The day her town flooded, Jennifer Gaskin, CCI’s editorial director, went to work anyway. Years later, that choice became a powerful lens for understanding burnout in high-pressure careers like compliance. Combining personal narrative with insights from burnout experts and CCI’s new research about stress in compliance roles, she explores how recognizing burnout can lead to positive change.
In June 2008, central Indiana was struck by severe flooding. As many as 10 inches of rain fell in a matter of hours, killing three people and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage across more than three dozen counties in the state.
On the day of the flood, not knowing the state of my own home because the water was so high that I couldn’t even get to the street that leads to the street where my house is, I had nothing else to do but go to my newspaper job.
Instead of checking on family members whose neighborhoods were also flooded, instead of pitching in to help those who would eventually lose their homes, instead of finding a way to get to my house to survey the damage — I worked.
I didn’t know the state of my house until later in the day when a friend biked by and said she could see into the kitchen windows and it didn’t look like there was any water on the floor. When I did finally make it home, the main floor of the house was undamaged, but I opened the basement door and saw nothing but floodwater. Water had risen to the top of the stairs, which were now unmoored and floating, a water softener bobbing along in the background.
I closed the basement door, packed a few things and left. There was more work to do.
While my brother pumped water out of the basement, I worked. The gas to the neighborhood was shut off for weeks, so I had no hot water. I showered at friends’ houses or the gym. And I worked. It was a hot summer, but I had no air conditioning because most of my home’s HVAC components, which were in the basement, were now scrap. So I went to work.
My life was disrupted by an uncontrollable force — later classified as a 100-year flood — and instead of acknowledging my personal stress, my fear, my grief, I poured myself into my job. It’s a little too on the nose, isn’t it? But that’s how burnout can feel: unmanageable stress creeping in until you are surrounded.
For compliance officers, a standard workday can seem like a flood, from new or changing regulations to lack of adequate resources to overwhelming workloads, and CCI’s 2025 survey has told us that many of them are highly stressed. More than 40% of the compliance officers we talked to experience “a lot of stress” or “extreme stress,” while only 7% say their jobs aren’t stressful. Extreme, unmanageable stress heads only in one direction: burnout.
“It seems like there’s a high level of burnout [within compliance professions] because the personality type that’s attracted to it [has a] high level of conscientiousness, high level of perfectionism,” burnout expert and author Jennifer Moss told me. “They’re supposed to be the last check mark on a lot of things, so they really feel pressured to always have to be perfect, and perfectionism is one of the personality traits that are very prone to burnout.”
***
I can remember the day I realized I’d stopped caring about that job. It was my day off, a Tuesday. Then, my days off were Tuesday and Saturday; I didn’t get two days off in a row without taking vacation time or calling out sick. I’d gone to a bar with a couple of old friends and I knew I wasn’t going to feel my best the next day, so I started working up a plan to call out. I chose food poisoning and emailed my boss from the bar to let her know my tummy was upset and I likely wouldn’t make it to work the next day.
That was the first time I played hooky in that job, but it wouldn’t be the last, as it just got easier and easier, the more my body realized it was perhaps my only way out.
In those days, I thought about work all the time. I ruminated over errors that got published and headlines I wished were better. I overanalyzed every conversation with my colleagues and those I supervised. I opted out of a personal life and became an absentee family member.
I worked myself into chronic insomnia, panic attacks and arrhythmia, and I would probably have worked myself into an early grave if I’d stayed.
The toll of such stress is measurable. CCI’s research shows that 60% of compliance officers report their jobs have a negative impact on their physical well-being, while just under half experience difficulties due to anxiety.
Even now, I have panic dreams that there’s only an hour left until our print deadline and I haven’t started laying out the front page. I haven’t worked there in more than a decade and have had several other jobs across multiple industries since then. I lost a parent. I got married. Many other things have happened since I left that job and yet its imprint seems indelible.
Would finding 10 minutes to meditate have kept me from getting burned out? Probably not, and that wasn’t my fault. The reality is burnout should not be on the worker to fix.
“It’s an ecosystem problem to solve,” Moss says. “It’s definitely not all on the individual, which is how we told people to solve it before. That’s slightly changing. The organization plays a massive role in how we end up burned out.”
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***
Of course it’s OK I took that fake sick day all those years ago; I was sick, after all, just not with food poisoning. I didn’t understand it then, but my body was telling me it needed connection with people outside of work, and it needed time to truly relax. Getting over the burnout I experienced in that job and others has meant paying closer attention to the signals my brain and body are giving me.
Compliance professionals need to do this, too. And they need to know the difference between a job that engages and excites them and one that turns them into a husk of themselves.
“The thing is that when you’re feeling good, you know it,” Moss says. “You’re still hanging out with your friends. You’re still eating dinner with your family. There’s still a life that you have, and you also are energized at work and you’re feeling really good about it.”
My nervous system still misfires sometimes. When I see a new email pop up, I assume it’s urgent and must be dealt with immediately. So I either drop everything I’m doing or get annoyed because I was interrupted.
And of course, work is still sometimes stressful. But when I’m feeling the mental and physical symptoms of stress, especially if they seem heightened, I take a moment to pause and notice them. I see the floodwaters now. And I won’t ever let them get so high there’s no way out.
Jennifer L. Gaskin is editorial director of Corporate Compliance Insights. A newsroom-forged journalist, she began her career in community newspapers. Her first assignment was covering a county council meeting where the main agenda item was whether the clerk's office needed a new printer (it did). Starting with her early days at small local papers, Jennifer has worked as a reporter, photographer, copy editor, page designer, manager and more. She joined the staff of Corporate Compliance Insights in 2021. 
