“You're drowning in project deadlines and stress. What self-care methods can save you?”
LinkedIn briefly introduced “collaborative articles”, which were questions that anyone could answer. They wound up abandoning the feature, but I enjoyed responding to them with my own brief mental health focused rants. I also only had 750 characters and no options for gifs, so this is WAY better. :)
Let’s get into it.
“You're drowning in project deadlines and stress. What self-care methods can save you?”
???? WHAT.
None of them!
Let me ask a question that makes just as much sense : “Your house is on fire. What breathing techniques can stop the place from burning to the ground?”
If you are drowning, I am not going to hand you a bubble bath and a breathing app and be like “Have a nice day, this will surely fix everything that’s wrong!”. Straight up, this is negligence. This is lavender scented nonsense.
If you’re DROWNING, you have to get out of the water.
If deadlines are swallowing you whole, the answer is not “take more breaks.” A break does not solve chronic overload, and will actually make it worse as you work 2x as hard to make up for “lost time”. A mindfulness app does not stop your manager from piling on another project. Meditation will not magically make a system that is broken suddenly work. These things can help you recover after stress, but they will never fix the fact that your workplace is designed to run you into the ground.
And that is the real problem. Companies love to talk about resilience and self-care because it keeps the responsibility on you. They overload you, understaff teams, set deadlines no human being could meet, and then when you inevitably start to drown, they tell you to ✨sign up for a yoga session✨ or ✨do more deep breathing!✨
If companies actually cared about burnout, they would fix their systems. They would hire enough people to handle the workload instead of demanding more and more and more output with fewer and fewer resources. They would stop glorifying late nights and all-nighters. They would stop calling constant emergencies “the new normal.” They would build recovery time into the workflow instead of treating it like a luxury you are supposed to steal back on weekends.
But they don’t. Because it is easier, and cheaper, to tell you to meditate and to make the burnout they caused into your problem.
The real answer is not more “self-care.” The real answer is confronting the thing that is breaking you. That means telling your manager and making them do their job, which is to support you. It means asking what they are going to take off your plate before they add something new. It means re-scoping projects so they are achievable by an actual person and not by a fantasy. It means missing a deadline and noticing that nothing collapsed. It means dropping something entirely and realizing the company did not fall apart without it.
No one is giving out medals for collapsing at your desk with your to-do list still clenched in your fist. And if your workplace celebrates that kind of self-destruction, you are not working in a healthy environment. You are working in a cult of productivity, where exhaustion is worshipped and collapse is turned into proof of loyalty. Gross!
You do not need to sacrifice your health and your sanity so someone else can hit their quarterly numbers. You do not need to grind yourself down to prove you are dedicated. You do not need to suffer so someone else can get richer while you get sicker.
Fix the source of the stress. Hold leadership accountable for doing their part. And only then does self-care have a place. Then we can talk about rest, sleep, joy, and the things that actually restore you. But none of that matters if you are still inside a system that demands constant sacrifice.
If your company really cared about you, they would stop asking you to patch yourself up while they keep cutting you open. They would build resilience into the system instead of demanding it from individuals who are already drowning. Until that happens, the most powerful act of care you can practice is refusing to play along.
The Threadsmith Group Approach
At The Threadsmith Group, we don’t believe in cookie-cutter advice. We believe in real answers for real people, backed by experience, strategy, and a healthy dose of common sense.
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