An overachiever’s guide to rest

Unbeknownst to many of my coworkers and many of my friends at the time, I went through a very intense period of burnout during a time of great professional success and growth. The source of burnout wasn’t actually work, but stemmed from something deep within my personal life. Without going into details, I was at an emotional rock bottom, exhausted beyond belief, barely able to keep going through the motions of work, martial arts, and home life.

Fast forward to today. Two years into a global pandemic, during which I’ve been mostly at home, I’m finding myself surrounded by people who are burnt out for one reason or another… but realizing that I was actually doing okay. I definitely was experiencing a fair amount of privilege (safe place to live! adequate food! cats! home gym! a piano! a library card!), but all things being equal, I didn’t seem to be as depleted as those around me from intense work situations, global events, and pandemic-caused isolation and anxiety.

I don’t see myself as any better or more capable than those who were experiencing burnout… but my experience with burnout previously, with the subsequent years of working toward healing, had equipped me with tools, perspectives, and philosophies that allowed me to weather the storm.

Beyond those who have incredible burdens placed upon them by life circumstance (parents of young children, people dealing with housing or food insecurity, those struggling with existing long-term health issues, and caretakers of the medically fragile, I see you), the people I see who are dealing with burnout are incredibly diverse from all outward appearances. But a fair number of them are familiar to me, because I count myself as one of them — overachievers.

Part 1: Overachievers are made

Some of us come by our overachieving ways through our schooling system: we’re rewarded for achieving, whether it be grades or sports or extracurricular activities. Some others come by it by internalizing family pressure (especially immigrant and POC families, which often place expectations — both spoken and unspoken — on the next generation to succeed, because parents and grandparents worked hard to give them opportunities they themselves never had). Even others see examples of success on various media sources (including social media), and internalize those goals for themselves. And others… well, they get the double- or triple-whammy of all of the above.

I was one of those kids: rewarded for doing well in school, immigrant parent pressure, and examples of success paraded in front of me. And these pervasive narratives influenced how I rationalized the world around me in subtle beliefs and behaviors that I had to dismantle during my recovery period.

One pop psych personality test, the SDI, had a statement I agreed with: your greatest strengths are also your greatest weaknesses. And so here are five statements about overachievers, why we might be more prone to burnout, and why it’s incredibly hard for us to simply rest.

#1 Oriented toward completion

“A job’s not done until the area is clean.” Maybe it’s statements like this, or maybe it’s how students are rewarded in school. But overachievers, by and large, are goal-oriented and, more importantly, have made it a practice to achieve those goals. It’s not done until the last I is dotted, the last T is crossed, no matter if it’s a massive construction project, the last little bit of knotted thread on a kid’s Halloween costume, or making sure that everything is pixel perfect before sharing it for review.

However, this also manifests itself in compensating for others who might not be as committed to a goal. One word that strikes a certain amount of fear and loathing in an overachiever’s heart is the phrase: group work. The overachiever is the one that takes the reins and makes sure everything is done, even if there are slackers in the group. Turning in something incomplete is anathema. Working twice as hard is preferable to getting a lesser grade or not meeting the goal.

Let me clarify: completing goals is not only important, it’s necessary to succeed in this world. The people who leave a string of half-finished projects behind them are the ones that don’t do as well. But, overachievers tend to add this goal-orientation to their core identity.

How does this manifest itself? If a job isn’t complete, there’s this itching feeling the overachiever gets. Rest feels like it’s going in the opposite direction of goal completion; in fact, it’s literally pulling time away from working toward the goal. If you haven’t achieved the goal, then what type of person are you? So the overachiever optimizes for investing more toward the goal over anything else, including rest.

#2 Oriented toward quality

“This is spectacular!” Overachievers have been praised for going above and beyond in many facets of their lives. Maybe it was the school project that showed a level of detail and insight that teachers and peers weren’t expecting. Maybe it was holding up the family as a teen during a time of stress or trauma. In professional life, it’s crafting a narrative so strong, it blows everything else out of the water. It’s designing something so compelling, everyone nods instead of surfacing core questions about the approach. It’s submitting code that is elegant, optimized, will scale, and is well-documented.

