Kat McAdaragh

Why emotional labor and performed wellness are draining us

“How are you?” my coworker asked as we passed in the hallway, and without thinking, I responded with my automatic “I’m good, thanks!” while my internal monologue was running something more like: I’m overwhelmed by deadlines, my anxiety is through the roof, I had a fight with my partner this morning, my mom keeps calling about family drama I don’t have the time for, and I’m pretty sure I’m having an existential crisis about whether I’m living the life I actually want.

But “I’m good!” is so much easier, isn’t it?

The problem is that I’ve become so good at being “fine” that I’ve started to lose track of how I actually am. The performance of wellness has become so habitual that I sometimes forget it’s a performance at all.

The “Fine” Complex

We live in a culture that demands emotional productivity. You’re supposed to be grateful, optimized, thriving, crushing your goals, living your best life. Mental health awareness has somehow morphed into pressure to perform mental health correctly—therapy as self-improvement, mindfulness as life-hacking, vulnerability as personal branding.

The result is that “I’m fine” has become the emotional equivalent of business casual: acceptance in most situations, requiring minimal effort, and completely unrevealing of what’s actually going on underneath.

But here’s the thing about constantly performing fine-ness: it’s exhausting in ways that are hard to name and even harder to admit. Because how do you complain about being tired from pretending to be okay without sounding like you’re making problems where none exist?

The Labor of Looking Together

There’s a particular kind of emotional labor that goes into maintaining the appearance that you’ve got your life handled. It’s the energy it takes to answer, “How was your weekend?” with something pleasant and unremarkable instead of “I spent most of it in bed scrolling my phone and having an anxiety spiral about climate change.”

It’s the mental bandwidth required to remember which version of yourself you’ve presented to which people, and to stay consistent with those performances. The colleague version, the family version, the social media version, the version you show your friends—each slightly different, each requiring its own maintenance.

It’s the work of translating your actual experience into something more palatable. Instead of “I’m struggling,” you say “I’m busy.” Instead of “I feel lost.” you say ” I’m figuring things out.” Instead of “I’m barely holding it together,” you “Things are crazy, but good!”

This translation work happens so automatically that we often don’t realize we’re doing it. But it adds up, this constant editing of ourselves for public consumption.

The Wellness Performance

Social media has turned emotional wellbeing into another thing to curate and display. We post our morning routines, our gratitude lists, our workout selfies, our inspiring quotes. We document our therapy breakthroughs and meditation streaks and boundary-setting victories.

Don’t get me wrong—some of this can be genuinely helpful and connecting. But it’s also created a pressure to not just be okay, but to be inspirationally okay. To turn your healing journey into content. To make your growth photogenic.

The dark side of wellness culture is that it’s turned emotional health into another performance of productivity. You’re not just supposed to feel better—you’re supposed to optimize your feelings, hack your happiness, manifest your way to mental health.

This leaves little room for in messiness of actual human experience. For the days when you do all the “right” things and still feel terrible. For the fact that healing isn’t linear and growth isn’t always gratitude-inducing. For the reality that sometimes life is just hard and there’s no amount of morning journaling that’s going to make it feel manageable.

The Emotional Airbrushing

We’ve become experts at emotional airbrushing—smoothing out the rough edges of our experience before presenting it to the world. We minimize our struggles, rationalize our pain, find the silver lining before we’ve even fully felt the cloud.

“It’s been a tough year, but I’ve learned so much!” “The breakup was hard, but I’m focusing on myself now!” “Work has been stressful, but I’m grateful for the opportunities!”

This isn’t necessarily dishonest—these things can be true. But when we automatically jump to the lesson or the gratitude or the positive reframe, we skip over the part where we actually acknowledge that something was genuinely difficult or painful or unfair.

We’ve trained ourselves to be okay so quickly and so thoroughly that we sometimes miss the fact that we’re not actually okay at all—we’re just really good at explaining why we should be.

