Your emotional energy is not in your job description.

There! I said it. Did you feel a little jolt of recognition, a sense of relief—or maybe a stab of rage?

Hi, I'm Lauren Howard. You can call me L2. Like other people do. And in this episode of "Different, Not Broken" I'm asking if you’ve ever slogged through unbearable meetings, survived a boss who’d rather watch you squirm than support you, or felt your job siphoning off bits of your sanity day after day… this episode is your permission slip to stop surrendering your mental health on the altar of toxic work culture.

If you’ve ever heard “No job is worth your mental health” and nodded vigorously, only to feel that familiar panic rising when rent is due and quitting might mean eviction, you’re in the right place.

This episode won’t hand you Instagram-worthy mantras divorced from the realities of bills, healthcare, and responsibility.

Instead, I'm calling bullshit on the “just quit” narrative, sharing the reality, along with some actionable insights, and the kinds of boundary-setting wisdom you wish someone told you before your workplace broke you—not because you were broken, but because you were different in a system built for sameness.

You’ll find out:

• Why the burn-it-all-down mentality works for trust-fund babies but not so much for the rest of us.
• How your emotional labor is being quietly exploited—and how to reclaim it without burning bridges (or burning out).
• The single most important thing to do before leaving a toxic workplace (hint: it's not just quitting).
• How to spot the difference between jobs that are simply tough, and jobs that are actively toxic.
• What actually leads to burnout (spoiler: it’s almost never the actual work).

Most importantly, you'll hear a deeply personal story of what happens when you reach your breaking point—and what you wish you knew before walking away.

No job deserves your mental health.

Listen now. Your sanity—and future self—will thank you.

Useful stuff

Stuff that helps you become awesome even if you're different: https://stan.store/elletwo

My grown up job: https://lbeehealth.com/

Timestamped summary

00:00 "No Job Over Mental Health"

06:11 "Choosing Your Emotional Boundaries"

08:49 "Leaving to Save My Sanity"

12:49 "Questioning Corporate Processes"

15:11 Corporate Misfit to Happy Entrepreneur

19:46 Weekend Questions I Hate

23:10 "Choosing Between Fun or Rest"

25:27 Navigating Choices and Conversations

Mentioned in this episode:

Build Your Better course

Build your better course - https://stan.store/elletwo/p/build-your-better

Your emotional energy is not in your job description. There's no place on there

that says, you must have a visceral reaction to your shitty

boss or we're not going to pay you. So we have a lot of people

that come in and say, exactly that. I can't do this anymore. This is

too hard. But nobody ever talks about the other side of that.

The burn it all down mentality works for people who have lots and lots of

money stockpiled away. It does not work for the average person who

is just trying to get by. All right, here we go.

I'm gonna pretend I'm pushing Record. Cause that feels right. Okay, I'm pressing Record.

Boop. Hi, everybody. I'm Lauren Howard.

Welcome to Different, Not Broken, which is our

podcast on exactly that. That there are a lot of people in this world walking

around feeling broken. And the reality is you're just different, and that's fine.

So if you follow, you know, mental health influencers, if that's a thing,

sometimes you see it on LinkedIn, sometimes it comes up in other places. But you'll

see this thing. The gist of is, no job is worth your

mental health. And that is correct. That is objectively

correct. No job should be so bad that it affects your

mental health. No job should be so toxic. No job should be so

abusive that it affects your mental health. Now, there are other things in jobs that

are not toxic or abusive that can affect your mental health. There are

jobs that are just hard. A lot of social workers have really hard jobs because

they see really horrific things every day. Teachers, that job is just hard.

Nursing, that job is just hard. You could have the perfect employment environment

for a nurse and still have it. Be a really, really difficult job

that affects your mental health. My brother works in civil rights and

discrimination law, and they see a lot of people, they do a lot of

employment law. They see a lot of, like, sexual assault at work and things like

that. Like, he loves his job, he loves his firm. He owns his own firm.

They have a really good environment for their staff. It's still a really hard job,

and it still affects people's mental health. So. So we're not talking about those situations.

