A few years ago, I was standing at the Air Canada check-in counter at Pearson Airport, trying to figure out what I could possibly take out of my suitcase. I was heading to Mexico for Christmas, something my family had done pretty much every year since 2006, and my suitcase was overweight. I’d packed Christmas presents for my niece and nephew and because my mom lived in Mexico 6 months of the year, I was also bringing down a few things she just couldn’t easily get down there.
The Air Canada employee reasonably suggested I move some of my items from my suitcase into my carry-on, but there was a minor problem: my carry-on was already completely full. I had:
my personal laptop
my work laptop
both power cables
my work iPad
my work phone
my personal cell phone
There was quite literally nowhere for anything else to go.
And I remember standing there thinking, “Why did I even bring my work laptop?!?!?”
I’d probably only open it a couple of times while I was away, but maybe not even at all. Yet there I was, paying to bring things to Mexico in an overweight suitcase because my carry-on was full of work stuff I didn’t actually need. UGH.
The funny thing is, I wouldn’t have considered myself someone who “worked” through her vacations. I wasn’t taking Teams calls from the beach. I wasn’t disappearing into my hotel room for hours on end to work. I just checked my email in the morning while I drank my coffee. Mayyyyyyybe I’d respond to something quickly or I’d forward something to someone if they needed it. I was just making sure I wasn’t missing anything important. 30 minutes tops.
What was the harm?
At least that’s what I told myself.
I thought staying connected made vacations easier.
For most of my career, I barely took vacation. I’d have at least 3 weeks of PTO sitting in Workday unused at the end of the year and then I’d tack it on to the company shutdown at Christmas. I would head down to Mexico for as long as I possibly could, but completely disconnecting from work made me super anxious.
What if I missed something?
What if an opportunity came up?
What if someone needed something from me?
What if I came back to so much work that I immediately regretted taking time off?
Checking email made me feel like I had some control, and especially early on in my career, I think I believed it said something good about me…
that I was diligent, committed, dependable, the kind of employee who stayed on top of things, and, most of all, a go-getter!
Except, now looking back, I realize there is something fundamentally flawed in my reasoning. Nobody was asking me to do this. My companies gave me vacation time. We had a holiday shutdown. Nobody expected me to be in Mexico monitoring my inbox. That was an expectation that I had completely created for myself, and I think that’s part of what we miss when we talk about burnout.
Burnout is a systemic workplace issue, but it can also be an employee issue.
I don’t want to turn this into an argument that burnout is all in your head, because it is well known (and documented) that the structure of a workplace is the main driver of employee burnout.
Sometimes you’re exhausted because you’re doing too much. Your workload is unreasonable, your calendar is relentless, you haven’t given yourself meaningful time off in months, you are just carrying too much at work and too much at home and you genuinely need to do less.
But then there’s the other kind of workload that I don’t think we talk about nearly as much.
Because what happens when you reduce everything you’re doing and your brain keeps reminding you about everything you should be doing?
You take the Saturday off, but you spend the day thinking:
I should work out.
I should clean the house.
I should answer that message.
I should get ahead for the next week.
I should finally deal with that thing I’ve been putting off.
I shouldn’t waste the whole day.
Or, you take the vacation, you actually close your laptop and yet you’re lying by the pool spending half the afternoon wondering what’s happening in your inbox.
Technically, you’ve reduce the workload, so why don’t you feel rested???
I think it’s because most of us are carrying two workloads.
Workload #1: What you’re actually doing
This is the obvious one:
meetings
presentations
deadlines
projects
managing people
emails
housework
family responsibilities
appointments
exercise
life admin
These are all of the things that genuinely require your time and energy. Sometimes this list is simply too long, and when that’s true, there’s no amount of reframing that’s going to create more hours in your day. Something in that workload actually has to change and the burnout relief comes from literally doing less.
But then there’s the second workload…
Workload #2: What you’re mentally demanding of yourself
This encompasses everything you think you should be doing:
I should respond faster.
I should be more prepared.
I should take more initiative.
I should be doing more for my team.
I should be further ahead.
I should be more organized.
I should exercise more.
I should use my time better.
I shouldn’t need this must-rest.
I should be able to handle this.
Now, on their own, none of these sounds particularly exhausting, and that’s the crrux of the problem:
Being prepared sounds responsible.
Being helpful sounds generous.
Taking initiative sounds ambitious.
Doing excellent work sounds like doing excellent work.
But when you put 50 or 60 of these expectations together, suddenly you’re looking at an impossible standard you’ve unconsciously been trying to meet every single day on top of your actual workload.
And here’s the thing, a task doesn’t have to be on your calendar or To Do list to exhaust you. You can:
Take something off your calendar and continue carrying it around in your head.
Decline the event and spend 3 hours feeling guilty about doing so.
Decide not to work on Sunday and spend Sunday worrying about everything waiting for you on Monday.
Take a vacation and spend the vacation making sure work doesn’t notice you’re gone.
