Understand what’s happening
What is work doing to you?
Too much work. Poor treatment. Being asked to do something that goes against what you believe is right. A complaint or investigation that creates even more strain.
Sometimes it’s one thing. Often, it’s several things happening at once.
Understanding what’s affecting you can make it easier to work out what you need next.
Making sense of work
What might be happening at work?
Sometimes you know something isn’t right, but you’re not sure what to call it.
You might be exhausted, struggling to switch off, questioning your reactions or wondering whether the problem is you, the work or the conditions you’re working in.
These topics can help you make sense of what’s happening. You don’t need to know the right psychological term to begin.
When work is leaving you exhausted
Burnout
When ongoing workplace stress has left you exhausted, disconnected from your work or feeling less effective.
ADHD burnout
When managing ADHD-related demands has become exhausting, sometimes across work and other parts of life.
When stress is affecting how you feel and respond
Can’t switch off after work
When the working day ends but your mind keeps going — replaying conversations, anticipating problems or struggling to settle.
Nervous system regulation
When stress leaves you overwhelmed, on edge or shut down, and you want to understand what might help you settle.
Fight, flight, freeze and fawn
When your response to stress surprises you — perhaps you become defensive, withdraw, go blank or try to keep everyone happy.
When something about the workplace doesn’t feel right
Unhealthy workplace conditions
When excessive workloads, poor support, unclear expectations or the way work is managed create ongoing strain — even when the work itself is meaningful.
When a workplace process isn’t fair
When you’re dealing with performance management, a complaint, an investigation or another process that seems unclear or inconsistent.
Moral injury at work
When your work puts you in situations that conflict with your values or your understanding of what is right.
Two other experiences worth understanding
Not every workplace experience needs its own article. Some concepts are useful because they give people language for something they’ve been struggling to explain.
Workplace invalidation
Workplace invalidation happens when someone’s experiences, concerns or reactions are dismissed, minimised or repeatedly treated as unreasonable.
It might sound like:
- “You’re being too sensitive.”
- “Everyone else seems to manage.”
- “You just need to be more resilient.”
A manager disagreeing with an employee isn’t automatically invalidation. Sometimes there are genuine differences in how people understand a situation.
The concern is when someone’s experience is repeatedly dismissed rather than considered, particularly when they’re raising legitimate questions about workload, treatment or working conditions.
Why it matters: Repeated dismissal can leave people questioning their judgement, becoming reluctant to raise concerns or feeling that the problem must be something wrong with them.
Institutional betrayal
Institutional betrayal describes situations where an organisation fails someone who depends on it for protection, support or an appropriate response, in ways that can deepen the original harm.
The concept was developed largely through research into sexual violence and institutional responses, and has since been explored in other institutional settings.
In a workplace, the idea may help explain why an organisational response can sometimes be as distressing as the original event.
For example, someone might raise a serious concern expecting it to be considered appropriately, only to experience dismissal, poor communication or a response that leaves them feeling less safe.
An important distinction: Not every disappointing decision, disagreement or unfair workplace process amounts to institutional betrayal.
When a workplace process isn’t fair What is moral injury at work?
You may recognise yourself in more than one of these topics. They aren’t diagnoses, and you don’t need to choose just one to begin understanding what’s happening.
What’s happening at work
The work can be hard. The conditions can make it harder.
Work can be demanding because of what the job itself asks of you — and because of the conditions you’re expected to work in.
It helps to separate the two. Some demands are part of the work itself. Others come from how the work is organised, managed or supported. Often, both are happening at once.
What the job asks of you
- Emotionally demanding conversations, day after day
- Being close to other people’s distress
- Customers, clients or patients who are angry, frightened or unreasonable
- Work that is genuinely hard to do well
The conditions you do it in
- Chronic understaffing
- A workload nobody could finish
- Poor supervision, or none at all
- No one backing you up when something goes wrong
- No time to recover after a bad interaction
- Conditions that are unsafe or unworkable
The job and the conditions can both be difficult at the same time — and they don’t have the same fix.
Real life examples
What this can look like in real life
Different jobs. Different circumstances. Workplace psychological harm can show up in many ways. These examples are fictional composites based on common patterns.
Maya
Community support worker
The workload never changed
Two colleagues left and weren’t replaced. Maya’s caseload kept growing, and she was regularly finishing notes at home. She tried taking leave, exercising and getting more sleep. It helped for a while — but every time she returned, the same workload was waiting.
What’s going on: Prolonged excessive demands → burnout risk.
Daniel
Health professional
The process became part of the harm
Daniel raised concerns about a practice he believed was unsafe. What followed was months of meetings, changing explanations and repeated questioning. Eventually, dealing with the response was causing as much distress as the original issue.
What’s going on: Moral conflict + procedural injustice.
Priya
Retail supervisor
The focus shifted to her coping
Priya repeatedly raised understaffing and aggressive customer behaviour. The response focused on stress management and resilience. The staffing problem remained — but the conversation had shifted to how well Priya was coping with it.
What’s going on: Unsafe conditions + workplace invalidation.
Maya, Daniel and Priya are fictional composite examples. They illustrate common workplace patterns rather than individual cases.
What self-care can and can’t reach
You can’t self-care your way out of every workplace problem.
This isn’t an argument against self-care. Regulation, recovery, sleep, boundaries and knowing your own limits genuinely help, and they are worth taking seriously. Many people are already doing more of it than they get credit for.
The difficulty is what happens when individual strategies are offered as the whole answer. Breathing exercises are not a workload policy. A resilience workshop does not resolve a moral conflict. A wellbeing app cannot make an unfair process fair.
When the cause sits in conditions — workload, staffing, leadership, safety, fairness, the impossibility of practising the way you were trained to — individual effort can’t reach it. And when that effort doesn’t work, people tend to conclude the failure is theirs.
The useful question isn’t am I coping well enough? It’s what is actually causing this, and is anything being aimed at the cause? Where harm has occurred, it is worth working out accurately where it came from — rather than assuming it started inside the person.
What you can do — and what the workplace needs to do
What you can influence
- Recovery and rest
- Regulating your body when you’re overwhelmed
- Recognising your limits and values
- Seeking support
- Deciding what you will and won’t keep carrying
- Raising concerns or asking for change
What the workplace is responsible for
- Safe and reasonable workloads
- Adequate staffing and rostering
- Making ethical practice possible
- Responding appropriately when concerns are raised
- Fair and transparent processes
- Leadership, culture and psychological safety
Individual strategies can help you cope with difficult work. They cannot make unsafe or unreasonable working conditions safe.
Sometimes it’s the working conditions.
Sometimes it’s the workplace culture.
Sometimes it’s what happens when concerns are raised.
Often, it’s more than one.
Where to go next
If some of that sounded like you.
None of this is a diagnosis. It is language for working out what happened, and where to aim next.