What Was Labeled Burnout Was Often a Reading Error

Created and owned by Itzel Yagual

Organizations have become fluent in the language of burnout — and increasingly imprecise in how they use it.

Over the past year, slowed output, withdrawal from discretionary labor, boundary enforcement, and refusal of informal responsibilities have frequently been interpreted as individual depletion. While exhaustion is real, this explanation collapses distinct structural phenomena into a single psychological category.

From an industrial-organizational psychology perspective, this is a reading problem.

For many women — particularly those navigating neurodivergence, multiple cultural layers, and stacked role expectations — what was labeled burnout was often accurate system feedback emerging from prolonged exposure to misfit roles and extractive role architectures.

The Reading Error: When Systems Diagnose the Wrong Unit

Burnout framing locates strain inside the individual. It asks why a person can no longer sustain output.

A role-systems lens asks a different question:

What is this person being required to stabilize, absorb, or translate — and at what structural cost?

When organizations diagnose individuals instead of roles, they misidentify the unit of analysis. The result is a cycle of surface-level interventions that leave demand structures intact while expecting renewed tolerance from the same people.

Cultural Load-Bearing Roles

A significant portion of what is currently interpreted as burnout reflects the strain of carrying Cultural Load-Bearing Roles.

Cultural Load-Bearing Roles are roles assigned — implicitly or explicitly — to stabilize families, organizations, or communities. They absorb disruption, manage relational risk, translate across contexts, and maintain continuity when systems are under strain.

These roles:

• are rarely named in job descriptions

• are often framed as “soft skills,” “leadership potential,” or “natural strengths”

• are almost never protected by authority, redistribution, or reduced expectations elsewhere

They function as infrastructure — not opportunity.

They are also disproportionately assigned to women whose adaptability has been mistaken for excess capacity.

Cultural Positioning and the Weight of Stabilization

For Afro-Latina, mixed, Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and first-generation women, Cultural Load-Bearing Roles often begin long before formal employment.

They show up as:

• Cultural translation inside institutions is never designed to read us accurately

• Responsibility for smoothing tension, others are permitted to ignore

• Expectations of endurance framed as loyalty, gratitude, or resilience

These roles are reinforced across settings — family, work, community — creating continuity of extraction even when environments change.

For neurodivergent women, the cost of this extraction becomes legible earlier. Heightened cognitive and sensory processing makes misfit harder to override. What others interpret as sudden disengagement is often the visible endpoint of long-term over-functioning within roles that were never sustainable.

This is not volatility; it is simply cumulative strain.

Created and owned by Itzel Yagual

A Brief Field Vignette

In a leadership setting years ago, I was described as “less engaged” after I stopped volunteering for informal coordination work — the follow-ups, the relational smoothing, the translation between teams.

My formal responsibilities had not changed. My output had not declined. What changed was my willingness to continue absorbing unacknowledged stabilization labor.

The withdrawal was read as burnout. In reality, it was role de-activation.

The system had become accustomed to support, but it did not know how to name and react when that support was withdrawn.

A Scholarly Lens: Misfit, Not Motivation

In I/O psychology, persistent withdrawal or reduced engagement is often interpreted as a loss of motivation. Research on role strain and person–role misfit points to a different mechanism: when role demands consistently exceed available capacity, degradation in performance is predictable.

Feminist scholarship adds a necessary corrective. Women of color and culturally complex women are more likely to be assigned invisible labor that remains unaccounted for in formal evaluations of contribution.

When these roles begin to deactivate, systems experience instability — and often pathologize the individual rather than interrogating role design.

This is not a resilience failure but more so an interpretation failure.

Why This Matters for All Women

While Cultural Load-Bearing Roles are unevenly distributed, their effects are not isolated.

Across sectors, women are more likely to be positioned as:

• emotional stabilizers

• continuity holders

• risk absorbers during transition or uncertainty

  
  

When burnout becomes the default explanation, organizations miss a critical opportunity: to redesign roles before withdrawal becomes exit.

Correct interpretation benefits all women because it:

• shifts focus from endurance to design

• exposes informal labor expectations

• creates conditions for redistribution rather than replacement

  
  

This is about refusing architectures that depend on unprotected labor.

What This Signals Moving Into 2026

As systems move into 2026, the patterns described here are not emerging — they are consolidating. The withdrawal, boundary enforcement, and role de-activation observed over the past year reflect cumulative strain rather than momentary disruption.

Organizations that continue to rely on Cultural Load-Bearing Roles without naming or redesigning them will encounter increased resistance, stalled initiatives, and quiet exit. This is not a matter of morale. It is a matter of structural dependency.

The differentiator in 2026 will not be expanded well-being language or resilience programs. It will be whether systems are capable of reading feedback accurately — and redesigning roles before tolerance gives way to departure.

Created and owned by Itzel Yagual

Beyond “Unlearning”: Role De-activation

For women carrying Cultural Load-Bearing Roles, change rarely takes the form of unlearning. These roles were not adopted through preference or belief. They were assumed through necessity, reward, or survival.

What occurs instead is role deactivation — the withdrawal of labor from roles that no longer match identity, capacity, or consent.

De-activation is frequently misread as disengagement or regression. In practice, it is structural recalibration.

Closing Observation

Many women did not lose capacity this year. They lost tolerance for the misfit.

That distinction is diagnostic.

Until organizations and communities learn to read these signals accurately, they will continue to mistake withdrawal for failure and structural strain for individual collapse.

From the desk of an I/O psychologist, researcher, and neurodivergent feminist systems practitioner, Itzel Yagual, PhD(c)The Unfolding Room™

A note on application

This analysis has implications for organizations and for women navigating these conditions directly. My work spans both domains: consulting with organizations ready to examine role architecture and labor distribution, and working with women leaders who want structured, psychologically grounded support that reflects real cultural complexity.

Unfolding Insights™ exists to name what systems misread. The applied work is intentionally separate.

If this analysis surfaced questions about your own roles — what you’re stabilizing, what you’re absorbing, and what has quietly become unsustainable — that work belongs in applied role-mapping, not self-adjustment.

I work with women leaders to do this systematically through the Identity Map Starter™ Sessions. Details are here → Identity Map Starter™

Unfolding Insights™ publishes research-informed interpretation at the intersection of work, identity, and systems. Applied tools and role-mapping work are intentionally housed within paid consulting and Identity Map Starter™ sessions.