We're talking about the situations that affect your mental health when

it is avoidable. So toxic work environment,

workplace abuse, workplace trauma, chronic stress.

And kind of the prevailing narrative

in situations is that no job is worth your mental health.

The logical end result to that is

if a job is affecting your mental health, you should just quit. I mean,

that's basically what they're saying, right, don't stay in a job that's bad for your

mental health. We see this a lot, especially in our burnout groups. We have a

lot of people that come in and say, like, I mean to say exactly that.

I can't do this anymore. This is too hard. This

is too hard. But nobody ever talks about the other

side of that, which is, you're absolutely

right. No job is worth your mental health. Your job should not be able to

affect you in that way. It should not abuse you. It should not

create horrible situations for you. But also,

what's the alternative? And this is not me advocating

for harsh or horrific work environments. I think you should get out of them as

quickly as you possibly can. I think it is awful

that they are doing that to you. They should not have the right to do

that. You should be documenting everything that is going on. If you have not already

talked to an attorney. Attorney. I think you should. In my experience, the time to

talk to an attorney about an employment issue is before you're

backed into a corner, when you can still just document and get

yourself in a good position about it. You should never, ever, ever be

in an abusive situation. I am not advocating for the abusive

situation at all. I'm sorry that it exists. I am so sorry that it is

happening to you. I wish you good luck of getting out of it. I

hope that if there's any way that anybody can help you, even if that person

is me, that you do get out of it. But also,

what is the alternative to that job that is hurting your mental health right now?

Is it eviction?

Is it not being able to afford your medication? Is it losing your

healthcare? Is the stress of not being sure how to pay your

bills better or more preferable than

the stress of going to that job every day?

I don't know the answer to that. For some people, it may be more worth

it to go get a job someplace

that's going to pay you a lower wage just to get the break

from the horror of what you're dealing with every day. And that's a valid

choice. I don't want to say it's not. But what we end up doing when

we put this blanket statement out there that no job is worth your mental health,

it sets this tone that, well, if you really cared about yourself, if you were

taking care of yourself, then you would just quit and figure it out a different

way. And that's not realistic. People can't do that.

It makes people feel like there's something wrong with them. That

they have not been able to generate the stockpiles of

money necessary, generate the Runway or the nest egg

necessary to be able to be unemployed for any amount of

time. That's not realistic. I think most people have at best

have two weeks worth of reserves because

of the way we pay people shit in this country than the way we haven't

created better ways to generate your own wealth. You know, if you have generational

wealth, then yeah, you probably can just quit that job. If you're an executive

and you've been on an incredible comp plan for many, many years, then

yeah, maybe you could just quit that job. The reality for most people is not

that. And so it becomes a different

situation. No job is worth your mental health. So

instead of quitting the job and putting

up middle fingers and leaving and putting yourself in a different dire

situation, don't give the job your mental health.

Don't give it access to your mental health. That is a choice.

It's a choice that a lot of people don't realize. And I, and I, when

I say it's a choice, I don't want to make it seem like it's your

fault that this job has abused you, because it's not. Our

corporate environments are built to be toxic because it means they can pay you shit,

run you into the ground until you physically can't take it anymore, and then they

will just replace you with somebody else who they are paying less than they were

paying you. That is not on you. That is the way our corporate environments

are structured. So it is not on you that you are being abused. However,

reacting to the things that they do that make you feel

small or bad or insignificant is a

choice that you get to make. They are going to pay you whether

they get your emotional energy or not. Your emotional energy is not in

your job description. There is no place on there that says you, you must

have a visceral reaction to your shitty boss or we're not

going to pay you. You get paid the same whether they make bad decisions

or not. You get paid the same whether your boss is a turd

or not. You can make the choice that if he wants you to do something

stupid and you don't want to do it, that you're either not going to do

it and face the consequences or you're going to do it and just not care

if they typically throw extra work on you

because they expect that that's your responsibility and you've done it before.

You can set the boundary and say, I'm sorry, I can't do that this time

and then just decide not to care if they are upset about it.

