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hoogbegaafd hoogbegaafdheid burnout
Why fast thinkers burn themselves out
Karolien Koolhof •
You are incredibly good at your job, yet by the end of the week, you are completely exhausted. Not because your own tasks are too difficult, but because you spent the entire week solving other people's problems. Why do fast thinkers do this? And why do they take on work that isn't actually theirs?
In every team or company, gaps occasionally appear. A manager fails to make a decision, or there's an unspoken conflict no one addresses. Most people on the shop floor don't even notice this. They just do their own thing. But if you are gifted, things work differently. You see everything. You immediately notice when a gap appears in the collaboration, long before anyone else realizes it.
The psychiatrist Kazimierz Dąbrowski explained this decades ago with his theory of overexcitability. In gifted individuals (and many other neurodivergent people), the nervous system is simply wired more sensitively. You process information faster and immediately spot the social and practical patterns. Where someone else sees a single, careless mistake, you instantly see that the entire project is going to crash and burn in three weeks.
And that is exactly where things go wrong. Because you see the problem first, you often think you have to solve it, too. Scientist Adele Diamond does a lot of research on this specific moment in your brain, known as response inhibition. That is the mental 'brake' that allows you to observe something ("this is going wrong") without immediately taking action ("I'll fix it"). For many fast thinkers, that engine runs so hard that they forget to hit the brakes. You take over the rudderless meeting, or you quickly fix your colleague's work.
Control
We then tell ourselves: "I am just very involved" or "I have a lot of empathy." That sounds very beautiful and noble. But it's not the whole story. Often, you solve someone else's problem because you simply cannot stand the chaos. You find it frustrating when things are slow or sloppy. By jumping into the gap and sorting it out yourself, your own inner restlessness disappears. So, it is actually a form of maintaining control. If you take care of everything yourself, you also avoid experiencing how annoying it is when others make mistakes or are slower than you.
Often, this is an old, learned habit. Perhaps, as a child, you were already the one ensuring everything remained calm at home and problems were solved. Your smart, fast brain isn't the root cause of your exhaustion now; it has simply become your tool to execute that old habit even better at the office. And you cannot turn off your fast brain. You will always continue to see the gaps in your team. That is okay, but you can learn to hit the brakes.
Letting it crash
The real challenge for you is learning to look at chaos and then... doing absolutely nothing for a moment. Sometimes, a project just needs to fail. Only then will the rest of the team (or your boss) finally see that there is a problem. If you secretly keep fixing it in the evenings, no one learns anything, and you are left exhausted.
The most important question for this week: am I solving this problem because it is truly my job, or am I jumping in because, deep down, I cannot stand the mess and the unrest? Sometimes, the best solution is to just leave the gap wide open.
About the author
- Karolien Koolhof is a coach voor introverts and gifted individuals
- Author of the book Introvert Leadership
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