You are probably reading this between doing three other things.
Maybe you've already handled a school issue, answered a work message, made a mental note to call someone back, and started planning dinner — all before 9am. Maybe you're the person who knows where everything is, who anticipated the problem before it became one, who quietly absorbed the extra load when someone else didn't show up.
Maybe you've been doing this so long that you've stopped noticing it. It's just how you operate.
This is overfunctioning. And it is one of the most invisible, most exhausting, most deeply entrenched sources of friction in women's lives.
"Overfunctioning isn't a personality type. It's a learned response — usually to an environment where things fell apart when you didn't hold them together."
What overfunctioning actually is
Overfunctioning is not simply doing a lot. It is doing more than your share — consistently, automatically, and usually without anyone asking — while simultaneously managing the cognitive load of everyone else's responsibilities alongside your own.
It shows up at work: you're the one who covers when others drop things, who anticipates what the boss needs before they ask, who absorbs the slack without complaint.
It shows up at home: you are the default parent, the keeper of the calendar, the one who notices the empty toilet roll before it becomes a crisis, who tracks the school dates and the emotional weather of every person in the house.
And it shows up internally: a near-constant background process running in your nervous system, scanning for what needs doing, who needs what, what might go wrong if you don't stay on top of it.
The exhaustion this generates is real. But because so much of it is invisible — happening in your head, never appearing on anyone's task list — it is also consistently underestimated. By others. And often by you.
What drives it
It was the only safe option, once
For many overfunctioners, the pattern originated in childhood — in households where things genuinely fell apart when no one held them together. Where a parent was absent, unwell, emotionally unavailable, or simply not managing. Where a child stepped up because the alternative was worse. The overfunctioning was adaptive then. It kept things stable. The problem is that adaptive responses from childhood don't automatically retire when the original threat is gone.
You were rewarded for it
Competence gets noticed and relied upon. Girls who manage a lot get praised for it. Women who absorb extra work get trusted with more. The overfunctioner learns early that her value is tied to her output and her reliability — that being indispensable is the safest way to belong. This is good girl conditioning in one of its most functional-looking forms. It doesn't feel like a problem. It feels like a strength.
Underfunctioning around you made it necessary
Overfunctioning and underfunctioning exist in a system. When one person consistently does less, another consistently does more — and over time this becomes the established dynamic. The overfunctioner steps in before the gap becomes visible. The underfunctioner never needs to develop the capacity. The pattern self-reinforces. Trying to stop overfunctioning without addressing the system that depends on it is one of the hardest parts of changing.
Anxiety that masquerades as responsibility
Some overfunctioning is driven not by genuine necessity but by the anxiety of not doing it. The anticipation of things going wrong if you let go. The discomfort of watching someone else do something less perfectly than you would. The sense that if you're not holding it, it will fall. This is anxiety with a very productive face on it — and it is extraordinarily hard to distinguish from actual responsibility from the inside.
ADHD — the invisible amplifier
For women with undiagnosed or late-diagnosed ADHD, overfunctioning often develops as a compensatory strategy. When your brain doesn't naturally retain information, organise sequences, or reliably execute tasks, you build elaborate external systems — and run them at significant mental cost. You overdo everything to compensate for what you fear might slip through. The effort required to produce ordinary results becomes extraordinary. And because no one sees the effort — only the output — no one knows what it's actually taking.
Perimenopause makes it all worse
When oestrogen begins to fluctuate and decline, the cognitive and emotional load that overfunctioners carry becomes significantly heavier. Brain fog, reduced working memory, increased anxiety, disrupted sleep, lower stress tolerance — all of these are physiological changes that directly affect your capacity to keep carrying what you've been carrying. Many women in perimenopause experience what feels like a sudden collapse of competence. It isn't sudden. It is a system that was already running too hard finally encountering a load it cannot sustain.
During the years that led to my burnout in 2021, I was overfunctioning in every direction simultaneously. At work — building a freelance business as the main breadwinner after being retrenched while on maternity leave. At home — carrying the invisible load, managing the children, anticipating every need. And internally — running a near-constant monitoring process for what might go wrong next, and what I'd need to do to prevent it.
I didn't name it overfunctioning at the time. I called it being responsible. I called it what needed to be done. I called it just how things were.
What I didn't see — couldn't see, from inside it — was that I had built a life with almost no capacity for error, rest, or support. I was the load-bearing wall in every structure, and I had been for years. By the time I reached that doctor's office in 2021, there was nothing left to give.
The breakdown wasn't weakness. It was structural failure — in a system I had been running, largely alone, far past its sustainable limit.
Wondering how much you're actually carrying?
The free Low Friction Audit is a quiet guide to help you see what's in the load — and what might shift if you started putting some of it down.
How to know if this is you
Overfunctioners are often the last to recognise it in themselves, precisely because the pattern is so normalised and so well-rewarded. Here are some of the quieter signs:
You might be overfunctioning if...
You find it genuinely difficult to let someone else do something, because you're already anticipating how you'll need to fix it afterwards.
You feel responsible for other people's emotional states — smoothing, anticipating, managing reactions before they happen.
Rest makes you anxious. Doing nothing feels like falling behind something.
You're the person people come to because you always figure it out — and part of you resents it, even as you keep doing it.
You regularly do tasks that belong to other people — not because you were asked, but because you could see they needed doing and the discomfort of waiting was too high.
You have very few genuine needs of your own that you feel entitled to name, because naming them feels like adding to a load that's already too heavy.
You're exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix — because the exhaustion isn't just physical. It's the cost of the permanent background process.
The low-friction question
Low Friction Living asks: where are you relying on effort, willpower, or sheer personal endurance where a better design could do the work instead?
For overfunctioners, this question lands differently than it does for most people. Because a significant portion of the friction in your life isn't coming from your systems, your habits, or your environment. It's coming from your role — the structural position you occupy in the lives of everyone around you.
Redesigning that is not simple. It involves naming the dynamic. Having conversations that might be uncomfortable. Letting things not be done perfectly — or not be done at all — while someone else develops the capacity to handle them. Tolerating the anxiety of not filling the gap.
It also involves something more fundamental: the recognition that your worth is not contingent on how much you carry. That being the person who holds everything together is not the same as being valuable. And that putting some of it down — slowly, deliberately, structurally — is not abandonment. It is the beginning of a life that is actually sustainable.
You cannot build freedom on an overfunctioning foundation. Eventually, the structure fails. The question is whether you make the change before it does — or after.
