We’re Having the Wrong Conversations

Capacity: The Burnout Thread — Part 3

By the time I entered the workforce in 2012, work-life balance and preventing burnout were already part of corporate vocabulary.

Corporate wellness itself had existed for decades in small, practical forms like flu shots, fitness classes, and health screenings. Throughout the 2000s, the door opened for more modern interpretations of employee wellness to take shape. As companies increasingly valued metrics tied to engagement, retention, and performance, wellness became a way to support all three.

Wellness was wide open to interpretation. In some organizations, it meant hiring a full-time wellness lead and bringing on new vendors to make benefits more appealing. In others, it focused on education and screenings. In many places, it was simply a handful of initiatives tacked onto the responsibilities of an already stretched employee.

I stepped into that world as a recent graduate, knowing a full-time position dedicated to wellness was rare. I was hopeful, energized, and genuinely believed improving wellness could reshape the experience of work. The role spoke to me because it didn’t confine health to one dimension. I saw wellness as something woven through the full landscape of work and life, and at the time, it felt like that perspective could make a real difference.

Quickly after starting, I saw how naive I was to lived energy of work and adulthood; the long days, the responsibility that follows you home, and the repetition of a routine that resets every week. I could see and feel how tired employees were, beyond just the hours of sleep they got the night before.

Inside that environment, I quickly learned that change didn’t happen fast. Corporate life moved at a different pace entirely. While there was day-to-day hustle, there was also an underlying slowness. The pace of strategic work arbitrarily dictated by meetings, approvals, and email responses.

Even so, the work itself felt meaningful. My organization gave me space to build programs that were innovative and human for the time. But the longer I stayed in the role, the more clearly I saw the gap between what wellness could offer and the level of disruption required to deliver real relief. Employees were carrying a strain that went far beyond anything a walking challenge or nutrition class could reach.

Around this same time, wellness was also becoming part of the “best places to work” image. Media stories spotlighted slides in tech offices, lunchtime yoga, and meditation rooms. Through that imagery, wellness was framed as light, fun, and aspirational, as if the general population needed convincing that work could be enjoyable.

Inside organizations, the experience was more mixed. Wellness was often appreciated, but not always taken seriously. Employees could sense that what was being offered didn’t reach the depth of what they were carrying. For some, an educational program landed as meaningful support. For others, it earned more of an eye roll. Either way, wellness increasingly became a shiny object rather than something that fundamentally changed how work felt.

In hindsight, I can see that the rise of wellness inside companies was its own quiet acknowledgement that people were struggling. Leadership could sense that something was affecting engagement, performance, and health enough to justify an investment. Yet, instead of examining the structure people were working inside, the focus naturally fell on helping individuals take better care of themselves.

If employees could just eat better, exercise more, and manage stress more effectively, then the struggles of the workforce would improve. In theory, it’s a nice idea. In practice, it wasn’t how wellness actually played out at work.

Wellness programs were regularly scrutinized for effectiveness. Data was expected to show clear improvements or a strong return on investment, but those results were rare. That doesn’t mean wellness didn’t help, many of the wins were real, but they were qualitative in nature. They showed up in heartfelt stories and moments of relief, connection, or awareness, not in yearly metrics.

I say this with the firm belief that wellness absolutely deserves its place in the workplace. Employees deserve more than a paycheck in return for their dedication. But wellness fell short because it was treated like a band-aid when what the workplace needed was a structural renovation.

We tried to fix what we could measure — weight, sleep, stress without digging deeper. People weren’t depleted because they lacked discipline or willpower. Their nervous systems were holding the weight of two worlds at once: the realities of life outside work and the pressures of work itself. Adults trying to live full lives with fewer resources, higher expectations, and constant demand. We focused on behaviors instead of the overwhelm driving them.

Wellness was designed to help employees feel better, but it rarely asked the more honest question:

Why are people struggling so much in the first place?

Conversations and industry trends had us creating programs, adding vendors, and offering education which were all meaningful, yet orbiting the same assumption: if employees take better care of themselves, they’ll feel better, and show up differently at work.

The entire corporate wellness conversation was rooted in self-improvement, with very little reflection on the structure of work.

Within corporate wellness, new trends emerged as moving targets to grab onto in pursuit of bigger change. Managing stress had obvious limits. When stress became constant, “managing” it was no longer realistic. Resilience entered the conversation with hopeful optimism: instead of just coping, employees would learn to bounce back.

In theory, resilience sounds empowering. Let a setback make you stronger. But it carried an assumption that there was still bounce left in someone’s system.

We spoke often about chronic stress, but lacked the broader lens to see that many employees were living in chronic survival. A depleted, over-activated nervous system doesn’t rebound. It forces the entire body to compensate.

Resilience wasn’t a harmful idea. It was simply the wrong conversation for the conditions people were living in.

Without much traction, an evolution toward de-stigmatizing mental health in the workplace followed. Training in psychological safety and emotional intelligence became new investments for organizations. While these efforts aimed to create safer conversations and more humane leadership, the day-to-day pace and structures of work remained largely unchanged.

Then 2020 happened.

The pandemic was a seismic disruption to work, no matter the role or organization. Corporate wellness pivoted almost overnight to address the crisis and offerings exploded. The pandemic brought compassion, empathy, and care to the forefront of leadership. For a moment, it offered a glimpse of a different way to work and operate organizations.

As we settled into post-pandemic life, questions emerged about which path organizations would take next. There were real positives in this more autonomous, compassionate approach. But just as employees began to exhale, a new language surfaced to describe the workforce.

Quiet quitting entered the mainstream after gaining traction on TikTok. It described employees doing the jobs they were hired to do without overextending themselves and it sparked a media firestorm.

Articles framed it as a warning sign: employees lacking effort, disengaged, and hurting performance. These conversations minimized the collective trauma that we experienced as a whole from the global pandemic. These weren’t employee acts of rebellion. They were signs of depletion, biological limits on what a human body could continue to hold and produce.

The narrative quickly shifted back to performance and showing up. It meant back to long commutes, rigid schedules, and days organized around proving productivity.

More recently, quiet cracking entered the conversation as another warning. While quiet quitting was framed as defiance, quiet cracking was described as the stage before burnout. Employees showed up to work but felt emotionally flat, unmotivated, and physically and mentally worn down. Once again, a label appeared and once again, the focus landed on the employee rather than the conditions producing the experience.

Different words. Same pattern.

This cycle of naming, monitoring, and blaming employees, while sidestepping the foundation of the problem, begins to resemble a kind of insanity.

So it’s worth asking the question we keep avoiding:

What if the way we work doesn’t work for the human body?

Most conversations about employee health and burnout never moved beyond surface-level symptoms. They focused on behavior, motivation, and effort, while ignoring the reality that humans are limited by their physiology.

Burnout isn’t a mindset problem.

It’s what happens when the weight of modern life and modern work collide with a nervous system never built to carry this much, for this long.

Our bodies are designed for rhythm. A flow of effort and recovery, engagement and rest. Modern work is designed for acceleration, accumulation, and depletion.

That’s the gap today’s workplaces keep trying to push through instead of acknowledge.

If we want a healthier workforce that’s productive and engaged, the conversation doesn’t live in corporate language or business models… it lives in the body itself.

This series is my attempt to tell the whole story of burnout — one I’ve been piecing together for more than a decade, at the intersection of how we’re built, how we live, and how we work.

Next in Capacity: The Burnout Thread — Part 4: Meet Your Newest Coworker: Nervous System Capacity.