July 28, 2026
Nine months ago, I made one of the hardest decisions in my life and career.
I was two years into my last project management role — running upwards of twenty individual projects simultaneously, managing a twelve million-pound budget, and feeling the pressure build the way it does when you’ve been carrying too much for too long. I reached a point where the choice was stark and simple, ruin my health, or step aside and let someone else pick up the reins.
I stepped aside and I became self-employed, and it was the right call. I am lucky and I know that as not everyone can bridge that gap the way I did, and I am not standing here pretending otherwise, but here is what I have been thinking about in the nine months since: for the people who can’t simply walk away. There needs to be a way to hand off the weight before it completely grinds them down, because by the time most people realise they are burnt out, they have already been burnt out for months.
The reason nobody saw it coming (including them) is that burnout is not a modern problem with a modern solution. It is a 50,000-year-old alarm system running in completely the wrong environment.
Here is the bit your caveman brain needs you to understand. For the vast majority of human history, we lived in tribes. Small, tight, interdependent groups where everyone had a role, everyone was seen, and everyone mattered to the survival of the whole. Being part of the tribe was not a nice-to-have. It was the difference between life and death. Exile, being cast out, overlooked, made invisible, was a death sentence. The brain knew this, and it built in a response accordingly.
That response is still in there. Every single one of us carries it. When a person feels unseen at work, when they are carrying too much and nobody notices, or when they raise a problem and it disappears into a silence, when they feel like a resource rather than a person, all of this is the caveman brain reading that it is in exile. Not metaphorically. Literally. The same ancient alarm that once screamed you are going to die alone in the dark starts firing, quietly and persistently, every single day.
That alarm burns through energy. It floods the body with cortisol. It keeps the nervous system locked in low-level threat mode, no longer in the sharp, immediate stress zone of the alpha predator, but the grinding, endless daily stress from a threat that never resolves. The caveman could outrun a sabre-tooth tiger. You cannot outrun a feeling of chronic invisibility in an open plan office.
This is why burnout feels so physical. Why it is not just tiredness but a kind of ingrained bone exhaustion that sleep will not fix. Why the person experiencing it often cannot explain it, because they are not doing anything obviously wrong, they are just carrying too much, for too long, without the tribal safety net that the brain was built to rely on.
Burnout is not weakness. It is biology. And that changes everything about how you fix it.
The caveman tribe had something that most modern workplaces have quietly removed: the campfire. Every evening, the tribe came together. They shared the day’s events, what happened, what was hard, what was scary, what worked. They processed stress communally, out loud, with people who understood because they had been there too. That nightly debrief was not a ritual. It was a biological necessity. It was the thing that switched the alarm off.
Now we sit in open-plan offices and say nothing. We send messages to people three desks away. We have one-to-ones that run over into the next meeting. And then we go home and sit alone with our phones, carrying the weight of the day into the next one.
The tribe is still there. The campfire isn’t.
I share my own story not to suggest that everyone needs to quit and go self-employed, as that comes with its own stress, and it is not realistic or the point I am trying to make. I share it because I know what it feels like to stand at that fork in the road, and I know that most people reach it having had no warning, no language for what is happening to them, and no one around them who saw it coming. Most go sick or start looking for a new job, for the cycle to start over again later down the road.
What I do now — in keynotes, in training rooms, in conference halls — is give people that language. Give organisations the tools to see it before it becomes a crisis. Because the fix is not a wellness app or a fruit bowl. The fix is understanding what the alarm is, how to recognise it, why it is going off, and what the tribe as a collective needs to do to shut it up.
The caveman brain does not need a yoga class. It needs to feel seen, valued, and part of something. That is not a soft ask. That is the oldest survival requirement in human history.
If your organisation is carrying people who are running on empty, or if you have started to see some cracks and want to get ahead of it before they are, I would love to come and talk about it.
Book me as your next keynote speaker: www.carljones.org
Caveman Thought
The tribe did not burn out because the hunt was hard. They burned out when they stopped sitting around the fire together at the end of it.
Parting Question
Think about your team — or yourself — right now. When did anyone genuinely ask, how are you carrying the weight, then wait for an honest answer? And if the answer is “I can’t remember,” what does that tell you about the state of your campfire?
As always, be the tribal member you are meant to be. It makes for a much easier and simpler life.
Your friend,
Carl – The Caveman.
P.S. When you are ready, here are a few things that might help you;
- You can book me to attend your next event as a Keynote Speaker.
- Do you want to do a FREE personality test? Check out The Caveman Principles Tribal Sorter.
- Check out my theories – The Caveman Principles and The SLAP Technique
- Grab a copy of my book The Caveman Principles, directly from my printing agent.
- You might want to book yourself onto one of my eLearning courses to help you master a new skill.
- Or, if you have time and want to schedule a Caveman chat (with virtual coffee) for a discovery call, do it here.