You can make the choice not to give them the

emotional reaction that you have been giving them. Because I've talked to a

lot of people about burnout in toxic work environments over the last several years,

and there is one thing in that conversation that always holds true. It

is never the work. It is never the work that people

are doing that burns them out. It is never the

actual functions of their job. It is the

mental gymnastics around the job that they have to do.

It's the anticipating the shitty thing that someone else is going to do. It's

dealing with the fallout from the boss who didn't communicate before he made a bad

decision. It's the fact that you worry when you're not on the clock.

It's the fact that you think that if you do less, they're going to fire

you. That you aren't sure how to set boundaries with them because they've blown

past them every other time. It's the things that have nothing to do with

your actual job. So rather than

jumping ship, which I still encourage you to do in time

with planning, and I want to say, I wish I had done this.

I did not do this when I was in the situation where I really

felt like I just couldn't do it anymore, that it became too toxic, I was

too burned out. I couldn't set the boundaries with them. I burned it all

down. Now I don't regret doing that. Burning it all down is what

got me here. It got me to the life I'm living now that I love

more than anything in the world. But I wish I had done it differently.

Only in that the way that I did it gave them the power

and let them decide when I was done. I let them

push me to the point where I couldn't do it anymore. Whereas if I had

taken the step back and said, oh, you want to send out a marketing campaign

that's definitely going to piss people off, cool, it's your money.

And just not cared about it. Knowing that the plan was to leave,

knowing that I was not going to get through another year of this, knowing that

I needed to find another place to live from a career perspective, not in my

house, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache. I could have saved myself

a lot of burnout. That job was not worth my mental health.

And it took it, and it took it gladly. And if I

had just drawn the line in the sand and said, cool,

I get paid the same whether you're an idiot or not. I could have

made a more coordinated decision. I could have had time to actually

loop my husband in on what was happening instead of just unceremoniously

burning it all down. He was far more gracious about my decision than I would

have been if he had done the same thing. I want to be very clear

about that. I expected that he was going to be big pissed, and instead he

said, if they don't want you, then they don't deserve you and we'll figure it

out. And he didn't even miss a beat. So just props to Kyle Howard for

being supportive Husband of the year in 2021.

That's what I should have done. In hindsight, I know that in hindsight, I. I

can see that. I can see all of the times that I got so upset

about things that didn't freaking matter because at the end of the day, they were

still going to pay me. At the end of the day, they were still going

to do what they want. It didn't matter if they were telling me the truth

about things. It really didn't. Because they were lying to me anyway. Because they were

lying to me anyway. If they had told me

the truth, I wouldn't have been happier with the truth. The reason they were lying

to me is because the truth was shitty. Rather than the narrative that no job

is worth your mental health, which is true. No job

deserves your mental health. Don't give it to them. Figure

out where the choices are. Is this something

that I can choose not to have an emotional reaction to?

Is this something that I can choose to care less about?

Is this something that I can set a boundary on? And if they have a

problem with it, they can show me in my employment agreement where I am violating

it. Is this something that I can put in place

so that Outside of my 9 to 5, my 5 to 9 is not a

freaking nightmare? And then I can use that extra bandwidth that

I have cobbled together to go find the job

that is better for me. The new job is still not worth your mental health,

still doesn't deserve your mental health, but it's better for you.

The burn it all down mentality works for people who have lots and lots of

money stockpiled away. It does not work for the average person

who is just trying to get by. And it makes that person

feel like there is something wrong with them because they've been put in

an untenable environment that was designed to be

untenable. No job is worth your mental health.

True. But the real story Is that no job

deserves your mental health. So let's figure out how

to not give it to them and then transition into something better

long term. We see this really

fascinating thing with a lot of our patients. A huge number of them are self

employed. And what happened for the most part is that they

do the very traditional workforce thing that they're told they always have to do.

