When Distress Is Information

BurnoutNervous SystemDiscernmentWorkplace Culture

Oct 5

Sometimes distress tells us about our history. Sometimes it tells us about where we are.

I read two pieces recently that I didn't expect to have anything to do with each other.

The first was Elise Dyer's article on why emotionally intelligent people often struggle most in toxic workplaces. Her argument is that the people most attuned to what's going on around them are often the first to feel it when a culture goes bad. They pick up on the change in tone and the things nobody is saying. They usually try to fix what's wrong, and in the end they're the ones who get worn down.

The second was David Robinson's essay in The Atlantic about why he left OpenAI. He spent three and a half years on the company's safety team, and part of his job was writing about what could go wrong with each new model. He describes a culture where the confidence and speed that made the company successful started working against the care the technology needs.

One is about workplace wellbeing and the other is about AI. But I finished both with the same question on my mind: what happens when we read someone's distress as information about them, when it might also be information about where they are?

Where we look for the problem

When someone is struggling, the instinct is to look at the person. If they're anxious, we work on the anxiety. If they're overwhelmed, we teach stress management. If they burn out, we talk about rest and boundaries, and if they leave a job, the organization posts the role and moves on.

None of that is wrong. But every one of those responses starts from the same assumption, which is that the problem lives inside the person.

Sometimes the response has more to do with what we carry into the situation, and that's important work. We bring our histories with us. A nervous system can react to something happening today as if an old threat has come back, and we can repeat old relational patterns long after the people and circumstances around us have changed.

But sometimes the environment really is asking too much. The workload can't be sustained, or the culture punishes people for saying what they see.

Distress isn't always a sign that someone is failing to adapt. Sometimes it's telling us something about what they're being asked to adapt to.

A signal doesn't come with its meaning

I've written before about the gap between a signal and our response to it. Something happens: a change in someone's voice, a message on a screen, a tightness in the chest, a sudden urge to leave or go quiet or smooth things over. We feel it right away, but it doesn't arrive with an explanation. We put the meaning together ourselves, out of what's happening now, what's happened before, and what our nervous system has learned to treat as dangerous.

Distress works the same way. Anxiety, exhaustion, anger and withdrawal are all signals. So is burnout, and so, at the level of an organization, is turnover. The hard part is working out what they're pointing to.

There are two ways to get this wrong. If I assume every uncomfortable feeling means my surroundings aren't safe, I can mistake an old protective pattern for a present danger. If I assume every uncomfortable feeling starts in me, I can spend years getting better and better at tolerating something that's actually hurting me.

When functioning hides the cost

This gets harder to see in people who are good at adapting. The capable employee keeps hitting deadlines. The attuned person reads the room and adjusts. The person who learned early to be useful picks up whatever others drop, and the person who cares about relationships tries one more conversation, one more repair.

From the outside, that looks like resilience, and sometimes it is. But functioning doesn't tell you what the functioning costs. When I wrote about burnout, I said that collapse is often the moment people finally decide someone's distress was real. Until then, the fact that they keep performing gets taken as proof that things must be manageable.

Highly adaptive people can compensate for a long time. They work harder, anticipate more, and regulate themselves around environments that aren't doing any regulating of their own. That skill can make it harder for everyone, including them, to see that something isn't working.

The people who notice first

This is where the two pieces met for me. Dyer describes emotionally intelligent people as unusually tuned in to the relational environment. They notice the gap between what's said and what's meant, and the undercurrents other people miss. Robinson was in a very different position, but his role was also built around noticing. He helped write OpenAI's Preparedness Framework and oversaw the safety reports for twelve major launches.

The settings are different and the stakes are very different, but the question underneath is the same. What happens to a culture when the people most likely to spot a problem stop speaking up, or leave?

We usually treat a departure as a personal event. They weren't the right fit, they wanted something else, they couldn't keep up with the pace. Maybe so.

The people best placed to notice that something is wrong are also part of how a culture sees itself. They're its early-warning system, and losing them is information.

I think about it the way an engineer would think about a sensor. Maybe that's because I spent years working in engineering and technology before becoming a therapist. Taking a sensor out doesn't make a system more stable. It just makes the system worse at detecting when it isn't. I've seen how easily the person raising a concern can become the concern. When that happens often enough, some people go quiet, some adapt, and some leave. The place may even feel calmer afterward. That calm doesn't mean the problem was solved. It may only mean the system has lost one of the ways it had of seeing itself.

Robinson ends his essay on a thought I keep coming back to. Before the organizations building AI can teach a superintelligence to treat humanity well, he argues, they have to remember how to do it themselves. He's writing about AI, but the idea reaches well beyond it. People can't build care into something if they aren't practising it with each other.

The same question in the therapy room

When someone comes in anxious, exhausted, shut down or on edge, it's easy to focus only on changing the response. How do we bring the anxiety down, settle the nervous system, become less reactive? Those are good questions. I just think another one belongs beside them: what is this response happening in relation to?

A protective response isn't proof that something dangerous is happening now. Fight, flight, freeze, collapse and appeasing can all come from patterns learned in circumstances that no longer exist. Part of therapy can be helping the nervous system discover that the present is different from the past.

But context still matters. The goal of nervous system work can't be to become calm enough to tolerate anything. Sometimes anxiety needs settling, and sometimes it needs to be listened to. Sometimes the urge to leave is an old reflex, and sometimes leaving is the right call. Someone who has spent years accommodating other people might need more capacity for discomfort, or they might need to stop accommodating. The response on its own can't tell us which.

The pause before meaning

This is why I care so much about the pause. People often hear it as a calming technique, and it can be, but what I value most is the room it makes to get curious about what's happening before deciding what it means. What belongs to the past, and what's happening now? What am I assuming, and what is my body picking up on? And what does this situation actually require of me?

The answer might be that my nervous system is reacting to an old expectation that doesn't fit anymore. Or it might be that my body noticed something before my thinking mind was ready to admit it. Both happen. We don't have to obey every signal, but we shouldn't dismiss one just because it's uncomfortable.

Before we ask someone to adapt

We talk a lot about resilience. Workplaces want resilient employees. Relationships need people who can tolerate difference and repair after conflict. In therapy, I help people stay present with discomfort instead of reacting to it right away. Those are real and worthwhile capacities.

Before we ask anyone to get better at adapting, we should ask what we're asking them to adapt to.

Distress can carry information on more than one level. It can tell us about our history, about our nervous system, and about the story we've learned to tell about ourselves. Sometimes it also tells us about the family, the relationship, the workplace or the culture we're working so hard to function inside.

So the work is less about deciding whether the signal is right or wrong, and more about getting curious enough to find out what it's saying. That might mean helping the nervous system learn that the danger has passed, or it might mean recognizing that it hasn't.

Knowing the difference is discernment.