Psychology says the people who burn out fastest at work aren't the ones doing the most. They're the ones who never feel safe enough to do less. - Silicon Canals

"Psychology researchers have a growing body of evidence suggesting that burnout's deepest roots aren't in workload. They're in the absence of psychological safety: the quiet, persistent belief that your position is conditional, your value is fragile, and the moment you ease up, someone will notice."

"Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School has spent decades studying psychological safety in teams, and her research consistently shows that environments where people feel unsafe to speak up, make mistakes, or set boundaries produce worse outcomes across every metric. Lower innovation. Lower retention. And, critically, higher rates of emotional exhaustion."

"Every email you draft gets re-read four times before sending, not for typos but for tone. Every meeting becomes a performance review you didn't ask for. Every quiet afternoon feels like a trap, so you manufacture visible busyness. This is hypervigilance wearing a lanyard and sitting in an open-plan office."

Burnout's deepest roots lie not in workload but in psychological unsafety—the persistent belief that one's position is conditional and value is fragile. Research by Harvard's Amy Edmondson demonstrates that environments lacking psychological safety produce worse outcomes across all metrics: lower innovation, reduced retention, and higher emotional exhaustion. Employees in unsafe environments experience constant hypervigilance, scrutinizing every email for tone, treating meetings as performance reviews, and manufacturing visible busyness to protect themselves. This cognitive cost of self-protection drives burnout more than actual work volume. People who grew up with conditional love often recognize this pattern, as workplaces become arenas where rest must be justified and effort must remain visible.

Read at Silicon Canals