You are chronically overworked at work. In a system where boundaries do not exist, where the quantity of work far outweighs the resources that support it, and you are forced to sacrifice quality to even be able to make a dent in TO-DO mountain, where do you draw the line?

Beyond being able to identify what is a manageable workload, could you even draw that line? Saying yes is a given, isn’t it? Plus, that’s contributed to your success. You wouldn’t be where you are today without going above and beyond at work. But you are feeling the stress. You find yourself searching “overwork exhaustion symptoms.” There aren’t words for your fatigue. It’s a tiredness in your bones, your soul. You know if something doesn’t change soon, something will give. You’ve been ignoring that feeling for awhile now, and you can feel the precipice getting closer. You are ready for a change, but you don’t know what to do. You feel trapped. You feel powerless.

The conflict

First, the tiredness in your bones and soul? That’s emotional burnout. I’d guess you are an overachiever and you care so much about contributing, giving back. Blood, sweat, tears, you’ve given them all. You’ve worked when you didn’t want to. You’ve worked when you were so tired couldn’t see straight. You’ve worked because you thought you should work. Work done well feels painful, right? Wait, no, that’s not quite it. But it’s true. The work you’ve been proud of required significant sacrifice. You gave up your energy, your time, your passions, your relaxation, some big life moments, and maybe your life outside of work in general. It’s good you are what you do because if you had to be more than that, you’d be 2D. Flat.

But now you’ve hit the edge of the cliff. You need work to give back to you the way you’ve given to it. You need to rest and heal to get your mojo back. You need to reconnect with your inspiration and strength and creativity. But work says NO. There are deadlines, standards, projects, funding gaps, revenue projections that won’t wait. If you can’t do it, there will be someone else who can. Someone else who says yes. Someone else who isn’t worn out and washed up. Flotsam on the shore.

This conflict – you unconditionally, selflessly loving work and work conditionally, selfishly loving only your effort and talent – has broken you open.

You feel trapped because you woke up – you are aware of the conflict – but are unwilling to do anything about it. You don’t know why you overwork yourself, but you are afraid to look too closely at it. Too much is at stake. At the heart of the conflict is the identity crisis this causes you.

The Identity Crisis

There are three ways this plays out:

1. You are what you do, so much so that you’ve let your life outside of work fall by the wayside.

   Passions you had lie dormant. People you used to spend time with would still recognize you…after a beat. You’d like to feel 3D again. BUT. Work gives your life a framework. You feel safe and comfortable in that matrix. It gives you focus and meaning. You are using your talents to produce and grow. You feel capable at work.

   The upheaval the conflict has created is breaking open that framework. You no longer feel so secure and capable because now that the workload is so staggering and your energy is flagging, you often come home feeling like a failure. In fact, you often wake up with this feeling.

   Dragging yourself into the office to tackle the mountain of work, you race through it at such a pace that you lose your connection to the bigger picture. The connecting thread slips out of your grasp as you put your head down and push through it.

   Which leaves you with a restless question that won’t stop plaguing you at inopportune moments: “Why bother?” But when you’ve let the work slice of the pizza of life take up so much space, facing the question of who you are if you take that portion fills you with anxiety because you’d be left with so little on your plate and you wouldn’t know what to put in the gap.

2. Your value comes from work­: your value is in doing.

   Being needed gives you a sense of belonging and meaning. Contributing helps define your role and secures your place in the world. If you aren’t contributing, if you aren’t needed, then what are you worth? But until now, there’s been no conflict. You give + you don’t have needs = you have value. Work is the source, the font, of your value.

   The conflict ends this because now it’s you who has the need. You’ve prioritized work over yourself, over your own wellness. Now that you have a need – to rest, to care for a sick family member, to develop professionally, to not lose your passions and inspiration, to feel capable again – work isn’t prioritizing your welfare. Which must indicate you aren’t as important as you thought you were. If you were important, critical, then work would prioritize your needs.

   And when you try to insist, to stand up for your needs, to prioritize yourself, work suggests if you are no longer able or willing to support the pattern of unconditional giving, you may be replaceable. Someone else will say yes, unconditionally. And with that, poof! work is no longer a dependable source of value. What keeps you stuck in a passive aggressive version of the pattern is that you don’t have another source of value – something you can DO to prove your value. And the inherent question of worth this has raised in your soul, makes you doubt that anyplace else will find you valuable.

3. You judge yourself harshly, not compassionately.

   You do this because you believe it helps you do the things you “should” do. Without punishment and criticism, what would make you try your best to do what you should do? Inherent in this mechanism is a belief that you are lazy and unproductive. Work protects you from yourself. It drives you. If you weren’t working, you aren’t sure you would know what to do. Work gives you focus. Work gives your life meaning. You are proud of what you are doing. If you had free time, you’d likely end up being lazy and unproductive. Work keeps you virtuous.

   But the conflict means that work is no longer a driver. It leaves you feeling unmotivated and sapped. You fear that without a driver, you will fall back into your lazy and unproductive ways. Your self-judgment and commitment to work protect you – keeping you moving forward even when you don’t want to. Because if it didn’t, you fear you wouldn’t do anything, which circles back to the problem of doing and value. Sure, there are things you could do, but you work A LOT. You don’t have enough passions and hobbies to fill the amount of time you work, which means you’d end up doing nothing…or nothing that counts. You’d become a waste of space. You can’t let yourself rest or be because your values lies in doing, not being. Your self-judgement keeps you enslaved to the doing. So, you wish for, but can’t commit to, change.

   You knew this already, but seeing it spelled out in black and white ties it together for you. But what do you do with this insight?

The self-worth solution

At the core of all three facets of your identity crisis sits self-worth. To find the wherewithal to stop abandoning yourself, always choosing work over yourself, to be able to set and hold boundaries that protect your well-being (and your ability to continue to contribute), you have to learn that your value is in being, not doing.

You feel you are only as valuable as what you contribute, you give, but that is false. And does you a grave disservice. Your self-worth is like a mountain. You are valuable because you exist. It’s solid and unchanging whether you can (or will) see it or not. So, release the judgment of yourself. Let go of the shoulds, the have-to’s, the musts. Everything in your life is a choice. You are where you are because of the choices you made in the face of what you encountered. Struggling to prove your value day after day, making decisions that don’t honor what you truly want, is a recipe for the life you are living, not the life you want.

It is possible to release judgment and see new possibilities for yourself; to understand that your value isn’t tied to what you do, which frees you to choose for yourself and to choose yourself. You can have the life you want, but you have to start living from a space that assumes your value. If you started with the belief that your value isn’t connected with your work, how would that impact the choices you make?

If you are interested in exploring your self-worth and want a partner to help you break free from the circular logic that’s keeping you stuck, schedule a free 30-minute call with me. What would you give to open yourself to a new way of being in a single conversation?

**

With gratitude to agnes-cecile (Silvia Pelissero) for her incredible talent and art. Find more here: https://agnescecile.com/