team conducted with Bentley University turned up something that surprised even us: when burnout is highest, visible productivity tends to stay high. People are still answering emails. They're still generating ideas in brainstorms. For leaders reading dashboards and team output, it looks like everything is working. What the data showed is that underneath — the capacity for strategic thinking, complex problem-solving, and durable innovation — is quietly depleted.
If you manage people, the signals you've been taught to look for may be the wrong ones. A team generating ideas but consistently delaying hard decisions isn't performing — it's surviving. The question worth asking isn't whether your team is busy. It's whether they have the cognitive bandwidth to do work that actually matters.
FOUNDERS NOTE: NEW PLATFORM, NEW CADENCE
A quick update from us: Over the past few months, we’ve been working behind the scenes to move FemmeFactor to a new email platform, Beehiiv. This change will help us connect with other incredible communities, bring you more of the content you love, and send newsletters more naturally—as we create them—instead of forcing them into a rigid schedule. We’re excited about what’s ahead and can’t wait to share even more with you. 🧡