Again, performing to quality is a good thing. Doing quality work is central to a vibrant professional life; people know that your A-game is going to be amazing. But again, overachievers tend to add this quality-orientation to their core beliefs about themselves.

This means that doing substandard work in any part of their lives feels like a violation of core principles. Rest pulls away from the work involved with improving an experience, a gift, an artistic pursuit, athletic performance, the quality of the presentation, or the delivery of the narrative. It’s hard to justify rest when there’s just so much to be done to improve the quality of your work.

#3 Oriented toward quantity

“How do you do so much?!” Hearing such statements are gratifying, particularly when you’re feeling tired or exhausted. It starts when we’re young, as children who are in a whole set of extracurriculars, and then in high school trying to prove your leadership so that you’ll have a compelling application to a top-name university. Fast forward a decade, and you’ll find that these same overachievers are also in high-demand jobs, living high-impact lives, and sharing the latest productivity tips with one another while polishing the humblebrag about how busy they are.

Again, having the capacity to do a lot makes you incredibly valuable in the workplace and can bring a lot of personal joy at the variety of activities one participates in. At the same time, tech culture in particular has emphasized the necessity to optimize every single minute so as to check those things off the list. The “side hustle,” the “second shift,” learning new technologies in your off-hours — these who do these things are praised and rewarded with solid reputations and career growth. Again, overachievers tend to add the burdens of doing a lot of things to their core identities.

As a result, rest triggers a huge amount of guilt. If you’re not working toward something or spending your off-hours working on some kind of side hustle, what are you even doing? Are you doing something to improve your life, your home, your kids, your relationships, your health, or your hobbies? Again, these questions trigger a core fear that by resting, you’re violating a deeply held belief about how you show up and do life.

#4 Oriented toward reliability

“I know I can count on you.” Overachievers have been told, over and over again, that their ability to always deliver a lot, on time, and with quality, is a core part of their value to whatever context they currently are in. Furthermore, overachievers are typically very responsible people, and have come to understand that others trust them to hold up their end of an agreement.

Again, having consistency — whether it’s in delivering quality product, reliably showing up and being on time, or performing at a high level— is also a key to professional success. But it can also become integrated into an overachiever’s core identity, to the individual’s own harm.

Rest or saying no can feel like letting other people down. There’s a certain gratification in knowing that someone else relies on you, and taking any kind of time off seems like a violation of trust that someone else has placed in you.

#5 Oriented toward delayed gratification

Athletes and overachievers both have a superpower: they can ignore pain for a really long time. Whether you’re a marathon runner or a martial artist, you know how to continue to perform through pain, manage it, and continue to train through injury (hopefully, intelligently). And of course, there’s also the question of whether the Venn diagram between athletes and overachievers is just a circle.

The Stanford marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification linked the childhood ability to delay gratification to better outcomes in life on a number of different scales. And delayed gratification is, once again, a good thing — it means that you can manage the trade-offs between now and later, and see the value in waiting for a larger, later pay-off.

Overachievers can take it one step further though, by ignoring mental and physical signs of distress until much later in the burnout cycle. I’ll add that there’s also a cultural factor here, as many children aren’t taught to self-monitor or self-regulate. This means that by the time overachievers realize something’s wrong, it’s often well on the way to burnout, an ulcer, a heart attack, or worse. So many things can happen when someone isn’t equipped with the tools to recognize and address internal distress as it happens.

Part 2: How to approach rest as an overachiever

If you’ve seen yourself in any or all of the statements I mentioned above, rest feels like a violation of your core values because your identity is enmeshed with your output and behavior. And at the same time, we probably all know that rest is absolutely essential to long-term sustainability. In the past few years, we’ve added a vast amount of uncertainty with a global pandemic, an unexpected war, supply chain challenges, inflation, and overall decreased economic stability. All of these increase the pressure on each of us, many to the point of breaking.

