Bianca Errigo on Is Your Work Ethic Actually Destroying Your Health?

Our CEO Johnny Isaacs sits down with Bianca Errigo, CEO and founder of HumanOS, for a very honest and wide-ranging conversation, one that every healthcare leader, founder and high performer needs to hear.

At our creative agency in London, we work at the intersection of design, healthcare and human behaviour every day. We see firsthand how stress, burnout, and hustle culture can quietly creep up on the people and organisations we work with. That's why conversations like this one matter so much.

Bianca and Johnny trace the deep roots of hustle culture, from Protestant work ethics and the Industrial Revolution through to the always-on, high-performance culture we've normalised in modern healthcare and business. The statistics are stark: stress is at the root of 80–90% of human illness and disease. Burnout is hitting professionals at an average age of just 32. 150 million people across Europe are living with mental health challenges. And yet we still celebrate "the grind."

But this isn't just a conversation about the problem we face, it's about what leaders, organisations and individuals in healthcare and beyond can actually do differently. In this episode, we dig into the psychology behind high achievement, why most founders and top performers start from a place of trauma rather than love, what genuine resilience looks like in practice and why detaching your self-worth from your results may be the single most important skill any high performer can develop.

Bianca also speaks candidly about what it means to navigate a male-dominated investment world as a female founder, being part of the 2% of women who raised VC funding in 2023 and the very real mental health toll the first two years of building HumanOS took on her personally.

The conversation also tackles the bigger picture, AI and automation fuelling workplace anxiety, employee engagement sitting at just 10% in the UK, the growing leadership gap and why the healthcare and business sectors urgently need to rethink how they invest in their people.

Honest and packed with insights, this is a crucial conversation that everyone who is invested in their health, wellbeing and achievements needs to hear.