Feeling Like You’re Doing Too Much? Let’s Talk About Overfunctioning

Our Wake Up Call: Overfunctioning and Burnout

We were supposed to record a completely different episode. A few days before this conversation, we sat down to record after an already full day. We had the equipment set up, we were dressed and ready, and Jenna thought we might as well maximize the moment and record another episode. Paige hadn’t planned on recording, but she agreed. We both fell into a pattern we know well: if there’s an opportunity to get something done, we tend to push through and do it.

Except this time, we couldn’t. Jenna was tired and hungry after an already long day, and neither of us had the energy the conversation needed. We finally stopped trying. When we came back a few days later, we realized the failed recording had given us a much more honest topic: overfunctioning and burnout, and what happens when doing everything starts to become too much.

When Everything We’re Saying Yes to Is Something We Want

The complicated part is that we’re not filling our lives with things we hate. We both have businesses we care about and clients we genuinely want to serve well. We’re building Wake Up, Sunshine and learning how to manage everything that comes with a new podcast. We also have families and communities we want to show up for. Most of the things taking up our time are things we’ve actively chosen.

Paige recently became the booster club secretary for her kids’ swim team, even though her schedule was already full. Jenna has her law practice and teaches yoga on Saturdays. She’s also been helping with family responsibilities and recently ended up at the emergency vet after Charlie got hurt at the dog park. Thankfully, he’s totally fine. Life keeps adding things, and we’re both very good at finding a way to fit them in.

Paige described our pattern simply: we say yes to things we want without always checking our capacity first. Jenna feels it when a “juicy, sparkling” opportunity comes along. Her instinct is to figure out how to make it work. Paige does something similar when she sees a place where she can help.

That’s part of what makes overfunctioning and burnout interesting for us right now. We don’t necessarily want to do less because we dislike what we’re doing. We’re trying to notice the difference between a full life that energizes us and one that slowly drains us.

How Overfunctioning and Burnout Show Up for Us

We don’t always recognize that we’ve reached our limit while it’s happening. Usually, the evidence starts showing up around us first.

For Paige, one of the funniest signs is her houseplants. When she’s overwhelmed, she stops caring for them as closely. Her kids know the pattern well enough that when the plants start drooping, they’ll ask, “Mom, are you dying inside?” It’s funny, but they’re also picking up on something real. The plants sometimes reveal how Paige is doing before she says it out loud.

Paige also clenches her jaw and notices herself getting irritated more easily. Her office starts collecting the evidence of a busy work season too. Memory cards and hard drives pile up alongside gear from different jobs. Before we recorded this episode, it had gotten overwhelming enough that Paige told her mom, “I can’t answer your question. I’m gonna crash out.” Her mom came over and helped her clean the office, which immediately made the space feel lighter.

Jenna’s signs tend to show up in her relationships. She becomes more impatient with the people she loves and realizes she hasn’t been sleeping enough. She feels less present. Her creativity also starts disappearing.

For both of us, that’s when overfunctioning and burnout stop being abstract ideas about a busy schedule. We can feel the effects in how we show up with other people. We can see them in our work and in our ability to create. Eventually, our capacity makes itself known whether we’ve checked it or not.

Why Is It So Hard for Us to Stop Doing?

As we talked, we realized this isn’t only about having too much on our calendars. We both have deeper reasons for continuing to do long after we’re tired.

For Jenna, productivity connects closely to value. She talked about being an overfunctioner and how much of her identity has been built around accomplishing things. Working as an attorney has reinforced that relationship with time because her work has a billable rate. It becomes easy to look at an open hour and think about how to maximize it.

At one point, Jenna said it plainly: “Productivity makes me feel valuable.”

Paige recognized a different version of the same pattern. Acts of service are one of the main ways she shows love. If someone needs something and Paige knows how to help, her instinct is to step in. Being useful feels good because helping people matters deeply to her.

Neither of us sees those qualities as something we want to eliminate. Jenna likes being ambitious. Paige likes helping people. We’re noticing what happens when those parts of us operate without enough attention to how much energy we actually have available. That’s where overfunctioning and burnout can quietly take over.

If Nobody Was Impressed, Would We Still Do It?

Paige asked Jenna a question during this conversation that shifted the discussion: “If nobody was impressed by anything that you did, would you still do it?”

Jenna’s immediate answer was no, but after sitting with it, her answer became more nuanced. She knows that she cares about what people think of her. Belonging matters to her, and she could see how external validation sometimes influences the amount she tries to accomplish. However, there is still a personal, internal satisfaction in doing the things you know you need to get done.

Paige’s answer came from a different place. She doesn’t feel as motivated by whether someone finds her accomplishments impressive. She cares about how she made someone feel and whether what she did mattered to them. Her sense of contribution often comes from helping another person.

We ended up in an interesting place because our motivations aren’t exactly the same, but the behavior can look remarkably similar. Jenna can keep going because accomplishing something feels valuable. Paige can keep going because contributing feels meaningful. Either path can lead us to a calendar with very little room left in it.

Asking for Help When We’re Used to Doing It Ourselves

Asking for help has been another part of this conversation for both of us, although we’re in different places with it. Paige has worked on delegating for years. She used to believe that explaining something would take longer than simply doing it herself. Working with a team has challenged that instinct. Her coworkers will sometimes point out that a task may need to get done, but that doesn’t mean Paige needs to be the person doing it.

Jenna is thinking through something similar in her law practice. Since moving, she hasn’t had an assistant, so she handles administrative work herself. She likes knowing how everything works. At the same time, she’s beginning to question whether knowing how to do a task means she needs to keep doing it.

Outside work, asking for help has brought up something more personal for Jenna. She’s been exploring people pleasing in therapy and practicing expressing her needs more directly. For her, letting someone help can feel vulnerable because it requires stepping out of the role of the capable person who handles everything.

We’ve started to see that receiving help can mean more than taking something off our plates. Sometimes it means allowing another person to show up for us. For people who are accustomed to being the helpers, that can feel like a very different kind of intimacy.

Can We Optimize Our Way Out of Overfunctioning and Burnout?

During the conversation, Jenna brought up something she’d been seeing on social media called “nothing maxxing.” The premise she described was almost comically simple. People intentionally spend time doing nothing, without reaching for their phones or finding another form of entertainment.

That led us into a larger conversation about how difficult it can be to stop optimizing everything. We optimize our schedules and our work. Somehow, even the things we do to care for ourselves can become another project.

Paige remembered high school detention, where she once had to sit in a bare classroom with nothing to do. At the time, it felt unbearable. Now she intentionally creates small periods of silence. She’ll go for a walk without her phone or drive without music. She sometimes paddleboards without listening to anything because she likes having room for her own thoughts.

Jenna meditates, but she has noticed that meditation can become another form of productivity for her. She can turn it into “working on herself” instead of simply sitting. That realization made us laugh because apparently we’re capable of optimizing our attempts to stop optimizing.

It’s also part of what we’re learning about overfunctioning and burnout. Rest doesn’t necessarily feel restorative when we approach it like another task to complete. Sometimes the hard part for us is allowing an experience to exist without needing it to produce anything.

When Being Present Happens Without Trying

Interestingly, some of our most present moments happen when we’re not trying to create them.

For Jenna, that often happens with Charlie or her nieces. Charlie will look at her a certain way, and she’ll stop whatever she’s doing to play with him. When she’s with her nieces, she can arrive with other things on her mind and then get pulled completely into their world.

Paige recently experienced the same thing with a client’s toddler. She sat on the floor with her for about 20 minutes, playing with blocks and repeating colors and shapes. At first, part of Paige’s brain wondered how long she should sit there. Eventually, she realized how relaxing it felt to give the little girl her full attention.

Those experiences gave us a different way to think about presence. We can work very hard to create the perfect conditions for rest, but sometimes it happens in ordinary moments. We’re simply absorbed enough in what’s in front of us that everything else gets quiet for a while.

