When Good Things Go Bad
As I start the last semester of my master’s program, I’ve been thinking about paradigm shifts I’ve had during this journey. I plan to make my next few articles a highlight of them. For this first one, I’m sharing my first really big “ah ha” moment:- the “Inverted U” of coping and wellbeing behaviors.
When I was at my lowest point of burnout in the summer of 2023, I kept asking myself what I had done wrong that lead me to burnout. You see, my former business is something I am so proud of. I had worked hard to learn and implement small business best practices. As a result, we had an incredible company culture, our services were the top in the business, we were profitable, and I had a strong meaning and purpose in what we did. When I finally admitted I was burnt out, which only happened because my body forced me to by being too tired to even function, I struggled with embarrassment of the fact that I was burnt out. In my mind, I did everything right and I believed it should have prevented burnout.
It was similar with my grief for my mom. We had 14 months with her on her cancer journey and we tried to do everything right. We had beautiful celebrations, moments of incredible joy, and we allowed ourselves to feel all the different aspects of the grief cycle. Her funeral was honestly one of the most joyous occasions I’ve ever been a part of because we had done grief gracefully. So, on the days I was sad after she was gone, I was also embarrassed about being sad (it’s probably why I wouldn’t admit I was struggling with depression). To me, we had done grief right. We had no regrets or love unsaid... but I was still sad.
I enrolled in a class called “Stress, Coping, and Resilience” last year because I wanted to figure out what I had done wrong. For 14 weeks, I found ways that my family, my company, and myself had done amazing things in terms of coping with stress. This information showed me how I was able to sustain the pace I had for 7+ years. Just as I had suspected, we had done a lot of things so right. On week 15, our topic was the dark side of coping, and I finally had an answer to what I had been doing wrong.
Our teacher had us read a paper by Grant & Schwartz (2011) which brought up the concept of having too much of a good thing and calling it the inverted U. The basic idea is that when it comes to “good” behaviors, we want to believe that the more of them we do, the more impact they will make. We tend to believe this behavior to impact ration is a perfect 1:1 ratio and behaves in a nice diagonally straight line.
The truth of the matter is that at best, these behaviors will follow the law of diminishing returns (meaning you’ll receive less impact for effort after a certain point) and some may even be harmful after they reach a tipping point.
Below is a list of virtues and their strengths from the article that usually we think of as good and want to believe that the more we use them, the more they will bless our lives (Grant & Schwartz, 2011):
Virtue: Wisdom and Knowledge
Strengths: Love of learning, creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, and perspective
Virtue: Courage
Strengths: bravery, persistence, integrity, optimism, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and vitality
Virtue: Humanity and Love
Strengths: caring, kindness, generosity, and social intelligence
Virtue: Justice
Strengths: citizenship, social responsibility, loyalty, teamwork, fairness, and leadership
Reading this list, if you’re like me, you see a lot of admirable traits that are all worthy of working towards. They are. They have been proven to increase wellbeing and performance… at least to a point.
The paper also shows that when they are taken too far, however, they can be quite destructive. To illustrate my point, I’ve pulled out two of my overdone strengths that were part of what led to my burnout (I could do many more, but I won’t make you read that much):
Persistence:
As an entrepreneur, persistence in the face of opposition must run in your veins or you will not make it very far. “Pushing through it” and “hustling” was a way of life for me. When the pandemic hit and our services were suddenly in very high demand, we pushed and increased capacity to meet the demand and it gave us very high returns. It was thrilling – at least at first.
After a while, however, I realized that it didn’t matter how much success we had, it never felt like we could get ahead. There was always something else we needed to move forward on. Everything felt like it needed to be completed yesterday. We were so good at creating deadlines and when the going got tough, buckling down to hit those deadlines (no matter what the cost was to our own work/life balance). I worked through most Christmas breaks. I justified it by saying it was prime time for creating without interruption by regular operations. I always kept my phone near me (day and night) in case of an emergency because we had events happening at all hours. Our organization had a perfect track record of always having someone there to support an event and I refused to let that slip by being unavailable. In the 7 years that I ran my business, I never really allowed myself to fully check out – not even when I was in labor with my third baby… I didn’t know how to regulate my persistence and I found myself on the wrong side of the inverted U.
Caring and Loyalty:
The community we built in our business is what I am the proudest of. Even now, when I think of the names and faces that worked with me, my heart is full. I love their stories. I love their struggles. I love how much we laughed and created together. Because I was so loyal to them, I became a champion of their wellbeing. I wanted to give them the job I had always wished I could have. One where you would work hard when on the clock and then be able to check out when off the clock. To provide a job that was high paying and flexible so you could contribute to your family both in terms of finances and time. I’m still proud of the fact that I created an environment for that… at least for them.
The problem is, I took my hero complex so far that I allowed myself to be a martyr. In protecting their work life balance, I sacrificed mine. Additionally, when I cared deeply for someone who was underperforming, my desire to help them often meant that I took away their tasks and overloaded my high performers by delegating the gaps. What I saw as generous and empathetic for one person was inadvertently being unfair and blind to the needs of others. I was unintentionally pushing a culture that cursed my most competent employees – all in the name of love.
I hope you can see how tricky and complex these things can be. Especially as someone who has overvalued achievement most of her life, it’s hard to swallow the fact that overachieving in these virtues came at a terrible cost.
Understanding the inverted U has shifted my goals when it comes to adopting strengths and virtues. I still want to embody all the virtues we listed above AND I know that I need to be aware of that tipping point for each of them.
Finding that tipping point, however, is the hard part.
It means that I need to build in mindfulness and reflective time to check in with myself and make sure that in my relentless pursuit of good, I am not unintentionally causing harm. Making time for reflection and honoring that time as valuable has been a key action for sustaining my paradigm shift. If I’m always pushing forward, I’m creating tunnel vision that reinforces my biases around what I think I’m doing right. Without getting lost in the past, I need to make enough space to review and reflect regularly so that I’m sure that the path I’m headed forward on really is one that is giving a worthy return on my investment.
Thanks for reading with me today. If you have a few minutes, I highly recommend checking out the full article (see the reference info below). I hope that you take some time to reflect on the tipping points of your favorite virtues this week.
Reference:
Grant, A. M., & Schwartz, B. (2011). Too Much of a Good Thing: The Challenge and Opportunity of the Inverted U. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 61-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610393523