In its fourth year, cyber resilience non-profit Cybermindz is urging organizations to reframe burnout, not as a standalone wellness issue, but as a critical risk, shifting the conversation towards a more measurable, impact-driven approach aligned with real-world operational resilience.
Burnout and stress are still a major issue in cybersecurity. Research by Cybermindz found that, in a poll of 101 cyber professionals, one in two experience burnout weekly or daily.
What’s more, 66% of those polled reported moderate or high emotional exhaustion and 54% show two or more concurrent burnout indicators.
Read more: PPRO CISO Bronwyn Boyle on Burnout and Building a Healthy Cybersecurity Culture
Positioning the solution to this challenge as a wellness offering can limit both understanding and engagement, Peter Coroneos, Founder, Cybermindz, noted in a conversation with Infosecurity.
He said that the current discourse on tackling burnout and stress can also have resource implications as solutions perceived as training or wellness initiatives are often seen as discretionary spending, rather than integral to cybersecurity.
“We believe that bringing our offering into a risk-based conversation will have more traction and unlock more resources to support teams that are doing the difficult work,” Coroneos told Infosecurity.
Coroneos warned that individuals at firms which have experienced significant ransomware attacks have shown evidence of “what appears to be trauma-like symptoms.”
“We talked to a CSO in Luxembourg that lost six out of ten at his team due to trauma after a major insider attack. This has real world effects in terms of capability and capability degradation translates into elevated risk,” he said.
Taking a risk-based approach allows CISOs to have conversations at board level about how the mental state of staff has a direct link to corporate risk exposure.
Investing in Resilience Key to Transform Operations
Research by Cybermindz published on May 27 found that organizations that invest as few as eight hours of targeted resilience training for members of their cybersecurity teams benefit from transformative operational resilience.
The Cybermindz iRest® Impact Study, found that participants gained an average of 26 minutes of sleep per night and showed a 16% overall improvement in sleep quality.
The study analyzed data from 275 cybersecurity professionals across multiple training cohorts delivered between 2022 and May 2026 using the military-proven iRest® (Integrative Restoration) protocol.
Meanwhile, burnout across three Maslach Burnout Inventory measures (emotional exhaustion, cynicism, professional efficacy) showed significant improvement when measured continuously across all participants. Emotional exhaustion decreased 19%, cynicism decreased 26%, professional efficacy increased 10%.
In addition, the training contributed to a 71% reduction in participants showing attrition risk, from 27% to 8%. Marked by moderate cynicism, the attrition warning zone is regarded as the strongest predictor of resignation.
“For cyber defenders, our findings bring a welcome message of hope at a time when 24×7 always-on pressure, crippling workloads and escalating attacks define their daily existence,” Coroneos said about the study findings. “Ultimately, our work is aimed at advancing societal safety, and these findings bring us closer to that goal.”
Coroneos, will present Human Capability Risk in Cyber Teams: When Burnout Becomes a Control Opportunity at Infosecurity Europe – Keynote, on Thursday, June 4, 2026 (11:00am – 11:35am BST), on the Keynote Stage, ExCeL London.
