Have you normalized your Exhaustion?

As seen in Business Insider

Business Insider published a piece recently with a seductive argument: working on Sundays can feel like liberation. Schedule your own hours, reclaim your week, make the 9 to 5 work for you. The people interviewed sounded thoughtful and in control. I have a problem with that.

We have become so good at rebranding exhaustion that we can no longer tell the difference between choice and compulsion.

The article doesn’t just describe a trend, it actively co-creates one. And the trend is this: we have become so good at rebranding exhaustion that we can no longer tell the difference between a choice and a compulsion.

The article introduces Joey Sanford, a startup exec who works Saturday nights, Sunday nights, early mornings and late nights so he can fully log off on Friday at sundown. The article frames this as wisdom. Soft boundaries enabling hard boundaries. Smart, right?

But look at what he actually built: he filled every available gap so one gap could stay empty. The performance equation doesn’t care what day you put in the hours. It just needs the hours.

Normalization doesn’t arrive as a billboard that says work yourself to death. It arrives as a thoughtful piece in a respected publication that says: actually, it can be freeing. The people are articulate, the data is real and a clear conclusion slides in: this is just how top performers operate now.

I saw this up close in sales. Someone casually mentioned they were working weekends because another team they collaborated with was also working weekends. Nobody decided that, it just became the rule.

Someone else said their biggest goal for the year was to not work weekends. Not a promotion or a new skill. Just “please give me Saturdays back.” Others said “I’m working until 10pm but it’s fine, it’s just right now, this week, this month, this quarter.” Every quarter. For years. And the managers wore it like a badge: “You can’t do what I do in 40 hours a week.”

That’s dysregulation dressed up as leadership.

Did she actually go to yoga?

The article’s opening example is Sam Hindman, a freelance writer who works Sundays so she can justify a Tuesday workout class or a long Thursday lunch. Working Sundays feels like liberation, she says. She’s contributing to her future rest.

Here’s the question the article never asks or answers: did she actually go to yoga?

A nervous system in survival mode doesn’t clock out for a workout. It goes to yoga and writes a to-do list in its head. It takes the long Thursday lunch and spends it mentally rehearsing tomorrow’s meeting. The body is at the table. Everything else is already back at the desk.

This is what dysregulation looks like. Not a breakdown, not a dramatic collapse, but a quiet scrambling of your body’s signals until you can no longer tell the difference between rest and recovery.

The headaches you stopped noticing. The shoulders up to your ears that someone else has to point out. The numbness you’ve started calling tiredness. The irritability you blame on traffic, on your partner, on the news. I wrote about what this looks like at a physiological level here.

The goal isn’t about quantity of work, but to understand from which space the work comes from

One of the people interviewed says she can’t turn the creative part of her brain off. She gets ideas on a run, jots them down on weekends, preps for the week on Sunday evenings. The article treats this as a personality trait. A passion marker.

She’s right that creativity doesn’t follow a schedule. What’s also true: neither does a nervous system running on high alert. You cannot selectively turn off the parts of your brain that keep working and keep the parts that bring ease, joy and actual rest switched on. It’s the same system.

When the line between passionate and compulsive has been blurred for long enough, you genuinely cannot tell the difference. And the culture around you (this article, the interviews, the colleagues working weekends) will keep confirming that what you feel is normal.

It’s about knowing what you actually want versus what you trained yourself to want.

I almost never worked weekends.

For most of my 12 years in B2B sales, I kept my weekends clean. I was protecting my boundaries. Doing it right.

What I was actually doing was dissociating so completely that weekends were a different life. A separate self. Two days of being someone who didn’t have to perform. And then Sunday evening arrived and I would feel it - the bracing. The internal tightening before Monday morning.

Is the rift between those two lives supposed to be that dramatic?

I don’t think it is. I think what I was experiencing and what many of the people in that article are experiencing, is high-functioning normalized exhaustion.

It looks like performing, delivering, being impressive on paper. But running on a nervous system that learned a long time ago that performance equals safety and validations and has never been told it can stop.

Normalized exhaustion looks like your best self doing more, saying they’re fine. Until the body stops cooperating (the headaches, the numbness, the exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix) and even then, many people reintegrate quickly and get back on the wheel. Because nobody showed them there was a different way to Be.

Is the life you’ve been optimizing for actually yours?

Before you close this tab

I’m not going to tell you to work less or set better boundaries or take a digital detox. That’s not the problem. The problem is what’s running underneath, the part that makes rest feel dangerous, that turns a Tuesday yoga class into a negotiation, that measures your worth by what you produce.

I help top performers who feel exhausted stop identifying with their performance. That work doesn’t start with goals or strategies. It starts with noticing.

So before you close this tab, ask yourself:

When did you last feel genuinely rested? Not just not working, but actually at ease?

When you imagine a week with no pressure to prove anything, what arrives first: relief or panic?

The life you’re working this hard to protect, whose version of it is it?

Now feel it in your body:

Think back to a time (not long ago) when thinking about your work brought something good. Excitement before a meeting. Pride after a project landed. The satisfaction of doing something you were genuinely good at and knowing it. Excitement on Sunday!

Can you find that feeling in your body? Where did it live?

Now think about this Monday morning. Same body. What’s there now?

If something shifted between those two moments, that shift has a name. It’s called normalized exhaustion. And you’re doing it because the system that was supposed to keep you safe never learned that it could.

That’s exactly what I work on. If something is sitting with you right now, let’s talk.