The Life I Needed to Save Was My Own

I considered myself indestructible. Bulletproof. Flying the world, up all hours, and the person you could rely on in a crisis to have fire in the belly and ice in the mind (and not the other way around). I was the fixer. My nickname was 'the plumber' and I wore it as a badge of honour.

When things got really tough, "we're not saving lives" was my refrain to lighten things up a bit.

In reality, and what I understand deeply now, is that I was drawing all of my sense of significance as a person from my work - and the harder or more 'heroic' the work, the more I ran to it (yes, ridiculous to think that anything we do in marketing is heroic, right? but I did...). I sought it out to fill the emptiness inside me, just seeking more validation from others that I could not seem to grant to myself.

Then for a while I stopped working. The sole source of my significance ended abruptly and I was totally adrift. My greatest personal mental health crisis was not when I was working under extraordinary pressure, it was when that work stopped, and I realised I was completely replaceable, had sacrificed too much for too little, and was certainly not saving any lives with my heroism. Instead, the life I needed to save was my own.

The 'indestructible' version of Justin did not consider therapy nor medication - now I appreciate and benefit from both. This industry eats lives. I'm ashamed to have been such a big part of the problem.

The data reveals a devastating truth: marketing professionals face the highest burnout rate of any industry, with 70% of media, marketing and creative professionals experiencing burnout in the past 12 months alone, according to the 2024 Mentally Healthy Survey by Never Not Creative. A staggering 83.3% of marketers report experiencing burnout at some stage in their careers.

NABS, the wellbeing charity for the advertising and media industry, reports that mental health calls have increased by 15% year-over-year, with mental health now accounting for 59% of all emotional support calls. The World Health Organisation estimates that 12 billion working days are lost annually worldwide to depression and anxiety, costing $1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

But here's what makes our current moment uniquely dangerous: we're layering AI displacement anxiety onto an already-broken foundation. 51% of workers in advertising and marketing predict changes to their jobs due to AI advancements, while 35% of all workers fear workforce displacement from AI. Marketing and advertising leads AI adoption at 37%, meaning our people are living daily with the technology that might replace them.

The marketing industry has always attracted people who derive identity from work. We're the ones who stayed late to "save" the pitch, who wore 80-hour weeks like war medals, who measured self-worth in client wins and campaign performance.

This heroic complex creates a toxic feedback loop:

The Significance Trap: When work becomes your primary source of meaning, any threat to that work becomes an existential crisis. AI isn't just changing how we do our jobs—it's questioning whether we're needed at all.

The Replacement Reality: Unlike other industries where automation targets manual tasks, AI is advancing rapidly into creative and strategic territory—the very areas we believed made us irreplaceable.

The Burnout Acceleration: Budget pressures, combined with AI anxiety, are creating what one CMO described as a "double whammy of stress" where teams are expected to do more with less while questioning their future viability.

The result? Younger professionals under 30 report significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression, with non-male, non-white, non-hetero, and non-leaders showing the highest levels. We're not just burning out our current workforce—we're destroying the next generation before they even establish themselves.

As senior leaders, we didn't just participate in this system—we built it. Every time we celebrated the person who "saved" the impossible deadline, every time we rewarded unsustainable heroics, every time we made someone feel irreplaceable while knowing they absolutely were, we fed the machine that's now consuming our people.

This isn't about offering more mental health days or meditation apps (though both help). It's about fundamentally reimagining what success looks like in an AI-augmented world where sustainable performance matters more than heroic burnout.

Based on both research and hard-won personal experience, here's how senior leaders can begin addressing this crisis:

1. Redefine Heroism

Stop celebrating unsustainable performance. The new heroism is building systems that work without requiring individual sacrifice. Start measuring success by team sustainability, not just delivery outcomes.

2. Separate Identity from Output

Help your team understand that their value extends beyond what they produce. Flexible working environments show the lowest levels of depression and anxiety, but true flexibility means psychological safety to have bad days, to struggle, to be human.

3. Create AI Partnership, Not Competition

Instead of pretending AI isn't happening, involve your team in defining how it enhances rather than replaces their work. 71% of employees are concerned about AI, but only 34% of organisations are actively reskilling their people to work with it.

4. Model Vulnerability

Share your own struggles with work-life balance, with meaning-making, with the changes our industry faces. Creating safe environments for people to speak out starts with leadership demonstrating vulnerability and acceptance.

5. Invest in Mental Health Infrastructure

81% of employees prioritise mental health over high-paying jobs. Make therapy and mental health support as standard as health insurance. Not as a perk, but as essential infrastructure.

We can continue perpetuating a system that treats mental health crisis as the cost of doing business, or we can choose to build something better.

The data is clear: our industry has a burnout rate 17% higher than the general workforce. The solutions exist: teams with true flexibility, commitment to better working processes, and clear support structures can dramatically reduce anxiety and depression.

But it requires leadership courage to prioritise human sustainability over short-term performance metrics. It requires admitting that the "heroic" culture many of us built is fundamentally broken.

The life I needed to save was my own. But as leaders, the lives we need to save are those of everyone who works for us. Not from clients or competitors or deadlines, but from the toxic culture that convinced them their worth depends on their willingness to sacrifice their wellbeing for our bottom line.

Your team's mental health isn't just a moral imperative—it's a business necessity. Companies with mentally healthy workforces see increased productivity, reduced healthcare costs, and better client relationships. The question isn't whether you can afford to address this crisis. It's whether you can afford not to.

How are you creating psychological safety for your team? What systems are you building to support sustainable performance?

And perhaps more importantly: when did you last check in with yourself?

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 3 June 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.