Disclaimer: This series is inspired, among other things, by the findings of the “Loneliness at Work” study prepared by Symetria. All interpretations and conclusions are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of the report’s authors or of any organization. The article does not refer to any specific company or professional situation. It describes systemic mechanisms typical of complex organizations.
Today’s guest is Katarzyna Dahlke, a fifth-year clinical psychology student at WSB Merito University in Gdańsk. Her comment on the text and a short bio are at the end, and I already encourage you to fill in the survey for her study on stress and coping styles in the IT industry among people aged 35–50, which Katarzyna is currently running.
Sometimes it is enough to sit down in a project room five minutes before a meeting starts to feel more about the condition of a team than from any report. It is that quiet tension which is not a conflict, but is not neutral either. As if everyone were half a second late relative to themselves.
I am not talking about stress here, because stress is loud. This is something quieter. Something that forms between people when they work too long on too thin a cognitive margin. That margin is precisely the place where emotional debt is born - which is what today is about.
The pandemic greatly limited the experience of it, especially in its early stages, but still: in remote or hybrid work it can be felt as well (I take my hat off here to highly sensitive people and to some neurodivergent people, who are exceptionally attuned to such signals). This characteristic kind of debt is like dust in a server room: nobody notices it until it starts lowering performance.
Debt as a side effect of working under overload
Emotional debt is born from micro-events - the same ones Weiss and Cropanzano described as catalysts of emotional reactions at work. The team does not register them, because they do not look like a problem, but the system remembers them:
- every sentence left half-said;
- every decision that lands one context too early;
- every promise that has to be moved to later, because the priority changed in the course of the day.
I would not want this to be taken as demonizing business. In organizations that run on complexity and large networks of dependencies, such changes are a normal arrangement. Weick would say that sense is made on the run. And that is exactly why, on the run, something often falls out of a pocket. In today’s story: a fragment of stability.
This is not about emotions in the colloquial sense, but more about a series of micro-tensions which, in the research on “daily hassles,” turned out to be far more exhausting than large events. Over a single day, nothing is visible. Over a month, the team’s behavior changes. Over a quarter - one hopes action has already been taken to prevent it.
Cognitive overload as the condition for debt to form
Many of these changes have their source not even in psychology, but in pure cognitive mechanics. Sweller showed this very clearly: working memory has limits. The limits are not negotiable. If work constantly delivers too many signals, the organism starts cutting costs, like any overloaded system.
This is where McEwen and his concept of allostatic load come in. Chronic micro-tensions accumulate. “Coping” becomes a defensive strategy, not a function of effectiveness. You can see it in the team’s micro-gestures: shorter words, breath more often held on harder questions, a lower tolerance for uncertainty, greater fatigue with context, an unconscious chipping away at quality.
How debt shifts a team’s behavior
The change begins with people stopping doing things they used to do automatically.
- Resilience to complexity drops. The tasks are not harder, but the system is less flexible. This is an effect known from the literature on cognitive stress.
- The communicative fuse shortens. Not in the sense of conflict - rather, for example, the reflex to paraphrase disappears, the question “am I understanding this correctly?” or following up on some undiscussed details, because that costs. The shrinking of psychological space is well described here in Edmondson’s research.
- Creativity is the first to go out. Not because people “have no ideas,” but because ideas need free space in the system. Have you ever had an idea in the bathroom or the toilet? That is, among other things, because you had free space for it (for example, drops of water in the shower de-stimulate you from the surroundings and everyday worries; you are set to unwind, and with you - your mind). Baumeister showed that cognitive exhaustion hits executive functions first.
- A sense of agency disappears slowly, without drama. More as a gentle leaking of meaning from everyday actions. Amabile and Kramer documented this fairly precisely.
Why organizations do not see this
Organizations have a certain shared systemic trait: they see only signals that can be measured. And emotional debt is impossible to measure in real time.
So why is it most often registered when it is already too late?
Confusing symptoms with competencies
- A drop in creativity? “Lack of innovativeness.”
- Shorter communication? “Lack of soft skills.”
- Slower decisions? “Low accountability.”
Each of these conclusions is wrong. But simple, so it wins.
Reporting policy smooths reality
Most teams cannot openly report fatigue, overload, or a loss of a sense of agency - not because they do not want to, but because there is no category provided for it. Reporting systems register execution, not the cost of execution.
Boards get this data with a delay of several quarters
Performance falls slowly. First a little. Then a little more. And only when the problem starts eating innovativeness or retention does a diagnosis appear - usually with a large error in pointing to the cause.
