Is It The Canary's Fault Or Is The Mine Toxic?

💭 Go deeper: We talk more about this in episode #285 of the Joy Lab Podcast

Are you doing too much? Feeling overworked, overwhelmed, or burned out? You're not alone. That's why we're talking about "doing enough" during our Element of Enoughness. Specifically, the gap between what we're naturally wired to do and what we believe we must do to prove our worth.

The truth is that we're already built to engage, connect, learn, produce, and build mastery. The problem is that we so often add more onto that with the belief that our doing has to be visible, relentless, and always expanding for it to count.

Perfectionism can play a role here. Unfortunately for us perfectionists, perfectionism doesn't predict better performance. What perfectionism does predict, however, is anxiety, depression, and burnout. 

There are lots of reasons why we might veer toward perfectionism. And we can work with those tendencies to create change. One pathway toward recovery from perfectionism comes from the burnout research.

Dr. Christina Maslach's six-factor burnout model includes work overload, lack of control, insufficient rewards, breakdown of community, absence of fairness, and value conflicts. Only one of those factors has to do with doing too much. Maslach notes that there's a canary in a coal mine situation here and there's good evidence that burnout can be a mine problem, not just a doing-too-much-perfectionistic bird problem. If you're part of an organization who breeds those other factors, no amount of bird-fixing will be sufficient. The mine is toxic. 

Our power comes in realizing whether we're responsible for doing too much and/or if the mine is toxic. With that information, we can create change. If we have little control and realize that the mine really is toxic, we still have strategies to ease some of the stress. For example, researchers Sonnentag and Fritz found that people who psychologically detached during off-hours reported significantly less exhaustion and more energy the next day. Their trick was to avoid mentally rehearsing tomorrow's problems when they're technically off the clock. There are many strategies to do this, and we talk about them in Joy Lab nearly every episode. The Experiment for this episode also provides a super helpful strategy. Access Experiments here.  

Remember, you're wired to do enough. And that's enough. When you want to push past your capacities, you can do that for a short period of time. But before you do that, be sure to ask yourself: "Is this mine toxic?" If so, fly very carefully. Or, fly out of that mine.  

Sources and Notes:

• Related Joy Lab Episodes:
  

  • Ep. 223: Breaking Free From Pathological Productivity

  •  Ep. 206: Time Poverty & Busyness: Too Busy to Be Well

  • Ep. 201: Balance Perfectionism & Do-Too-Muchism

• Bellam, S., Curran, T., Hill, A. P., & Stoeber, J. (2025). Perfectionism and work performance: A meta-analysis. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12570
• Freudenberger, H. J. (1974). Staff burn-out. Journal of Social Issues, 30(1), 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1974.tb00706.x 
• Harari, D., Swider, B. W., Bujold Steed, L., & Breidenthal, A. P. (2018). Is perfect good? A meta-analysis of perfectionism in the workplace. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000324
• Hewitt, P. L., & Flett, G. L. (1991). Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: Conceptualization, assessment, and association with psychopathology. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.3.456
• Maslach, C. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030020205  
• Sonnetag, S., & Fritz, C. (2014). Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1924