They either get out of school or, or go to a training program

or, you know, get a job as a teenager or whatever, they

start a career or a job or whatever, and they're in it for a number

of years, maybe five years, maybe 10 years, maybe more. Sometimes a lot

more than that. And from that experience, they pick

out all of the things that they really like doing that they're really good at,

and the stuff that they just hate. And the parts that they just

hate are usually the very corporate

bureaucracy stupid crap that

neurodivergent brains tend to look at and go, why

do we have to do this? And leadership goes, because that's the way we've always

done it. The brain that looks at things differently goes, but can it be

changed? Because the way that we do it is stupid. And that makes people

mad. Because why are you questioning a system that's existed long

before you? Because the system works. Well, if it worked, you wouldn't be questioning it.

And then there's the other side of that, where sometimes people with brains that are

good with pattern recognition or just brains that are a little different

ask questions not because they're questioning the validity of

something, but because they're better at following processes when they understand why they're doing

them. And corporate hates that. They just

want you to do what they told you. They said this was the instruction,

follow the instruction. And your brain says, I will

follow the instruction better if I understand why we're doing it. Is it possible that

you could explain that? And corporate talking head says, that's none of your business.

Why is that none of somebody's business? If they're trying to learn how to do

their job better, why can't you just explain to them why you do the thing?

Is it because you don't know, because you are also

just following the instructions? Or is it because the answer is

usually what the answer is, which is, that's the way we've always done

it. I can't tell you how many times

I have found processes at organizations,

large organizations, government funded organizations, where you ask,

can somebody tell me why things are this way? And the answer

literally is, because that's the way We've always done it because nobody in the

20 years before I got there has ever once

said out loud, can someone tell me why we do this this way?

The real answer is because Shirlene, who worked here 25

years ago, decided to do it this way when she was the only person doing

it. It is just the way I do it. When she trained

somebody new, she trained them how to do it that way. This is how you

need to do it too. And it worked for Charlene, so therefore Tim did it

too. And now, 25 years later, we're still using this bad system that was

probably a great system when it existed inside of one person's head.

And now, years later, it's a really broken, fragmented system because it

doesn't scale to the number of people who are doing it. That's where most

processes come from. For the most part. If you just tell a

neurodivergent person the actual reason why something is done and it's not stupid,

they'll go, okay, that makes sense. And then just do it now. If it is

stupid, what you get is probably like the logical

byproduct of the fact that your process is stupid. I'm sorry, I'm not going to

protect you from that. But those are worlds that nd

brains don't always exist. Well, in first off, the answer that's the way

it's always been done is just infuriating. It's just infuriating. It's a way

to create corporate bloat that never goes away. But

more than that, it doesn't sit well with people

who are very analytical and whose brains naturally try

to improve things, which is very common. The point to that being what we see

a lot is people will survive corporate for as long as they do,

get to the other side of it, decide they can't do it anymore, quit for

whatever reason, maybe they get another opportunity, whatever, eventually end up either

self employed, freelance, whatever, owning their own company. And through

that company, they will do all of the things that they are

really, truly excellent at and not any of the

stupid corporate stuff that they hated, and they will build

exactly the company that they want to be working in

with exactly the culture that they want to be working in. They will run

it exactly the way that they think

it should have been done before and strip out all the things that

nobody needed anyway. And then they become very happy business

owners as opposed to very unhappy

corporate scapegoats. The point of that being

there is a really strong chance that there is nothing

wrong with you, that the World around you was not built for

someone like you, and that means that it was built incorrectly,

because we are supposed to include all those kinds of brains into

our work and our world. I'm sure anybody who's

listening knows this, but in the event that you're brand new here and you've never

heard me say this before, my dad was a psychiatrist. This wasn't

specifically about neurodivergence, but we used to have a lot of patients come in with

what would eventually be diagnosed as obsessive compulsive disorder.

And for whatever reason, they

tend to carry around a whole lot of shame about

these behaviors that they couldn't control, that they just desperately wanted to control,

that they couldn't control. A lot of time it was, like, about counting

or precision, or things that had to be exactly right, or things that had to

be exactly clean, or sometimes things that had to be

exactly not clean. Hoarding can be a sign of ocd. There's this very

weird kind of balance there, but. And those patients would come in with these just

very heavy shoulders and

seem like the entire world was sitting on them. And

what he used to say to them has stuck with me this whole time

and sticks with me about almost every patient we see now,

which is that without people like you, meaning these patients

who. Who have OCD and felt so

shameful of it, really, without people like you, we would all

still be living in caves. We need brains like yours.

