“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”―Bertrand Russell
Most high performers read it, nod, and go back to treating their work as terribly important. Sometimes, the harder they try, the worse it gets. Not always. But more often than you think, and through a mechanism many people never see.
One way to make work feel less like a burden on your life, and your relationships with colleagues less like a source of threat, is simply to take it a little less seriously. Paradoxically, this often leads to fewer mistakes and better decisions, which improves both your work and your life.
When we take work too seriously
1. This creates tension.
We start to feel that we cannot fail. Failure becomes a threat, and threats trigger a fight-or-flight response, with cortisol and adrenaline rising.
That has another consequence. Physiologically, the brain shifts between fight-or-flight mode (sympathetic activation) and rest-and-digest mode (parasympathetic activation). The first supports narrow focus and quick reaction. The second supports broader attention, clearer reasoning, and more creative thinking.
If everything feels terribly important all the time, we never give the brain space to think broadly or consider a problem from multiple angles. The quality of our reasoning and decision-making suffers. Instead of focusing fully on the task, we start watching ourselves perform. That creates a self-monitoring loop.
2. Ego involvement.
We begin to tie the work to our identity. It is no longer just something we do; it becomes something we are. “If I fail, I am a failure.”
We start taking everything personally, including criticism of an ordinary moment of work. We are no longer listening to ideas with an open mind; we are protecting our ego. Any “this piece of work has a flaw” turns into “I have a flaw.”
It is no surprise that our colleagues do not enjoy this. Neither do we, but we are usually too entangled in it to see the real reason.
3. Chronic stress.
The fight-or-flight response was biologically designed to be short-term. If a predator appears, we run. When the threat passes, we return to calm. But when work becomes “the predator,” and our self-worth is tied to outcomes, the threat never fully goes away. Sympathetic activation never fully switches off.
Over time, this can raise baseline anxiety, shift our resting state toward vigilance, and make recovery more difficult. The worst part is that it starts to feel normal, so the decline often goes unnoticed.
Naturally, this can also lead to sleep problems and broader health issues that compound.
For people who lead others, the cost is even higher. Not because they are responsible for other people’s seriousness, but because teams mirror their environment.
Why do we fall into this trap?
1. Because the trap is built from things that look like virtues on the surface.
We feel admirable for taking our job so seriously. We are often reinforced for caring so much, and suffering for work can seem noble. It often pays off at first, and by the time it starts hurting us, the pattern is already so deeply wired that we no longer understand why things are going wrong when we seem to be doing everything right.
2. Because identity fusion happens gradually and invisibly.
Nobody wakes up and decides “I will tie my self-worth to outcomes.” By the time it becomes a problem, it already feels like part of our personality.
If you put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out. If you put it in cold water and slowly heat it, it does not notice the danger and ends up being boiled alive.
3. Because ego involvement feels like motivation.
“I feel so productive!” But it takes real self-awareness to distinguish between actual productivity and friction. “Busy” does not equal “productive.”
We fall into this trap simply by adapting to early experiences and social signals. It worked once, so why would we assume it will not keep working? Nobody tells us there is a ceiling.
The question itself is a symptom.
If you are reading this, that is itself a symptom. And that is good news, because it means you are obviously not too late to make things better. Give your parasympathetic system some air.
Solution in two parts
The solution deserves a separate article, so here I will only outline it briefly.
Physiological part.
The body needs direct intervention to force parasympathetic activation. Physical exercise, breathing, and walking help. We need to make sure these things happen regularly. But at least this part is simple.
Identity part.
This part is slow and hard. It requires constant reflection.
These things help:
Building identity anchors outside our main work. This is where pet projects help a lot, because we are no longer tied to only one thing.
Investing in human relationships, in real ones, not deal ones. Once we are not only our work, but also friends, the threat work creates is no longer the only part of our identity.
Separating process identity from outcome identity. We are what we do and how we do it. “I am someone who does this, behaves this way, speaks this way.” We are not our results, because results depend on more than just us.
Deliberately practising a lower guard and more vulnerability. This includes learning to accept small criticism, speaking about our own failures, and pausing before the impulse to defend ourselves takes over. And no self-punishment.
Each time we practise these behaviours and the world does not collapse, we slowly but surely rewire the brain. We shift from caring about being seen as good to caring about the work actually being good.
Once again about the loop and about the next time
The loop:
take things more seriously -> perform worse than you would if you cared less -> gap between expectation and reality grows
Next time you feel exhausted, ask yourself: “Am I taking this too seriously?”
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