Three ways overwork warps your perspective
And how to fix it
Great Work’s been quiet the last few weeks: I’ve been editing a new draft of the book—which is now with my developmental editor. More on that soon, I hope …
Are You Fine? Is Your Job Fine? Or Are You Too Tired To Tell?
Overwork for a while, and your perspective becomes distorted. There are many causes: prolonged cognitive overload; accumulated exhaustion; a lack of the vital, restorative benefits of regular rest and leisure; often, impaired sleep; and more. And it’s a distorted perspective that’s no fun, and makes for bad decisions, too.
There are several common, overwork-distorted perceptions of work.
First, there’s This is hell and it’s someone else’s fault. This one has lots of variations. This organization is ridiculous. My boss is an idiot. None of my colleagues are as committed as me. My patients/students/students’ parents/clients/customers are so bloody entitled. And more.
Then there’s I’m not up to this. Again, there are a few versions. Everyone else is smarter than me. My colleagues all have skills that I don’t have. Someone made a mistake in giving me this job. I’m not going to be able to cope. I’m going to screw something up.
And there’s a particular version of this, when you actually are being shafted1 by the organization or team in which you work, where you tell yourself that it’s your fault. You may even have been encouraged to think that: “Well, everyone else is OK with how we’re working here.” This is, needless to say, a form of gaslighting that’s done especially to women.
All of these, whether you’re blaming yourself or others, feel horrible. Worse, they result in you making bad decisions:
If you’re telling yourself it’s all someone else’s fault, you’re denying yourself the opportunity to improve, and perhaps transform, how you handle tough situations. This is a key Great Work idea—that, when you focus first on how you’re dealing with something, what you’re dealing with usually turns out to be much less of a problem, and can even be reshaped into an exhilarating challenge. It’s often the reaction, not the stuff.
If you’re telling yourself you’re not up to it, you’re likely experiencing imposter symptoms, which are awful. But the beliefs driving them are usually wrong: you probably are up to it. And those beliefs can be fixed: imposter syndrome.
If you’ve allowed yourself to believe that you’re finding it hard because you’re inadequate, not because your work situation’s objectively absurd, you’re going to feel terrible—and you won’t challenge it or leave, when perhaps you should.
But how do you know when your perspective’s distorted and you’re making bad decisions? Read on!
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, having just given myself a short writing sabbatical after several years of working too hard (long, intense hours away from home, overnight shifts, and sprawling medical director responsibilities). I wasn’t burned out. And it was work I’d chosen, which was, in many ways, the high point of my career so far. But I was exhausted. And I didn’t appreciate how exhausted I was, or how much it had affected me, until some time after I gave up those responsibilities. Creativity I’d forgotten about slowly returned. I became more present with people I care about. I started thinking bigger thoughts. My sleep began to normalize. I read more books. I began appreciating the world around me more. I realized how much worse I’d been than I’d seen at the time. But it took time.
One of the problems here is that many of us have years of training in pushing through excessive workloads. My profession, medicine, doesn’t have a monopoly on this: it affects plenty of others, and parents of young children, too. We can do it indefinitely, superficially managing fine, because that’s what we learned to do for so long. Yet we still pay the price, losing perspective, and perhaps, along the way, years of our lives.
What’s the answer?
This begins with recognizing that you’re not at your best—which, if you know you’ve been overworking for a while, you can’t be.
And then it’s about doing what you need to do to regain perspective. You may not have the luxury of being able to take a sabbatical—but there’s always something you can do.
Take a long walk somewhere beautiful, without your phone.
Take a few days off and spend them doing things that allow your mind to wander, not catching up on all the chores that have accumulated because you’ve been overworking.
Take a relaxing vacation, if you can.
Do what you need to do to step back, breathe, and think.
Chew it over with someone wise and independent, someone you trust to discern whether you’re being screwed, and with the bravery to tell you if the priority is to address how you’re handling the job.
Often, just a little stepping back and head-clearing is enough to see that things aren’t right, that something needs fixing.
And, even when it is the stuff, not just how you’re handling it, it’s always worth thinking about how you are handling it. Crappy stuff warps your perspective and depletes your ability to fix it.
And then, when you’ve done all that, when you’ve reminded yourself of your priorities, you can make better decisions, big and small, with a clear view from the top of your mountain.
Book Review
Dr. Sunita Sah’s Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes (One World, 2025) is a book that’ll have you thinking about those times when you go along with something that doesn’t harmonize with your values. It’s about why we do this, how we can stop doing so, and why our lives, and the world, improve when we do.
As you’d expect in a book about sticking up for yourself, the experiences of women and members of marginalized ethnic groups are where they should be, at its heart.
It’s got me thinking differently about those times when it’s easy to go along with someone, or not to speak out about something, or to compromise what you care about. And perhaps it’ll help me do better.
A paperback edition came out last week, which makes it cheaper. (It has a new subtitle: How To Speak Up When It Matters.) I’d recommend it.
Some Great Work Core Principles
In recent emails I’ve been reviewing seven core principles that underpin much of what I write about in Great Work. We’d covered four …
Work’s a huge part of life. It should be part of what makes life fulfilling and fun.
You’ll be happier, and you’ll achieve more, if you’re kinder to yourself.
The kind–businesslike matrix, or: Why so many teams of good people struggle.
Here are the remaining three:
(5) It’s often the reaction, not the stuff
There’s often a perspective that will serve us better. For example, some situations—not all, but many—that feel overwhelming, stressful, or out of control don’t have to feel that way. There’s a trick to reformulating them that can make them positively exhilarating.
I wrote more about this here:
(6) Almost nothing’s as important to your wellbeing or success as other people and your relationships with them
Yet it’s easy, especially when stressed, to forget that.
More here:
… and this piece on having difficult conversations is relevant, too.
(7) Habits make it easy, and everything improves when you use the best approach consistently.
Many of these pieces and, especially, the book on which they’re based, suggest changes that you can turn into habits. Habits are how we automate things in our lives, making them effortless—and the right habits make everything better. This may be why there’s been a recent(ish) wave of books on habits—Charles Duhigg’s thoughtful The Power of Habit (2012), James Clear’s wildly successful Atomic Habits (2018), and Wendy Wood’s more scientific Good Habits, Bad Habits (2019).2
Get in the habit of resting regularly through your day, for example, and you’re going to get more done, and do it better, than if you just plough through. This article suggests some rest habits that can transform your working days. Here’s how you can cultivate better internet habits. And here’s a little sequencing habit that’ll make you more efficient and more relaxed.
How could this be better?
Would you take a moment to complete this one-minute survey? There are only two important questions and it really does help me improve this. I’ll soon be writing about juggling caring responsibilities alongside tough, meaningful work—which reader feedback helped me realize I’d neglected.
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To be shafted = to be screwed, in case you’re unfamiliar with this British expression.
I haven’t yet read Jonathan Goodman’s just-published book Unhinged Habits (2026), which I believe is more about what’s sometimes called lifestyle design than the psychology of habits.