What Being Too Busy Takes Away From Us

One of the clearest things Paige loses when she’s overloaded is creativity. Her work requires her to create for clients all day, and sometimes she reaches the end with nothing left for herself. That’s when she’ll message Jenna because she can’t think of another title or piece of copy. Her creative energy has already gone somewhere else.

Paige also knows the opposite feeling. When she shuts out the noise and starts creating for herself, ideas begin to come again. Too much input can make it harder for her to hear her own thoughts.

Jenna experiences something similar when she’s trying to solve a problem. Often, her best ideas arrive after she stops actively searching for the answer. Space gives her brain room to make connections she couldn’t force.

We also realized that busyness can take away our perspective. When we’re constantly moving, we don’t have much room to ask whether something still works for us. Vacations and retreats can change the way we see our lives because we temporarily step outside our routines. Wake Up, Sunshine itself came from one of those moments. The idea surfaced while we were away together at a retreat, far enough from our normal obligations to imagine something different.

Rethinking Balance Instead of Trying to Perfect It

We eventually started questioning what “balance” means for us at all. Neither of us experiences life as a perfectly divided day where every important part gets equal attention. Some weeks require more work. Some seasons ask more from our families. Our energy also isn’t identical from one day to the next.

Jenna has been thinking about balance across a week or even a month rather than expecting every day to look balanced. On a lower-energy day, she may need to focus on what actually has to happen and let something else wait. That became especially obvious on the day of our failed recording. She was on her period, hadn’t eaten enough, and still expected herself to produce as though none of those things mattered.

Paige has her own experiments with making room. She sometimes gives herself what she jokingly calls an “F*** Off Friday.” If she has space and a friend asks her to breakfast, she might abandon the planned schedule. She also loves a slow Saturday morning when she can wake up without an alarm and pick up sourdough.

We don’t have a formula for balance, and we’re not trying to create one. We’re noticing that overfunctioning and burnout become much more likely when we expect ourselves to operate at the same level every day. Our actual lives don’t work that way

What Overfunctioning and Burnout Are Teaching Us About Rest

Toward the end of the episode, we each chose something that could create a little more room in the coming week.

For Jenna, that meant giving herself some grace about the state of her house. The Amazon returns could sit there a little longer. The laundry didn’t need to become an emergency. She also wanted to put her phone away after 9 p.m. and spend part of Sunday outside with Charlie instead of automatically using the day to catch up with work.

Paige had deadlines she couldn’t move, so doing less work wasn’t realistic that week. Instead, she decided to protect a few hours for something that restores her. She wanted to drive 45 minutes to a plant store she loves and let herself wander without turning the trip into an efficiency calculation.

Paige described it as being okay with a three-hour block that wasn’t productive but was “really good for my soul.” That idea stayed with both of us because it gets at the tension we’ve been living in. We genuinely love a lot of what fills our lives. We’re also learning that loving something doesn’t automatically give us unlimited capacity for it.

That’s what this experience with overfunctioning and burnout has been showing us. We aren’t trying to become people who never work hard or take on something ambitious. We’re noticing what happens when our desire to do it all leaves no room to hear ourselves anymore.

Our Rays of Sunshine This Week

We’re starting something new at the end of these conversations: sharing a ray of sunshine from each of our lives. Paige’s is her trip to the plant store. She loves being around plants, and she’s giving herself permission to spend the time getting there without deciding that a 45-minute drive makes the whole thing inefficient.

Jenna’s ray of sunshine is her Wednesday running group. The group has existed in her community for about 30 years, and anywhere from around 20 to 50 people usually show up. Even when she’s busy and doesn’t feel like going, she never regrets it once she’s there. Being outside with other people consistently gives something back to her.

Paige had a similar realization after returning to a women’s connection group she’d skipped for several months because she was too busy. Going back made her happy enough to wonder why something that filled her up had become so easy to cut.

We’re starting to notice that distinction more clearly. Two things can take the same amount of time without having the same effect on us. Right now, we’re paying more attention to the parts of our lives that make us feel more like ourselves when they’re over.

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Related Episode: If your enjoyed this episode, check out Energy Healing and Meditation: Learning to Listen with Melissa Seil-Butler, where we talked about meditation and making space to listen inward.