Heroic culture covers the real physiology of work
People in organizations tend to “deliver no matter what” (read: the so-called grind culture). That destroys early-warning signals. The team stops talking about load before anyone notices that it is working on reserve.
Confusing complexity with chaos
Snowden’s Cynefin shows this well: organizations often apply tools from the “obvious” or “complicated” domain to problems that have long been in “complex.” And that is exactly where emotional debt has the best conditions to grow - in an attempt to put in order something that is not orderable at all (quiet in the back; as of today, that word exists).
Systemic effect: cognitive cost grows faster than the speed of work
When cognitive resources fall and complexity rises - the system slows down, though subtly, invisibly. For a long time there are no dramas; simply every decision is a few percent heavier, and every task - a few seconds longer. Sprints start requiring more energy to give the same result. After some time this cascade becomes noticeable at a wider scale.
This is the moment at which organizations start implementing additional processes, believing that “the problems come from a lack of control.”
Meanwhile it is precisely the excess of control that raises the cost even further. You cannot partly repair an overloaded architecture by adding further layers of load.
The simplest test for emotional debt needs no studies, questionnaires, or consultants. It is enough to ask people when they last had the feeling that their work really “landed” - that it was light, connecting the dots, giving meaning (because among other things it is about giving work meaning that we are talking here). If the answer is uncomfortably distant, it is not that the team “came apart.” What came apart is the cognitive margin the team is standing on.
Emotional debt is not a result of people’s weakness. It is a result of the weakness of systems that expect stability without creating the conditions for stability.
And in this way, a discussion about this or that set of soft skills must in fact turn into a discussion about the infrastructure of work.
Comment from Katarzyna Dahlke
Emotions deferred come back with interest - stress, depression, and a body in alarm mode
Emotional debt does not remind you of itself with a notification on your phone, but its precision can surprise. The longer a person avoids their emotions, the more clearly stress rises, mood drops, and symptoms appear that cannot be explained by the weather or a lack of magnesium. In psychology it has long been known that suppressing emotions is one of the strongest predictors of chronic stress, because it keeps the nervous system in readiness mode far longer than it was designed for (Gross & Levenson, 1997). The organism then behaves as if it were waiting for something that “was supposed to happen, but still has not.”
Correlate 1: Stress - the first signal that arrears have started to accumulate
When emotions find no outlet, the body treats them as a threat. It raises cortisol, disrupts sleep, shortens the breath, causes muscle tension, and the person starts living in a state of readiness that resembles a mental false start. This is the moment at which a seemingly ordinary conversation can trigger a reaction out of proportion to the situation - an example? A “small remark at work” suddenly makes a person fall asleep in silence with the feeling that the whole world has it in for them.
Correlate 2: Depression - the finale of the story when the tension lasts too long
Research on chronic stress shows that prolonged activation of the stress system leads to a depletion of resources (McEwen, 2004). And when resources fall, what appears in practice looks like emotional fading: lack of energy, apathy, difficulty making decisions, and a shrinking capacity to feel pleasure. Depression often does not start dramatically - sometimes it looks like a person saying: “I’m not sad… nothing just makes me glad anymore.” And that is precisely one of the most serious signals that emotional debt has crossed the safety threshold.
Correlate 3: Psychosomatic disorders - when the body plays the emotions we did not let out
The organism has its ways of demanding attention. If emotions are systematically put off, the body starts speaking for the person: with a headache, pressure in the chest, stomach problems, or chronic fatigue that cannot be explained by test results. The literature shows that people who avoid emotional confrontation have a distinctly higher level of somatic symptoms (Pennebaker, 1997; Lumley, 2011). This is not “sensitivity,” a “bit of stress,” or “just how they are,” but a message that the organism does not intend to store overdue emotions for free.
I am a fifth-year clinical psychology student at WSB Merito University in Gdańsk. Day to day I work with the De Stare foundation and write psychological articles for people working in IT as part of Product Art. I have constant contact with the IT environment and I observe the challenges and loads people in this industry face. The topic of my research and the choice of the study group are not accidental. They come from real stories, conversations, and experiences. I want to understand better the scale of the problem that stress is in this professional group, so that I can draw more accurate and practical conclusions.
I am running research on stress and coping styles in the IT industry among people aged 35–50, to better capture what is not visible to the naked eye day to day: how much it costs to keep up the pace, quality, and responsibility when professional and private life meet halfway.
If you work in IT and are in that age range - I will be enormously grateful if you fill in the survey: https://forms.gle/MnhpBGiwMzRSgs1R9
And if you are not in the study group, I will be very grateful for every share onward.