🗞️ The Wellness Briefing – Edition No. 08: “Overfunctioning Is Not a Flex” | August 19, 2025
Quick, high-impact wellness insights for ambitious professionals. Delivered Tuesdays.
Welcome Back to The Wellness Briefing
Burnout Culture Rewards the Wrong People
You’re the first to volunteer, the last to leave, and the one who always “gets it done.” On paper, it looks like leadership. In reality? It’s overfunctioning—an adaptive response to chaos that eventually collapses into exhaustion.
Organizations love overfunctioners until they burn out. The cost is high, but the reward? A thank-you email, maybe. Recovery starts with this truth: your ability to not do everything is the real leadership skill.
Let’s begin.
🧠1 Insight Worth Reading: “It’s Not You. Your Job is Responsible for Making You Feel Burnt Out”—This in depth Fast Company article addresses the burnout epidemic, what needs to change on an organizational level, most importantly culture shifts spearheaded by leaders committed to creating work environments that provide the conditions employees need to flourish and to perform at their best—without facing the risk of burning out. These are called burnout immunity cultures and this piece explores seven ways leaders can start building them.
Read on Fast Company
🔑 Deep Thoughts | Real Talk | Hard Truth:
“We overfunction when we do for others what they can do for themselves.”
đź“° 1 Study to Know: New research published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes reveals that managers consistently rate employees who unplug from work as more recharged and productive, yet still penalize these same workers when it comes to promotions and career advancement.
This “detachment paradox,” where leaders recognize the benefits of disconnection but punish those who practice it, creates a troubling contradiction. Read more about this study on Forbes
💡 What That Means for You: Being the go-to person feels good—until it erases your boundaries, credibility, or career clarity. If you’re in an organization where unplugging from work is punished, it’s important to find safe ways to ruthlessly, and quietly, audit your workload to make sure you’re not carrying what isn’t yours. High contribution ≠high sustainability.
✅ Try This: Do a “Responsibility Audit”:
What tasks did you take on without being asked?
Which of them could be delegated, delayed, or declined?
What are you protecting by overfunctioning—your role, your identity, or someone else’s comfort?
🎯 Pro Tip from the Guide: Overfunctioning is often a nervous system response to early chaos. You’re not broken—you’re wired for vigilance. Awareness is the first break in the loop.
The Approval Matrix: A judgmental grid for high-functioning exhaustion. What’s nourishing, what’s draining— and what’s quietly sabotaging your week.
When doing too much starts doing too much damage.
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See you next Tuesday.
– Michelle