There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from carrying things you never agreed to hold.
Permission to stop isn’t about quitting. It’s about noticing what you never chose—and setting it down long enough to see what returns when you do.
Not the weight of genuine responsibility—caring for people you love, showing up for work that matters, honouring commitments you’ve made with open eyes. I mean the invisible cargo: obligations inherited from old versions of yourself, expectations you’ve outgrown, routines that stopped serving you years ago but still occupy space in your calendar and your mind.
Psychology has a name for this accumulation: **role overload**—when the demands attached to our roles exceed the resources we actually have. Research consistently links role overload with psychological strain, emotional exhaustion, and reduced wellbeing. (Definition: APA Dictionary of Psychology—Role overload: https://dictionary.apa.org/role-overload) What drains us isn’t always crisis. Often, it’s the quiet excess. Burnout isn’t just “too much work”—it’s prolonged stress without recovery and too little say in where your energy goes.
And excess is sneaky.
**The things we keep carrying**
We accumulate obligations the way we accumulate belongings—gradually, without ceremony, until one day we look around and wonder how we ended up surrounded by things we don’t remember choosing.
Obligation can bind communities and relationships together. That’s part of why it sticks. But what supports belonging can also outlive its usefulness if it isn’t re‑examined.
Some of this weight comes from old identities:
- the one who always says yes
- the reliable one
- the strong one who doesn’t need help
These roles once served a purpose. They may have been survival strategies—ways of being valued, needed, or safe. Yet identities calcify. What was adaptive becomes automatic. We keep performing long after the original reason has dissolved.
Many therapists use the shorthand FOG—fear, obligation, and guilt. The term was popularised by Susan Forward in Emotional Blackmail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_blackmail). These forces can keep us compliant even when compliance costs us. The tyranny of should sounds responsible; in practice, it’s often fear wearing the mask of obligation. Unexamined “shoulds” often drive that compliance—and research links them to emotional exhaustion and reduced wellbeing.
**What I’ve stopped doing**
I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’ve started saying no to things I once considered non-negotiable. Small things, mostly. The kind of decisions that feel trivial until you realise how much mental real estate they’ve been occupying.
I stopped checking a particular news site every morning—not because the information isn’t important, but because the ritual had become compulsive rather than useful.
I stopped responding to every message within an hour.
I stopped pretending I enjoy certain social obligations that drain me without filling anything back up.
These aren’t dramatic gestures. No announcements. No exits. No one is noticing.
But I feel lighter.
**Why stopping feels so uncomfortable**
Here’s the part that surprised me: stopping doesn’t feel like relief at first.
For about three days, it can feel terrible. There’s guilt. Low‑level panic. A sense that you’ve failed someone or dropped a responsibility. Your nervous system doesn’t immediately recognise that you’ve made a choice rather than dropped a ball. Here, guilt is a conditioned alarm, not a moral verdict.
This reaction has context. Chronic busyness and over-functioning often operate as nervous-system strategies—ways to maintain safety, predictability, or approval. When you stop, the system protests. From a regulation standpoint, stopping is protective: it interrupts cumulative strain so capacity can return.
Burnout research reinforces this. The World Health Organization defines burnout as a response to chronic stress that hasn’t been successfully managed—marked by exhaustion, detachment, and reduced effectiveness. Importantly, burnout isn’t only about workload. It’s about **lack of recovery and lack of control**. (WHO overview of burnout—ICD‑11: https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burnout-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases)%3C/ins%3E)Stopping threatens the illusion of control before it restores actual capacity.
Then something shifts.
**The relief of letting go**
After a few days, reality asserts itself.
You realise the thing you stopped doing didn’t matter as much as you thought.
Or it mattered, but not in the way you were doing it.
Or someone else stepped in.
Or the gap closed naturally, like water finding its level.
In the space where that obligation once lived, something else appears:
rest
curiosity
attention
bandwidth
Not necessarily productivity — just room.
This is the part that often gets missed. Letting go isn’t about giving up or checking out. It’s about **discernment**. Choosing where your energy goes instead of letting habit, guilt, or inertia decide for you.
And in that room, the things you actually care about have a chance to return.
**The hidden role of self-criticism**
For many of us, the real barrier to stopping isn’t logistics. It’s self-judgment.
People who equate worth with constant output are more vulnerable to burnout and depression.
Strong evidence links self-critical perfectionism with burnout and depression. (Meta-analysis: Hill & Curran, 2016—Perfectionism and burnout: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-26665-001)%3Cins%3E) Research also shows that **self-compassion changes that pathway**—not by lowering standards, but by reducing the threat response that keeps us over-performing long past the point of usefulness. (Overview of self-compassion research: https://self-compassion.org/the-research/)%3C/ins%3E)
You don’t have to wait for comfort to act; clarity can lead.
**What I’m learning to ask**
When I notice myself doing something out of obligation rather than intention, I pause and ask:
- Whose voice is this—mine now, or someone else’s expectation?
- What would actually happen if I stopped? Not the catastrophic version—the likely one.
- Am I doing this because it matters, or because I’m afraid of what it means if I don’t?
Not everything survives these questions.
Some things fall away immediately, revealed as habits rather than values. Others remain, but with renewed clarity and firmer boundaries. Either outcome is information.
Questions like these don’t lower care. They raise clarity.
The research on saying no
Data is reassuring here: when we say no, most people accept it and move on far faster than we fear. The anxiety we spin anticipating reactions often lives more in our heads than in reality. Boundaries don’t break relationships; they reveal which ones rest on authenticity rather than performance. (Related evidence: people say yes to requests more than we predict—Bohns, 2016; summary via HBR: https://hbr.org/2019/01/youre-overestimating-how-awkward-it-is-to-ask-for-help) Most of the discomfort is anticipatory; once stated, boundaries reduce strain.
**The quiet rebellion**
Stopping is quietly radical.
We live in a culture that equates worth with output and value with visible busyness. Rest looks suspicious. Boundaries look like disengagement. Stopping can feel countercultural—even dangerous.
Yet I’m learning this:
the people whose opinions matter don’t need me to perform exhaustion.
They don’t need me to carry what I never agreed to hold.
And the ones who do? Their disapproval is information, not a verdict.
When someone can’t accept your boundaries, that tells you more about their expectations than about your worth.
Stopping isn’t moral collapse—it’s an evidence-supported way to keep cumulative stress from becoming burnout.
Letting go isn’t failure.
Sometimes it’s the most honest thing you can do.
Sometimes it’s how you make space for what actually matters—relationships grounded in mutual respect, work that energises rather than depletes, a life shaped by intention rather than inherited obligation.
* * *
**Reflection prompt**
**What are you carrying right now that you didn’t consciously choose—and what would it feel like to set it down, even for a moment?**