The behavior stopped, but the pressure didn’t.
This is what’s particularly sneaky for high-achievers.
My guess is, a lot of these expectations probably helped you become successful. Amiright?
You were rewarded for going above and beyond. People praised you for being dependable. Your boss knew she could give you something, and you would get it done. You were prepared, responsible, responsive, helpful, and proactive. Your work was excellent.
Eventually, these things can stop feeling like choices and start feeling like requirements for just being a good employee.
When someone tells you to just do less, it isn’t always as simple as deleting three things from your calendar. You may also have to question some of the rules you’ve built around what it means to be good at what you do, and that’s the part that’s uncomfortable.
You might intellectually know that you deserve rest, but when you try to rest, all you can think is:
I’m being lazy
I’m wasting time
I’m falling behind
I should be doing something useful
And my personal favorite: “I should be better at resting”
Now you’ve somehow managed to turn rest into another thing you’re not doing well enough!?!?!
Try this: The Role vs. Pressure Audit
If any of this sounds familiar, I’m going to go against the grain and tell you the place to start is not by optimizing your calendar.
Where I want you to start is to figure out what you’re actually carrying.
Take out a blank page and answer this question:
What are all the things I think I should be doing at work?
I mean all of them. Don’t filter the list based on whether you’re actually doing it, or if someone asked you to, or if it’s reasonable, or if you’re good at it, or if you have time for it, or if it’s genuinely required.
The point of this exercise is not to decide what stays or what goes yet. We’re making the invisible workload visible.
To get you started, maybe your list includes:
I should respond to messages quickly.
I should reach out to colleagues more.
I should speak up more in meetings.
I should volunteer for more projects.
I should take more initiative.
I should arrive early.
I should stay late when everyone else is working.
I shouldn’t take a full lunch.
I should be available when my boss needs me.
I should make sure my team is okay.
I should anticipate problems before they happen.
I shouldn’t need help.
I should always be prepared.
Keep going, and then look at what you’ve written and start separating it into two categories.
ROLE
What does your job actually require?
What are you employed to do?
What are your real responsibilities, deliverables and explicit expectations?
And then:
PRESSURE
What have you decided you also need to do in order to be excellent at your job?
This should be a very different list.
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying everything in the second category is bad. Maybe you genuinely want to do some of those things. Maybe some help you progress. Maybe some reflect the kind of leader or colleague you consciously choose to be.
The point isn’t to cross out every expectation you’ve created for yourself.
The point is to stop treating every expectation as an unquestionable obligation.
Because you can’t meaningfully reduce your workload until you can see the full workload you’re carrying. If you get halfway through this exercise and you think THIS IS EXHAUSTING, pay attention to that. The exhaustion is data.
My hope is, through doing this exercise, that your realization isn’t simply “I have too much to do” but that it’s “I’ve turned far more things into obligations than my job actually requires.”
Eventually, I stopped packing the laptop
In full transparency, there wasn’t one dramatic moment where I suddenly developed perfect boundaries and never thought about work on vacation again. Far from it.
It happened gradually.
After that specific trip to Mexico, I stopped bringing my work laptop, but I still brought my work phone and my work iPad. That felt safer.
Eventually, the work laptop stayed at home too and then I got to the point where I could go on vacation, completely disconnect, come home, and still not turn on my laptop or my work phone right away.
I would turn them on the morning I was ACTUALLY back at work.
Not the night before, so I could get ahead, not to just quickly see what I’d missed when I was back at work. So yes, there were still emails waiting, there was still work to do, and people still needed things while I was gone.
But what I was slowly showing my brain was that while I was off, nothing catastrophic happened. Other people handled things, and whatever was waiting for me could wait until I was being paid to deal with it again.
The biggest change for me wasn’t that I learned how to take a better vacation. It was that I stopped believing that being a good employee required me to remain mentally and emotionally available to work even when I wasn’t working.
Maybe you do need a vacation. (Honestly, if you’re anything like my clients, you probably do!)
If you close your laptop and your mind immediately starts cycling through everything you should be doing, everything you’re behind on, everything you could be doing better, everything you could be optimizing and everything a successful person like you is supposed to be able to handle, time off can only solve part of the problem.
Burnout isn’t only about what you’re doing; it’s also about everything you’re mentally carrying.
Before you spend your next vacation trying to become better at relaxing, I want you to ask yourself one question:
Which part of my workload belongs to my role and which parts are coming from rules I’ve created about what it means to be excellent at my role?
You might be surprised by how much you’ve been carrying, and unlike my work laptop, you don’t have to pack all of it.
Want help figuring out what’s actually going on?
If you know you’re burned out but slowing down somehow feels just as uncomfortable as pushing through, there’s probably more going on than having too much on your plate.
I work 1:1 with high-achieving mid-career women to figure out what’s making work feel so heavy, which patterns are keeping them stuck there and what needs to change so they can make a life, not just a living.
both😭