The Cost of Constant Composure

What happens when you spend years performing fine-ness is that you start to lose access to your own emotional reality. The performance becomes so automatic that you stop checking in with how you actually feel underneath the acceptable responses.

You might find yourself crying for no apparent reason, or feeling inexplicably angry, or having physical symptoms that don’t seem connected to anything specific. Your body keeps the score even when your conscious mind has been trained to edit out anything inconvenient or socially awkward.

The exhaustion isn’t just from managing other people’s perceptions—it’s from the energy it takes to maintain this disconnect from yourself. To constantly override your own experience in favor of what’s expected or appropriate or easier for everyone else to handle.

The Permission to Not Be Fine

Here’s what I’m learning: there’s a difference between being okay and saying you’re okay. There’s a difference between genuine resilience and performed resilience. There’s a difference between healing and looking like you’re healing.

It’s possible to get grateful for your life and still struggling with it. It’s possible to be proud of your growth and still feel lost sometimes. It’s possible to love your partner and be frustrated with your relationship. It’s possible to be successful by external measures and still feel like you’re failing at being human.

None of these contradictions make you ungrateful or broken or doing life wrong. They make you complex, which is what humans are supposed to be.

The Act of Honest Answers

I’ve started experimenting with more honest responses to “How are you?” Not in a way that dumps my entire emotional state on unsuspecting coworkers, but in a way that acknowledges that fine-ness isn’t the only acceptable human condition.

“I’m tired but hanging in there.” “It’s been a rough week, honestly.” “I’m okay, but it’s been a lot lately.” “Ask me again in a few days.”

What surprised me is how often this honestly creates space for other people to be honest too. How many people respond with relief that they don’t have to perform okay-ness in return. How conversations shift from superficial check-ins to actual connection when someone is willing to acknowledge that life is complicated.

Redefining Resilience

Real resilience isn’t about bouncing back quickly or staying positive through everything. It’s not about having your emotional house in perfect order at all times. It’s not about being an inspiration or having it all figured out.

Real resilience is about being able to feel what you feel without immediately trying to fix it or explain it away. It’s about knowing the difference between taking care of yourself and performing self-care. It’s about being able to say, “this is hard” without needing to follow it up with “but I’m grateful for the lesson.”

It’s about trusting that you can be not fine and still be worthy of love and support. That you don’t have to earn your right to struggle by also being inspirational about it.

The Messy Middle

Most of life happens in the messy middle—not the crisis that demands attention, not the breakthrough that looks good on social media, but the ordinary difficulty of being human in a complicated world. The chronic low-level stress, the vague sense of dissatisfaction, the feeling that everyone else has figured out something you’re still learning.

This messy middle doesn’t fit neatly into our cultural narratives about growth and healing and positive thinking. It’s not dramatic enough to warrant concern, but it’s not fine enough to ignore. It’s just… life, with all its ordinary difficulty and complexity.

But maybe that’s okay. Maybe the goal isn’t to transcend the messiness but to find ways to be present with it that don’t require constant performance. Maybe resilience looks less like bouncing back and more like learning to rest in the in-between spaces without needing to immediately transform them into something more palatable.

A Different Kind of Okay

I’m not suggesting we all start oversharing our emotional states with everyone we encounter. Boundaries matter, and there are times when “I’m fine” is the appropriate response even when it’s not the complete truth.

But I am suggesting that we give ourselves permission to acknowledge the full spectrum of our experience, at least to ourselves. To check in with how we actually are instead of how we think we should be. To recognize that emotional labor is still labor, even when it’s so normalized that we don’t notice we’re doing it.

The goal isn’t to be fine all the time. The goal is to be honest about when we’re not, first to ourselves and then, when it’s safe and appropriate, to the people who love us enough to handle our not-fine-ness without trying to immediately fix it.

Because here’s what I’m learning: the energy it takes to constantly perform wellness could be better used actually taking care of ourselves. The space we create by being honest about our struggles is space that can be filled with genuine support instead of performance.

You don’t have to be fine. You really don’t. And admitting that might be the first step toward actually being okay.