With this dichotomy firmly in mind, how do we then avoid burnout, when by doing so, we feel like any steps in that direction manifest themselves in the heavy discomfort of cognitive dissonance?

The answer is easy to say, but hard to put into practice: reframe the problem, the approach, and the solution, in order to create new reference points and narratives. I’m hoping the following will equip you to grapple with the topic internally and drive conversations with those around you to hold the space for rest.

#1 Divest yourself of the belief that it all has to be done by you right now

Overachievers are hyper-responsible people who often put the onus of completion on themselves. As a result, we hold an unspoken belief (often due to poor experiences) that if something is on your plate, it has to be done by you, and it has to be done at quality, and it has to be done right now.

And no matter how much they intellectually know differently, overachievers sometimes optimistically believe that all that it’ll take is more time, as if work scales linearly. After all, doesn’t more time equate to more productivity?

Unfortunately, most people experience diminishing returns, where after a certain point in time, the amount of productivity per hour decreases rapidly. As a result, I’ve had to adjust my expectations of myself, and remind myself of the following tenets:

• It’s rarely worth it for me to work past the point of diminishing returns
• I have a fixed number of functional hours every day
• Certain things can be delayed without repercussion
• Certain things can be delegated without repercussion

Once this is firmly rooted, it leads to…

#2 Frame your conversations around priorities

In my first year of product management, I ran myself ragged trying to get everything done. My manager, who also happened to be a good mentor, sat down and informed me that it was literally impossible to get everything done every day, and that my job was to instead ruthlessly prioritize.

If you treat yourself as having fixed capacity, then anything new in the system — whether it’s additional scope, an unexpected wrinkle, or a dependency you’ve uncovered — should kick off a conversation that clearly communicates priorities and what will drop as a result.

Here’s an example: if my manager comes to me with new project “D,” I need to evaluate whether or not there’s enough buffer in my schedule to accommodate it. Otherwise, I need to set expectations as to the timing of Project D. Does it get put in the queue behind Projects A-C? Can we adjust expectations for projects A-D to accommodate the request in an acceptable timeline? Can I transfer any responsibilities to another (very capable) person on my team? Or will something need to drop in order to get Project D out the door?

I use this alignment tactic frequently to help my manager understand the trade-offs, empower her to make decisions about my focus, and to consider alternate scenarios she might not have otherwise. We can then problem-solve the capacity problem together and align on expectations on what Project D means to the other things on my plate. The times I’ve been through extreme stress have generally been due to misalignments in expectations, so I try to manage this as closely as possible.

#3 Change your internal yardstick

As someone who has always been goal-oriented, the shift from engineering to product management was a rough one when it came to internal expectations. A successful day as an engineer was different than success as a product manager, and I often ended days feeling like I’d failed.

There were a few things I had to adjust in my own definition of a good day. The following are questions that I ask myself to help me define whether or not I had a successful day:

• Did I make progress, no matter how small, toward my stated goals?
• Did I unblock someone who needed my specific, timely input?
• Was there a greater priority that pulled me away from delivering on my plans? Did I intentionally make the decision to participate, or was I just swept up in the momentum?
• Was I focused today?
• Was I faithful to my charter today?
• Was I intentional today in moving toward our team’s greater goals?

Reframing how I measured each day helped me to establish the value I was bringing to the table, even if it wasn’t exactly what I had planned. Sometimes, a crisis drops in your lap and needs you and only you, and you’re only able to move your initiatives a couple of steps forward that week. Sometimes, there’s something that ripples through the fabric of your community and needs extra care and concern. Sometimes, someone in your sphere of influence is hurting and just needs the extra support. That, too, is time well-spent.

The last change I had to make was the definition of “good enough.” As a perfectionist, it’s super easy to get trapped in making sure that everything is as good as possible. I’ve learned that you have to make a conscious choice on what needs to be delivered at high quality and what just needs to get done as fast as possible, potentially at lower quality. In order to do so, I had to learn to live with the discomfort of calling things “done” when it’s accomplished its task, no matter how ugly it might be.

