The Work That Was Never Yours to Carry

Written By Kara Ryles

Not all of the exhaustion carried by high-responsibility women comes from having too much to do. Research on “illegitimate tasks” (work that’s unreasonable to expect of someone in a given role, or unnecessary altogether) links this specific kind of workload to burnout, lower engagement, and more work-family conflict, separate from simply having a full role. A second 2026 study found that common recovery practices, walks, journaling, breathing exercises, don’t reliably reset wellbeing week to week the way wellness advice often promises. Together, these findings point to two separate levers: whether your workload is legitimate, and whether your recovery practices are actually working, not one standing in for the other. For women in federal, defense, or mission-driven roles carrying caregiving on top of career responsibility, that distinction changes where the real leverage is.

Opening Perspective

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that shows up in high-responsibility women long before it has a name. It is not the fatigue that a good night's sleep resolves. It is the exhaustion of carrying a workload that was never actually reasonable to begin with, alongside the quiet assumption that if you just recovered better, you would be able to carry it anyway.

For women managing federal deadlines, defense timelines, or the open-ended demands of mission-driven work, alongside caregiving and community responsibility that never clocks out, two things are usually happening at once. First, some meaningful share of what fills the week was never a legitimate part of the role to begin with. Second, the recovery practices marketed as the fix (the walk, the journal, the breathing exercise) were never designed to reliably undo that in the first place. Both of those points are supported by research published this year, and both are worth sitting with before reaching for another productivity fix.

Evidence Insight

A 2026 meta-analysis in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, drawing on 141 datasets and more than 65,000 participants, examined what researchers call "illegitimate tasks," work that is either unreasonable (not appropriate to ask of someone in that role) or unnecessary (does not need to be done at all). Across the studies reviewed, illegitimate tasks were consistently linked to lower job satisfaction and engagement, higher turnover intentions, more negative affect, more burnout, and more work-family conflict. The distinction matters because it separates two things that get collapsed into "I have too much on my plate": a genuinely full, demanding role, and a role that has quietly absorbed work that was never appropriately part of it.

A separate 2026 study in the same journal tracked 333 people over eight weeks to test whether recovery activities (the things we're told to do to reset after a hard stretch) reliably improve wellbeing the following week, or vice versa. The finding was more modest than the wellness industry usually claims: there was little consistent evidence that recovery activities produced predictable week-to-week effects in either direction. One promising link, between creative activity and later work engagement, was flagged by the researchers themselves as needing independent replication, since it may not hold up.

Neither study is about individual failure. Read together, they say something more useful: some of what's draining you was never yours to carry, and the recovery practices you've been told to lean on are real tools, not guarantees. That reframe changes where the actual leverage is.

Context

This shows up in ordinary ways. You inherit a task because no one else claimed it, not because it belongs to your role. You take on a recurring piece of coordination that exists only because a process elsewhere is broken. You tell yourself that if you just protected your evenings better, or journaled more consistently, the accumulated weight of the week would resolve. The research suggests something different: workload legitimacy and recovery are two separate levers, and treating recovery as a stand-in for addressing an unreasonable workload just adds a second, quieter kind of pressure, the pressure to recover correctly.

This is not a case against recovery practices. It is a case for holding them honestly: as a menu of tools worth trying and noticing, not a prescription that owes you a specific outcome. And it's a case for auditing what's actually landing on your plate, since some of it may not have belonged there in the first place.

Real-Life Leadership Lens

Eighteen years in federal acquisition taught me how easily illegitimate tasks get absorbed into "just part of the job." Coordination that existed because a process upstream was broken. Follow-up that fell to me because no one else claimed it, not because it was mine. I did not think to separate "this is genuinely part of my role" from "this landed on me by default," and for a long time I assumed the fix was simply to recover better between rounds of it.

The women I work with now describe the same pattern. The instinct is almost always to look inward, to assume the solution is more discipline, a better morning routine, a more consistent wind-down. Sometimes it is. Just as often, the more honest question is whether the workload itself needs to be renegotiated, not recovered from.

Reflection

Try a short audit of your own week. For each recurring task, ask: is this reasonable to expect of someone in my role, and is it actually necessary at all? Anything that fails either test is worth a conversation, a delegation, or a decline, not another recovery routine layered on top of it.

For the recovery side of this, The Regulation Library is built as exactly that: a menu of twenty practices to try and notice what actually helps you, not a promise that any one of them will reset you on schedule. If you want a clearer picture of where your own pattern sits first, the Nervous System Audit offers a structured starting point.

Educational Framing Note

This perspective is provided strictly for educational and self-advocacy purposes. It does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Health coaching supports sustainable lifestyle alignment and stress management alongside your personal healthcare team.

Peer-Reviewed Sources

Kara Ryles
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