Because people like me, I'm fine. When shit doesn't work, I don't

care. Unless it's, like, deeply inconvenient, I'll just work

around it. I don't care. I don't need it to be exactly right, doesn't bother

me. But somebody like you, who sees precision, who knows how to

achieve precision, who wants precision, who craves it, who likes

to make processes better, who wants to build

things that are bigger, stronger, faster, whatever. That's what your

motivation is. Who notices when things are a little off, who

it bothers when things are a little off. And so you have to make them

exactly right. You're the reason we don't live in caves

anymore. You advance society. People like me

sit and keep it where it is, and you would see this total

change in their countenance. This is. They all of a sudden went, you mean I'm

not a problem? I'm not something to be ashamed of?

And he'd be like, no. In fact, I'm probably something to be ashamed of. I'm

the one who lets things be broken and doesn't care. You are the one who's

fixing things. Now. Does it get troublesome? Does it interfere with people's ability to

harness it for good? At times? Absolutely. And so that's why we have

good treatments and we have therapy and we have exposure programs and we have all

sorts of things that can help. But the goal is to never make you someone

else. We need brains like yours.

We need you to be comfortable in your brain. We

can't have you unhappy or out of control of

the things that you do because your brain is taking you for a

ride. We can't have that. But that doesn't mean

that the way you are built is not the way we

want you. It's not the way that we love you. It's not the way that

we appreciate you. There's nothing wrong with you.

There might be places, areas where you need help, and that's where good help is.

But without people like you, we would still be living in caves.

And now we'll go to Allison, who has this week's

small talk. A question I hate is, what are you doing this

weekend? Or did you do anything exciting this weekend?

I know these questions are well meaning, but I freeze every time

someone asks, how do I know what to share? What if I sound

really boring? I'm sure there is a way to reframe this, but my

brain is stuck. I also, to be very

transparent, hate it when people ask me these questions because

I never know what's going on and I freeze in the same way

that I do. And my husband does not understand this, even though he also does

the same thing. So bite me. But he'll come in and say

like, what are we gonna have for dinner? And I will have had a

super long day where I'm making decisions for 800 different

things at all times. And my answer is I don't care. And if I have

to decide, I don't want to eat because it is so

stressful. I could literally make strategic

direction decisions for an entire organization and our entire budget

without missing a beat, without worrying about a thing with calculate all the numbers

in my head. Totally good. But if you ask me what I want for dinner,

I am not hungry anymore because it is too much stress to be

responsible to pick my food and also pick the food that everybody else

wants and also deal with everybody's different personal

preferences. It's too much stress. I can't handle it. I don't want it. And

so I have just started saying if the follow up question to

this is going to be that I have to pick, or nobody

is going to know what to do. Then I am no longer hungry, and I

do not want to eat. And that seems to be enough of an incentive for

all of the rest of the people in my house to figure out what they

want to eat. And then I just go along with it, because guess what? It's

one meal. If it's not good, we'll

have another. I don't care. There's

nothing about dinner that I care enough about to be involved in that decision.

Not when I've got 37,000 other things going on.

Now, if it's like a special dinner for someone or we're, you know,

we're. We're making a big deal or we're celebrating or something, okay, then I will

absolutely be involved in that. But I do not care if you show up to

my house with Filet mignon or McDonald's. I don't care. At the end,

I will be full. I do not care. Please do not make me pick. And

so I think it's very much the same thing. What are you doing this weekend?

First off, I never know. I am not in charge of those decisions. I don't

want to be in charge of those decisions. Second off,

plans could change in a heartbeat. Third off, likely,

there's nothing I want to do. And if there's something I want to

do, it's usually something I want to achieve, but not anything

that I actually actively want to do. I also feel like it is

important to note that the person who. Or one of the people who is

often responsible for telling me what to do on the weekend, who is a small

human, is staring at me from the balcony above my office and

giving me weird looks, trying to figure out why I would

say that I don't care what we do on the weekend. As if I have

any control over any of that. She ran away now. Now that she's been

spotted, I don't think. Well, in blank space. And that's

probably what you're running up against, too. Blank space is

overwhelming. Now, if you come to me and say, do you want to go to

the movies or do you want to go ice skating this weekend?

