The people who celebrate your endurance often need you exhausted. You ever notice some people cheer loudest when you are running on empty? Your burnout is their comfort.
This one is uncomfortable, and I will not soften it. I will say that it took me years to see it clearly, and a longer time still to name it without the accompanying guilt that tends to attach whenever you notice something unflattering about relationships you value.
There is a particular dynamic in high-achieving environments, in hospitals and leadership teams and some families, where the person who is always available, always delivering, always pushing through, becomes the load-bearing wall of a social architecture that was built around their perpetual availability. The people around them have organized their own functioning, sometimes consciously and often not, around that person’s willingness to carry more than their share. When the load-bearing person rests, the architecture creaks. When they draw a limit, the architecture protests. And the protest sounds, if you are not listening carefully, exactly like admiration.
“You’re incredible. I don’t know how you do it.”
That sentence is not always a compliment. Sometimes it is a request for continuation. Sometimes it is, underneath its genuine admiration, an anxiety about what happens if you stop.
I want to apply the Honesty Scale to the claims in this chapter because some of the underlying frameworks are not clinical in the way that cardiovascular medicine is clinical, and I want you to know what you are receiving. The structural literature on enabling relationships comes largely from addiction studies, where Melody Beattie’s work on codependency documented the relational patterns in which one person’s enabling behaviors maintain another’s dysfunction (Beattie, Codependent No More, 1986; Honesty Scale: Early-to-Theoretical in the strict randomized-trial sense, Solid in clinical observation across decades of relational work). The Karpman drama triangle describes how relationships can organize around complementary roles: Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim. What matters for our purposes here is not the formal model but the observable pattern. When a person is consistently in the Rescuer position, providing energy and capacity that others are not providing for themselves, there is a mutual maintenance happening. The Rescuer needs the need. The people being rescued need the Rescuer. The system resists change because every node in it has been organized around the status quo.
This is not a judgment of character. It is a description of a system. The people who need you exhausted are not usually malicious. They are frequently people who have their own unmet needs and have found a way to have those needs managed through your chronic overextension. The relationship has become structured around the dynamic. Your boundary-setting is genuinely disruptive to something they have been relying on, and their discomfort with your limits is real, even if the limits are necessary.
The celebration of your endurance is part of this. People celebrate what they need to continue. When your extraordinary availability is the thing they are depending on, they celebrate the availability, and the framing of it as endurance or dedication or strength makes the celebration feel like an honor rather than what it sometimes is, which is a reward for continuing to do something that is costing you dearly.
I think of a colleague of mine, a brilliant internist I will call Daniel. Daniel was the person in every room who stayed longest, answered every page, took every extra call, covered for colleagues without being asked, and responded to administrative requests with a speed that everyone around him had come to rely on without examining the reliance. He was celebrated for it. He received commendations for it. He was described, in the particular language that medical institutions use for this, as “a pillar of the department.”
When he finally told his department that he was going to take a Saturday off, genuinely off, not available by pager, the response from his chairman was almost theatrical in its alarm. “Who will cover if something comes up?” As if Daniel’s being present on Saturday was a structural requirement of the hospital’s functioning, which was exactly what it had become, rather than a feature of Daniel’s particular constitution and particular inability to disappoint.
Daniel took the Saturday off. Nothing collapsed. The hospital continued to function with the same competence and care it had always possessed, because it had always had the capacity to manage without Daniel’s Saturday. Daniel had simply never made it find that capacity. He had solved the problem before the institution had to.
Daniel told me afterward, with a quiet that sounded like someone who had discovered a room in their own house they had not known was there, that he had no idea rest felt like that. Not the absence of work. The actual physiological experience of a parasympathetic afternoon in his own back yard, in which the nervous system settled in a way it had not settled in over a decade.
The people who had been celebrating his endurance were not celebrating him. They were celebrating the version of him that had made himself structurally indispensable through the slow obliteration of his own limits. The celebration was genuine. It was also, in the fullest sense, consuming him.
Here is the diagnostic question I want to leave you with. When you draw a limit, when you say no, when you rest publicly and without apology: who in your life is genuinely pleased for you? Who is quietly inconvenienced or quietly anxious? The inconvenienced ones are not the enemy. Many of them are people you love and who love you. But they are the ones whose applause you have been mistaking for care.
Applause is easy. It requires presence and hands and no real cost to the one clapping. What the people in your life actually need from you is not your best performance at the cost of your own depletion. It is your genuine presence, which requires you to have something left. You cannot be present when you are running on empty. You can only perform presence. And that performance, however good it is, fools fewer people than you think, particularly the ones who love you most.
Some people are not asking for your work. They are asking for your exhaustion. The two are not the same.
I want to be careful about the conclusion you draw from this chapter, because the wrong conclusion would be to leave here suspicious of the people who admire you. That is not the point and it would not serve you. The point is more specific than that. It is this: admiration for your capacity is not the same as care for your person. You deserve both, and many people in your life are genuinely offering both. But some of what you have been receiving as care is structural dependency dressed in the language of appreciation. Learning to tell the difference is not cynicism. It is the beginning of the relational honesty that this whole movement has been building toward.
The person who emerges from this chapter with a genuinely functioning limit is not a colder person. They are a more present one. When you are no longer running on the fuel of other people’s need, when you have stopped performing the bottomless availability that their comfort requires, you have something available to give that you did not have before. You have yourself. And that is what everyone in your life actually needed most.
I want to end with one observation from the clinical side, because this chapter sits at the intersection of the somatic and the relational in a way that is clinically real, not just interpersonally interesting. Chronic depletion in service of other people’s needs is a cardiovascular risk factor. Not metaphorically. The allostatic load literature is clear that sustained relational strain, the kind that comes from being chronically over-obligated in high-demand social environments, produces measurable physiological stress markers independent of workload. You are not just emotionally exhausted by the relationships that need you exhausted. You are physiologically taxed. The heart that never rests because the people around it need it in constant service is the heart that arrives on my table earlier than it needed to.
This is the first movement of the book, and it is about the body. The body keeps the account. Drawing a limit is not a relational choice made in a vacuum. It is a physiological intervention with a measurable benefit. Your heart rate will thank you before your relationships catch up to the change.
A Mirror
Who in your life cheers most loudly for your endurance, your long hours, your perpetual availability? What would it cost that person if you became genuinely less available?
Think of the last time you drew a limit, said no to something, or rested without apology. How was it received, and by whom? What does that reception tell you about the relational architecture around your limits?
Is there a relationship in your life where your being depleted is a feature rather than a bug of the dynamic? You do not have to name the person here. Just notice whether the relationship exists.
Letter from Dr. Job
Subject: Who is clapping for your depletion
There are people in your life whose relationship with you runs on your exhaustion. They are not bad people. They are people who have organized their own comfort around your inability to stop.
The applause is real. I know it feels like love. In some cases, it is love, mixed in with something else. The two are not exclusive. But the thing mixed in is worth seeing.
This week, I want you to notice who celebrates when you push past your limits and who celebrates when you take care of yourself. The two lists may not be identical.
You can love people who need too much of you. You can also love them differently, with a limit that lets you remain present for the relationship rather than consumed by it.
Your depletion serves no one as well as your wholeness would.
— Job