CNBC is now accepting nominations for the 2026 Changemakers list. Learn more and submit a nomination by Nov 21.
Arianna Huffington has spent a lot of time thinking about the links between working hard and success, and she has come to the conclusion that there is a “collective delusion” about the positive correlation, while pervasive neglect of risks that can be literally fatal. She has spent years studying the science, but she also draws conviction from personal experience.
Two years after founding Huffington Post, Huffington collapsed from exhaustion and sleep deprivation. She hit her head on her desk, broke her cheekbone, and as she proceeded from doctor to doctor, from MRI to echocardiogram to find out what was wrong, the diagnosis that came back was burnout.
“Which in 2007, wasn’t the term that was much in use,” she tells CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in the first episode of the new CNBC podcast “Changemakers & Power Players.”
“That’s what changed my life,” Huffington now says. “Not just in terms of how I changed my daily habits, but in terms of how I wanted to change the culture, because I realized that we’re all suffering under this collective delusion that in order to be successful, in order to achieve, we did not have the luxury as It was seen, to take care of ourselves, and the science is so contradictory.”