I'll be like, oh, probably. Definitely the movies. Because I got weak ankles and I

can't hold up ice skates. So ice skates not gonna work. If you come up

to me and say, do you want to go to. This was an actual

decision we had to make recently. Do you want to go apple picking or do

you want to go to the World's largest

arcade that is near our house up here, but also is

a petri dish of every communicable respiratory

illness that every child has ever had in the entire New England

area. That is a very simple choice. So

what you're probably responding to is that there are too many choices, but

if somebody gave you two choices, you would be fine. I will also

say that if someone asks me what I want to do this weekend,

my answer is probably going to be nothing, because I genuinely want to do

nothing. I do things a lot, and they require a lot

of my brain and a lot of my energy and a lot of decision making.

And the idea of not having that responsibility or any of those

responsibilities for two whole days.

Amazing. Is it likely that I won't get two whole

days without having to make decisions? No. Is it likely that I will get three

whole hours without having to make decisions? Also no. But

often my answer is nothing, because

I want it to be nothing. The other thing that I get

a lot is, do you have any plans for this weekend? To which

I respond, God, I hope not, because

plans are awful. Plans mean you have to

do things, and I don't want to do things.

Sometimes we do have plans occasionally. Very occasionally. Like,

not that long ago, my husband and I went to go see Pat

Noswalt. He was in town and we went to go see him and we had

actual plans. And the fun thing was

I forgot about them until, like, the morning of

when my husband reminded me that the tickets that I had purchased

voluntarily were that night. It's not like my husband,

like, surprised me with tickets to this show I wanted to go to. I had

been like, hey, do you want to go see Patton Oswald? He was like, yeah,

sure. And so I bought the tickets and then promptly forgot

about them. Thankfully, he remembered and coordinated,

like, childcare and stuff. That was nice of him.

There is also a good chance that if I have plans, I do not remember

until someone reminds me. The actual point here was that

what you're fighting against is thinking in blank space and the fact that there are

way too many choices. And so you can either

saying you have no plans, which is totally fine and not only

acceptable, but admirable, or you can come up with

something that maybe you want to do, or you can have two options in your

pocket ready to go in the event that somebody asks you this thing, so you

always have two choices that are available to you,

or you can just say, I don't know, I don't make plans. Life is too

chaotic for that. And that's totally fine. These

are all not even bizarre. Like, that's kind of like a

pleasant social thing that comes up, that is somebody trying to make

conversation with you, but the reality is that they don't actually care that much

about your answer. Whatever is fine. It'll be a jumping off point for the rest

of the conversation. And when you're me and make it very clear that plans would

be your nightmare, like, the conversation unfolds naturally from

there because they're like, please tell me why you refuse to wear shoes. And I'm

like, I would love to. Thanks for being here, guys.

Have a good day. Love you. Mean it.

So I was born on December 29th. So I'm one of those people who has

the end of the year birthday that doesn't exist. Which is fine, because I hate

my birthday, and I never want to pay attention to my birthday. And if nobody

draws any attention to my birthday whatsoever, I'm like, happy. And when people

do, I'm like, shut up. This is dumb. I don't like it anyway. I'm

a total shit on my birthday the whole time. Like, I'm grouchy, and

everybody's like, what do you want to do? And I'm like, I want to do

nothing. Don't talk to me. I just want a nap. I don't want to do

nothing. Don't talk to me. That said, it was supposed to

be the first or second week of January, but my

mother had me induced for the tax write off. If the baby is born

before December 31, the whole year is a tax write off.

But if the baby is born after the first of the year, just the portion

of the year since the baby was born is a tax write

off. And so she had me induced over a week early,

in case you want to know when I got gifted my

first dose of generational trauma.