When Work Feels Different

A few years ago, I wrote a heartfelt ode to educators and the struggle we had been having with the recommendations for self-care. At the time, I was writing about teachers. Looking back, I think I was really writing about something larger.

We often talk about Social-Emotional Learning as something students need, but adults are navigating their own emotional landscapes every day at their work.

The challenge is that adult SEL rarely announces itself as a social-emotional issue. It shows up as fatigue, distraction, disengagement, or the gradual feeling that work no longer feels the way it once did. 

For years, we’ve tried to solve workplace exhaustion with individual strategies.

Take a break. Practice mindfulness. Set boundaries. Do more self-care. 

It’s well-intentioned, and sometimes helpful. However, the trouble with self-care was never self-care itself. We know that rest matters. Reflection matters. Time away matters. The trouble is that for many people, "take care of yourself" becomes one more thing to accomplish on an already crowded list. It often becomes added guilt to the very stress we are trying to relieve. 

The message was meant to help, but it sometimes left us feeling as though we were failing at wellness in the same way we felt we were failing at everything else. Looking back, I wonder if that conversation distracted us from a deeper question. What if the problem was never that people weren't practicing enough self-care? What if many of us were trying to recover from demands that had quietly grown beyond what any amount of mindfulness, boundary-setting, or bubble baths could address?  That gap between promise and reality is where fatigue lives. 

This shows up clearly in education, but it’s not limited to it.

Across industries, we’ve added layers of tools, platforms, reporting systems, dashboards, and communication channels, each promising greater efficiency.  Yet for many professionals, the lived experience is the opposite: more context switching, more duplicate entry, more time spent managing systems instead of doing meaningful work.

The result is a specific kind of fatigue. Not just long hours, but constant cognitive interruption. The sense that work is never fully “done,” only paused between notifications. 

What makes these losses difficult to recognize is that they arrive in disguise. Few of us wake up one morning suddenly disconnected from our work. More often, the change is gradual. We become a little less curious. A little less engaged. A little less willing to explore an idea, take a risk, or follow a question that interests us. Because our productivity often remains intact, neither we nor the people around us notice what is changing. The work continues. The deadlines are met. Yet something important has quietly gone missing. We have become surprisingly good at naming burnout once it arrives. We are far less skilled at recognizing the quieter shifts that often come before it. 

In education, we often talk about Social-Emotional Learning as the process of helping students understand themselves, manage emotions, build relationships, and make thoughtful decisions. We spend far less time considering what those same skills look like in adults. 

Maybe adult SEL begins earlier than we think; not at the point of burnout, but at the moment we notice our relationship with our work beginning to change. 

Many of us don't notice the impact right away. We aren't necessarily overwhelmed. We aren't burned out. We may even be productive. We simply begin to experience our work differently. 

People can comply long before they disengage, and they can disengage long before anyone notices. 

We might find ourselves rereading the same email three times before responding.

We move from task to task but struggle to recall what we accomplished at the end of the day.

We leave a meeting with a long list of action items but little clarity about where to begin.

We feel busy almost constantly yet rarely feel finished.

The challenge is that these losses do not show up on a dashboard. They rarely appear in performance reviews, utilization reports, or quarterly goals. We still meet deadlines. We still attend meetings. We still complete the work. What changes first is harder to measure: our sense of curiosity, our willingness to engage deeply with a problem, and the satisfaction we once found in work that used to energize us. Activities we once enjoyed—solving problems, planning projects, learning something new—begin to feel heavier than they used to. These losses are felt long before they are measured. That is why noticing matters.

These are not always signs of burnout. Sometimes they are signs that our attention has been stretched thin for too long. They can be small indicators that something is changing in our relationship with work, even while our performance remains largely unchanged. Because we continue to meet expectations, these signals are easy to dismiss. They blend into the routines of work, making them easy to mistake for a busy week, a demanding season, or simply the reality of modern professional life. We notice that activities we once enjoyed like solving problems, planning projects, learning something new, begin to feel heavier than they used to.

By the time burnout is visible, the more important signals have often been present for months.

Perhaps this is where adult SEL needs to begin—not with intervention, but with recognition.

We often notice burnout too late. What we miss are the quieter losses that come first—the loss of curiosity, the loss of creativity, and the gradual loss of connection to the work that once energized us. 

We spend so much time responding, documenting, reporting, and managing that we have fewer opportunities to explore, wonder, experiment, and create. The work still gets done, but the parts of it that once sparked our curiosity become harder to reach. It is the gradual feeling that we are spending less time being the professional we set out to become and begin to lose touch with a part of our professional identity.

Perhaps what changes first is not our productivity but our capacity for curiosity and creativity. 

What happens when the parts of ourselves that are most alive at work get less and less room to show up? 

Perhaps the goal of adult SEL is not simply helping people manage stress. Perhaps it is helping people notice when their attention has become so fragmented that they are losing connection with the work, the people, and the purpose that once energized them. Perhaps the answer is not to add another wellness strategy to the list. Perhaps it begins by paying attention.

Notice when curiosity disappears.

Notice when everything feels transactional.

Notice when you stop asking questions.

Notice when you spend all your time responding and none creating.

Notice when you can no longer remember what part of the work energizes you

What if the solution lives in recognizing when we are no longer making space for the human capacities that make work fulfilling in the first place?

Because when we can recognize those patterns in ourselves, we become better able to make intentional choices. We can protect time for deep work. We can create boundaries around interruptions. We can reconnect with the parts of our work that give us purpose and satisfaction.

The goal is not to eliminate stress. Meaningful work has always required effort, uncertainty, and persistence.

The goal is to notice when the work of doing the work begins to crowd out the reason we chose the work in the first place.

Winnie O'Leary June, 2026