Many of my clients have worked in the humanitarian sector for a long time. A client recently shared something that stuck with me, because I think it explains more about burnout in this field than any wellness webinar ever will.

They said they actually loved the beginning of a response.

They felt a sense of purpose, helping people who were truly in crisis. I felt that way myself in the first months of the Rohingya Response. We worked six and a half days a week, long, long hours.

The first thirty, sixty, ninety days, when it truly is an emergency, when the hours are long because they have to be and things move fast because lives depend on it. That kind of intensity has a logic to it. Your body knows why it’s tired. The exhaustion means something.

The problem isn’t the emergency. The problem is what happens when the emergency never officially ends.

Look around the world right now. There are responses that have been running for two years. Five years, all across the globe. And in a lot of them, there are still managers running the operation as though it’s day ten.

Let me be clear: people need help, there is no doubt about that. But the people doing the helping have to take care of themselves, or they can’t take care of anyone else.

A manager sends emails at eleven at night. Then, at nine the next morning: “Why didn’t you respond?” No real deadlines, just a permanent sense that everything is due immediately. And often the information a person needs to do their job arrives late, in pieces, or not at all, which manufactures a crisis that didn’t have to exist.

I’ll be honest about something people in management don’t love to hear: a lot of this is a power struggle.

Keeping things tight. Keeping people slightly out of the loop. An emergency that never ends is, for some managers, a way to stay indispensable and in control. I’m not saying it’s always conscious. I’m saying it’s more common than we like to admit, and naming it honestly is where change starts.

So what do you actually do, if you’re the one being managed this way?

This is where the coaching lives.

It’s the work I love most.

You can’t fix your manager. That’s the first thing I say to clients, and it’s a relief more than a disappointment. What you can do is manage upward, deliberately, and a little ahead of the wave.

Here’s a version several of my clients have built and refined, and it sounds almost too small to matter.

On Thursday, around eleven in the morning, you send a short note: What are the priorities for next week? What are the deadlines? That’s it. Now the expectations are on the record before the weekend, before the 11pm email, before the Monday scramble. You’ve quietly set the schedule instead of reacting to one. You’re managing your boss before your boss manages you.

And yes, get it in writing. I know that can feel like bracing for a fight, but it isn’t. It’s clarity. Email creates a shared version of reality that a late-night message can’t override the next morning.

The other piece is the boundary, stated plainly and without apology. Something as simple as an out-of-office line: I respond to email between 8:30 and 6:30, Monday through Friday, or whatever your working hours are. If it’s urgent, call me. You’re not refusing to work hard. You’re refusing to treat everything as an emergency, which is exactly the discipline the operation itself has lost.

None of this makes a difficult manager easy. But it changes the power dynamic. And for someone who’s been running in permanent crisis mode, that shift, from bracing to steering, is often where the recovery actually starts.

The emergency was never the thing that broke people. It was the years spent inside a manufactured one, with no one willing to say so out loud.

I’m saying it out loud.

I coach humanitarians and professionals in high-pressure environments, integrating ICF coaching with functional movement, because recovery happens in the mind and the body, usually in that order’s reverse. Let’s talk.

And if you’re not ready to talk yet, start with The Mission Reset, the tools I used in Bangladesh to stay sane.