#4 See rest as an investment in your future self

“I don’t know why past me purchased 12 lbs of Epsom salt at Costco, but current me thanks past me for her insight.” This was a post I made in early 2016 after a particularly brutal martial arts workout sent me looking for a restorative soak. In this case, a small investment in a previous trip to Costco had given me the ability to accommodate this recovery activity when I most needed it.

I began to look at rest not as simply collapsing when I was exhausted, but as a regular practice that was an investment in my future self. By creating and holding boundaries, I was in effect creating slack in the system so that I could handle the unexpected things that got thrown my way.

Dr. Richard Swenson has another word for it: margin. Defining and holding margin is a way to preemptively set boundaries to protect the reserves or buffer, so that you can handle anything unexpected that might happen. If you’re already running late and have fifteen things on your to-do list, the worst thing that could happen (and probably will, given Murphy’s Law), is to run out of gas, have a flat, or run into a particularly chatty neighbor. Margin helps to bring down the stress by accounting for these things ahead of time, and rest does the same by giving you the emotional capability to handle stress when it happens.

How does this manifest in my professional life? I very politely hold time boundaries and keep my own capacity in mind, and redirect everyone whose requests don’t fit into these boundaries. Of course, I have to be flexible, but for instance, I will say “no” to meetings that would have me working both ends of my day. Instead, I’ll do exactly what I do if I have two meetings at the same time: I’ll inform the organizer of the conflicting meeting of my inability to attend, and offer a few things I can do instead: listen to a recording, read and take action on notes, catch up offline with the organizer, or take the meeting at another time.

I will also preemptively schedule activities that I know will nurture and nourish my internal self. Not everything I do offline is particularly restful (hello, brainless scrolling on social media), so I prioritize activities that will be connecting or otherwise restorative. It could be an hour sitting on my couch drinking tea, petting a cat, and reading a magazine. I also have a category of things that are nourishing but exhausting, such as spending time with the young children in my life.

#5 Regularly monitor for and immediately tend to personal distress

“Stiff upper lip” was one of those phrases that resonated with me as a teen. As a second-generation Asian immigrant young woman, such practices were fairly common; you just learned to bear with whatever discomfort was thrown your way. As a result, I grew up not learning my own personal signals of distress.

Sure, some of it was just being young and energetic, but a big part of my inability to slow down was the compulsion to meet my internal, inflated expectations of what success looked like. And because I knew how to withstand a lot, I just kept on going… until I didn’t.

Now, I spend some time periodically checking in to see how I feel. I’m more in tune with how these various emotions feel in my body: jealousy, anger, disappointment, nervousness, anxiety, loneliness, being overwhelmed, helpless, drained, exhausted, or a litany of other emotions and sensations that help me understand that something is wrong.

I spend a lot of time journaling in order to discover what’s going on inside of me.

Some key signals of distress for me:

• Difficulty being emotionally generous
• Emotional exhaustion, even with physical rest
• Emotions that are more extreme than the situation probably warrants (mostly anger)
• Large personal inertia when trying to create
• Strong relational withdrawal symptoms

If I experience one or more of the symptoms above, it’s a signal that something is trending in the wrong direction and that I need to pay attention or suffer consequences in the future. As a result, I’ll try to address them through extra care and concern for my time boundaries and social commitments, and investing in immediate self-care. I’ve let myself sleep in, journaled, spent quiet time with my cats, read a book, connected with close friends, or have crafted an experience for myself that is truly restful, full of joy and intimacy and laughter. Sometimes, it’s taken weeks to “rest” myself back to a semblance of normalcy.

Lastly, I’ll mention here that as a society, things are not yet back to normal. In the past two years, we’ve undergone a series of corporate and individual traumas, some of which are still ongoing. This overhead decreases our capacity, but we overachievers intellectually seem to think that we should be able to continue trucking along at the same rate we were before.

If we can extend ourselves the grace to not perform all the time, and allow ourselves the rest to process and heal from trauma, we’ll be able to recover that capacity. But we shouldn’t expect that we all should continue to sustain a peak capacity that was set when we weren’t dealing with such drastic external stressors.

