Royse City author tops Amazon with book on burnout, fatherhood

Royse City author Dennis Bairos turned a personal reckoning about overwork and fatherhood into a debut book that reached No. 1 on Amazon in the fatherhood category during its first week.

Bairos lives in Texas with his wife and three children and works as the regional vice president of operations at EōS Fitness. Amazon describes Wired Like This: Why Men Push Too Far and Still Say I Got It as the first book from a husband and father of three who has spent two decades leading large teams across industries.

The book is built around 27 short essays that examine the habits many men carry from the office into the home, including overcommitment, control, emotional avoidance and the reflex to say they have everything handled. The project grew out of a conversation with Bairos’s wife, who challenged him on the way he pushes himself too far and burns out. That personal origin gives the book a sharper edge than a generic self-help release.

The message is landing in a county that keeps growing. Rockwall County’s population rose from 107,819 in the 2020 Census to an estimated 140,738 by July 1, 2025, as more families moved into North Texas. In that setting, Bairos’s focus on stress, work and the pressure to appear unshakable fits the daily reality of many parents balancing long hours, home responsibilities and the expectation that men should keep pushing without asking for help.

Bairos has also been building an audience through Substack, where his Keep The Edge publication centers on fatherhood, work, burnout and the line between drive and damage. A May 3 post in the archive said the I got it instinct gets men promoted before it follows them home, a theme that runs through the new book and the conversations around it.

National data make that argument timely. The CDC says women were more likely than men to receive mental health treatment in the past year, and the National Institute of Mental Health says men are less likely than women to have received treatment. The American Psychological Association has also published guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men, underscoring how closely Bairos’s book tracks a broader cultural problem.

For Royse City and the rest of Rockwall County, Bairos’s rise is a local success story with a wider resonance: a father, executive and new author using a growing platform to talk plainly about pressure, burnout and the cost of always saying I got it.