"Employees are often expected to act as if nothing else is happening in the world or in their lives... or if it is, it's less important than the next deadline. The expectation, essentially, is that we function as if work exists in a vacuum-separate from the world that's shaping our effort, our organization, our lives. The show "Severance" made this literal, but many employees live a version of it every day: unable to "know what they know.""
"Research on cognitive load shows that our brains have limited processing capacity; what we spend on one task is no longer available for another. If we're managing fear, anxiety, or grief about real concerns, we can't actually seal off that experience... and the effort to do so uses significant mental and physical resources. Compartmentalizing is often seen as a form of professionalism, but it's also a form of suppression."
Conscious acknowledgment of internal experience—knowing what one knows and feeling what one feels—is foundational to healing from trauma and to well-being. Many workplaces implicitly demand that employees act as if external events and personal realities do not exist or are less important than work deadlines. That enforced separation treats work as a vacuum and compels suppression or compartmentalization. The pandemic and ongoing societal harms have made the absurdity and harm of that expectation more visible. Cognitive-load research shows that suppressing fear, anxiety, or grief consumes significant mental and physical resources and reduces capacity for other tasks. Compartmentalization often appears as professionalism but functions as suppression with tangible costs.
Read at Psychology Today
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