I think one thing that’s useful in itself is just for people to admit that they feel this pressure sometimes. Hearing that other people feel the way I do—that other people worry about whether they’re doing the best thing, and worry about what others think of them—helped me to realise that it wasn’t just me, and accept that what I was feeling was natural.
This is super important, but I think there’s actually another failure mode to worry about: at some point people in my communities started talking more openly about feeling pressure / burn-out. This was helpful. But then, when a bunch of people burned out at one, the result was that several people I knew were frequently very negative (myself included), and this created a cycle of despair.
My tentative solution is that if a community or organization seems at high risk of that, people should take vacations and/or change their environment more, so that the negative feelings don’t all get concentrated in one place.
This is super important, but I think there’s actually another failure mode to worry about: at some point people in my communities started talking more openly about feeling pressure / burn-out. This was helpful. But then, when a bunch of people burned out at one, the result was that several people I knew were frequently very negative (myself included), and this created a cycle of despair.
My tentative solution is that if a community or organization seems at high risk of that, people should take vacations and/or change their environment more, so that the negative feelings don’t all get concentrated in one place.