#6 Be gentle with your own imperfection and failure

Perfectionism often rears its ugly head in the hearts of overachievers. If you miss one goal, no matter how small, there’s a tiny, self-critical voice that tells you that you could have done better. Driven by that guilt or shame, you wake up the next morning, teeth gritted and heart set on doing better than you did before. And if you don’t do well on a second day, well, the cycle continues, but at a higher pitch. This downward spiral compounds upon itself, adding to any additional external pressures you might already be feeling.

Sometimes this results in emotional paralysis, almost as if a giant circuit breaker has tripped. Sometimes, the overhead will serve as a generalized friction on every activity in your life or a generalized anxiety that permeates every thought. Our own perfectionism becomes the primary driver of our exhaustion.

Instead, fellow overachievers, I encourage you to learn to forgive yourself, to hold space for yourself to be imperfect. To fail, sometimes epically. You’ll need to tell yourself that it’s okay, and that tomorrow is another day. Being gentle with yourself is the only way to soothe the guilt and shame of not meeting your own expectations. Comfort yourself when you’re disappointed.

It’s okay.

You will be okay.

Bonus: Communicate your expectations that others will prioritize their own well-being

The thread that kicked off this entire blog post was a call to leaders to protect overachievers in their lives. The tools I’ve provided are useful for overachievers to manage both their own expectations and the expectations held for them. But one thing that I haven’t yet covered are the expectations you hold for others due to your expectations of yourself.

Leaders, we often hold others to the same bar that we hold for ourselves. In this blog post, I’ve very clearly outlined the ways that our own expectations are overly optimistic and not entirely healthy. Temper your expectations and empower those who work for you to drive these alignment conversations. We have an opportunity here to feed into the sustainability of our industry, and thus lead to greater talent retention and employee satisfaction.

You’re able to set the atmosphere. We can make it happen.

Bonus: A special note to those who are truly under great stress

In the midst of this pandemic, certain people have been hit particularly hard. The one nearest and dearest to me are parents of very young children, particularly when every single support structure normally available to these parents were stripped away in one fell swoop. I also know single parents, single parents of medically fragile and special needs children, parents going through chemo, people unable to work due to a variety of medical reasons, and a whole constellation of other situations, each one more stressful than the last.

You are all living under stress that the rest of us can’t even imagine, and I don’t have a solution for you. It’s likely every perfectionistic temptation has been stripped away at this point in time. The only message I have for you is this: don’t let anyone else’s judgment or advice cloud the decisions you make out of a pragmatic view of your own energy and the needs of your family.

Ask for help. Take care of yourself. Take the nap while someone else watches your kids. Carve out tiny slivers of time for restful activities where you can. And most of all, seek professional help if necessary, because while all of us are struggling, there are many things you’ve had to deal with that can’t fall to the wayside or be deprioritized. I know I’m speaking from a privileged position, and I want to recognize that your situation is extremely challenging and just as valid.

I see you. Life is hard. Give yourself the grace to focus on survival. You don’t need to live an Instagram life or be a Pinterest parent to be sufficient.

If you’ve already reached the point of burnout, you might need to spend most of your time recovering. You might be able to do this while working, or you might need to take some significant time off. Even if you can’t, I encourage you to carve out margin in your life wherever you can: focus on the essentials and spend time nourishing your soul.

Investment in your healing is investing in yourself. It’s never wasted time or effort.

And remember, there’s nothing wrong with being an overachiever. The very traits that push you into burnout are also your superpowers. But instead of being enslaved to them, you can manage them, and in the process, build the sustainable life you so deeply desire.

• Checklist by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
• Pole vault by Frans Vledder on Unsplash
• Jar of coins by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
• Tea, flower, and poetry by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
• Journaling by Prophsee Journals on Unsplash

Elaine is a senior product manager at Adobe. You can find her on Twitter at @elainecchao. All statements in this essay are her own and do not reflect the opinions of her employer.

The essay above does not constitute medical or mental health advice. If you’re truly in crisis, please call your local emergency services or seek time with a mental health professional.