You Cannot Yoga Your Way Out of an Unsustainable Workload: The Problem With Workplace Wellbeing

There is absolutely nothing wrong with yoga.

I feel I should establish that fairly early, before somebody from HR sends me a strongly worded email.

Yoga can be wonderful. So can mindfulness, exercise, breathwork, lunchtime walks, resilience training, EAP support, coaching and occasionally remembering to eat something that didn’t come out of a vending machine between meetings.

The problem starts when these things are offered as the answer to a problem they were never designed to solve.

If someone has more work than can realistically fit into their working hours, no amount of downward dog is going to create an additional three hours in the day. If a team is chronically understaffed, priorities change every few hours and people are expected to remain permanently reachable, teaching them how to breathe more effectively may help them regulate their stress response. It won’t change the conditions creating the stress.

And yet workplace wellbeing can sometimes drift into exactly this territory.

Employees are encouraged to protect their work-life balance while carrying workloads that routinely spill into evenings. They’re reminded to take proper breaks while their calendars are packed back-to-back. They’re invited to resilience workshops while trying to work out which of the twelve “urgent” priorities their manager actually means is urgent.

At some point, “we care about your wellbeing” can start to sound suspiciously like “please become better at coping with what we have no intention of changing”.

That’s the part I think organisations need to be more honest about.

Sometimes the individual does need support. Sometimes the job is the problem.

I say this as a coach, because I don’t think the answer is simply to blame organisations for everything either.

There are absolutely times when an individual’s working patterns need looking at. Someone may be saying yes to everything because disappointing people feels intolerable. They may be perfectionistic, spending three hours polishing work that genuinely needed forty minutes. They may struggle to prioritise, avoid difficult conversations or have become so identified with being “the reliable one” that asking for help feels like failure.

Those patterns matter, and coaching can be extremely useful in exploring them.

But psychologically informed coaching also means being willing to recognise when the person sitting in front of you is not the primary problem.

Sometimes somebody has already become exceptionally good at coping with a situation that isn’t sustainable.

They are organised. They have the colour-coded calendar. They’ve tried time blocking. They’ve learnt to say no occasionally. They meditate. They go for walks. They have notifications reminding them to drink water. They have, frankly, done their bit.

And they are still exhausted because there are simply too many demands.

The World Health Organisation describes burnout in relation to chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. The UK Health and Safety Executive also takes a wider view of workplace stress, looking at things such as demands, control, support, relationships, role clarity and organisational change.

That matters because burnout is very easy to individualise. We talk about the burnt-out employee rather than the conditions surrounding them. The person needs resilience. The person needs better boundaries. The person needs stress management.

Sometimes, yes.

But if several people in the same team are exhausted, working late and quietly considering leaving, I’d probably resist booking another mindfulness webinar until somebody has looked at the spreadsheet.

High performers can hide an unsustainable system surprisingly well

One of the reasons organisations miss this is that some employees are incredibly good at absorbing the cost.

I see this particularly with neurodivergent professionals, disabled people, people living with chronic illness and high achievers who have spent years building an identity around being capable.

They find another way.

They overprepare. They work later. They compensate for executive-functioning difficulties by creating elaborate systems. They recover at weekends. They avoid requesting reasonable adjustments because they don’t want to be seen as difficult. They say yes because saying no feels risky. From the outside, they look impressive.

Sometimes they are impressive.

But impressive and sustainable are not the same thing.

I understand some of this personally as well as professionally. Living with disability and chronic illness teaches you a great deal about adaptation. You get very good at working around things, anticipating barriers and finding solutions because quite often there isn’t another option.

Resourcefulness is valuable.

But there is a point where adapting to everything stops being resourcefulness and starts becoming a way of continually absorbing problems that perhaps shouldn’t be yours to absorb.

Workplaces can reinforce that pattern without meaning to. The person who always delivers gets another important project because they can be trusted. The person who never complains is assumed to be fine. The employee who fixes crises becomes everybody’s first call whenever there is one.

Competence quietly gets rewarded with more work.

Then one day that employee goes off sick, disengages or hands in their notice and people are genuinely surprised.

“But they were doing so well.”

Were they?

Or were they simply very good at making an unsustainable situation look manageable?

That is a different question.

Wellbeing should sometimes make an organisation uncomfortable

This is perhaps the part of workplace wellbeing I’d like to see us talk about more.

Real wellbeing work is not always soothing.

Sometimes it should lead to uncomfortable conversations about workload, staffing, leadership, expectations and culture.

It might mean asking why everyone feels unable to say no. Why emails are routinely being sent late at night. Why one team has unusually high absence. Why “flexible working” exists in policy but employees quietly understand that using it will affect how committed they are perceived to be.

It might mean asking managers whether everything really is urgent, or whether poor prioritisation is simply being passed down the hierarchy as everybody else’s emergency.

That isn’t as easy to package as a wellbeing week.

You can put yoga on a poster.

“Perhaps our operating model is part of the problem” is harder to fit beside the company logo.

But if organisations genuinely care about sustainable performance, both conversations are needed.

Coaching can help people develop confidence, stronger boundaries, clearer communication, better working strategies and a healthier relationship with performance. I believe strongly in that work.

What I don’t believe in is using coaching to make somebody increasingly efficient at tolerating the intolerable.

Sometimes the person does need to change how they work. Sometimes the manager needs to change how they lead. Sometimes the organisation needs to acknowledge that the workload itself is unreasonable.

A psychologically informed approach should be able to tell the difference.

And perhaps that’s the question I’d encourage organisations to ask before rolling out the next wellbeing initiative:

Are we helping people build genuine resources for the normal pressures of working life, or are we asking them to become emotionally better at tolerating problems we already know exist?

Because those are not the same thing.

By all means, offer the yoga class.

Just don’t schedule it between six meetings, call it a wellbeing intervention and then send everyone back to three hours of work they couldn’t possibly have completed during the working day.

If your wellbeing strategy is mostly teaching employees how to survive the environment you’ve created, the problem may not be their resilience.

It may be the environment.

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I’m Emma, a BACP-accredited counsellor, EMDR practitioner and trained coach. I provide psychologically informed coaching for professionals and organisations, with particular interests in neurodivergence, disability, chronic illness, confidence, leadership, burnout and sustainable performance.

My approach combines coaching with a therapeutic understanding of the person behind the professional. I’m interested not simply in helping people perform more, but in helping individuals and organisations understand what allows good performance to remain effective, healthy and sustainable.

For individual, workplace or organisational coaching enquiries, you can contact me through my website.