Sunday, 31st May
There's a pattern in this week's clinical reading that I want to think through with you.
A cluster of Australian workplace wellbeing and mental health reports have been crossing my feed this week, all pointing toward similar territory. Employee wellbeing indicators are tracking down, burnout conversations are tracking up, and the advice across most of it lands in a similar place: set limits, recover properly, switch off.
For some people, this is reasonable advice. However, I've noticed something that tends to happen when the high-achieving professionals I work with encounter this. There's a specific kind of dissatisfaction.
I've been sitting with why that tends to be.
The framing across most of these pieces assumes the primary problem is insufficient recovery, too much demand, not enough switching off. For many people, the framing is accurate. But for the profile I see most often, recovery tends not to be the friction.
What can be true for this profile is that achievement tends not to produce the relief that switching off is supposed to restore.
The Sunday evening is often difficult, less because of the absence of rest, and more because the internal register is occupied with something else: the recalibration.
What just happened. What needs to happen next. Whether what was produced this week is evidence of anything durable. What more can I do?
This is what I call The Moving Bar. In the schema therapy literature, Jeffrey Young describes the Unrelenting Standards schema as the belief that one must strive to meet extremely high standards, usually to avoid criticism or the sense of falling short, with the cost of not meeting them experienced as unacceptable. What The Moving Bar names precisely is the mechanism Young points at: achievement tends to reset the standard rather than satisfy it. Hit the target. The target moves. The scoring system is structured to reset, not to declare a winner.
The difficulty may not be the inability to switch off. It could be a scoring system that doesn't register switching off as evidence of anything valuable.
This is why the recovery advice lands as slightly unsatisfying, rather than wrong. It's accurate about what the body needs. It misses what the scoring system does once the rest arrives. Rest, when filtered through this architecture, tends to register as time not producing.
What can shift things isn't necessarily overhauling the recovery plan. It can be noticing the scoring system itself, and catching the moment the bar moves. The question that surfaces most often in this territory isn't how to recover better. It tends to be something closer to: if you stepped away for two weeks and came back to exactly where you are now, would that feel like enough?
For most people running this pattern, the honest answer is probably not. And sitting with the honesty of that answer may be more useful than version 2.0 of the recovery plan.
As always, hold it lightly: The Moving Bar isn't a flaw in ambition. In my observation, it tends to be a flaw in the scoring system, one that's been running long enough that it's rarely questioned.
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand