Are You An Under Or Over-Functioner?
by Marissa Pomerance
How do you respond when you get an email at 4:37pm asking you to put together a 20-page presentation for a client meeting at 10am tomorrow morning?
Do you go into overdrive, working on the presentation for the next 12 hours, refusing help from your coworkers, obsessing over every single detail until your vision blurs and your hands cramp from typing? Or do you shut down and freeze, deciding you’ll “get to it later” and then rush to get it done at 9am the next morning?
Well, if you do the former, you’re probably an “over-functioner,” and if you do the latter, an “under-functioner.” According to Amanda White, “an over-functioner is someone who responds to stress or anxiety by doing as many things as possible. They are planners and relieve stress by crossing things off their to do list. Under-functioners respond to stress by freezing. They become overwhelmed and shut down and struggle to make decisions. They procrastinate, put things off and tend to hide and look to others to lead during times of crisis.”
Where do these coping mechanisms come from? Is one better than the other? And can we change how we function? All good questions. We’ll answer them below.
Why do we do this?
These styles of functioning are more than just being “Type-A” or “lazy.” They’re coping mechanisms we develop as children (or even as adults) to deal with stress and anxiety.
Over-functioners, like people-pleasers, might cope with anxiety by focusing on everyone else’s needs, running around to take care of them, or trying to “fix” a situation by over-preparing; they like to try to control the situation so that they can control the outcome and alleviate their anxiety. Under-functioners, on the other hand, become so overwhelmed by their fear and anxiety, that they want to just avoid the situation entirely.
And surprisingly, we’re not always either one or the other. “Some people can absolutely be both over and under-functioners, especially if they have gone through major changes in their life,” says Amanda White. Humans are complicated, and different stressors trigger different responses.
“If you are someone who was always an under-functioner, but then you have a child, you may need to over-function in that area to survive being a parent,” White explains. “Or maybe you were always an over-functioner, but then you married an over-functioner as well and they are even more of a planner than you, this may cause you to under-function in response to them.”
Sorry, being an “over-functioner” isn’t better. They’re both bad.
It might seem easy to read this article and go, “well of course I’d want to be an over-functioner! If I HAVE to be anxious, I might as well be productive and not ‘lazy.’” We love to praise productivity, and glamorize over-working, and congratulate people for not “succumbing” to things like grief or depression, as if feeling those things make us weak.
But there are some serious drawbacks to being an over-functioner, like “chronic exhaustion, burnout, bulldozing people and not allowing them to help, insomnia, restlessness, inability to be present, take time off or have fun, and being unable to delegate and resenting others,” says White. Plus, over-functioning can just lead to under-functioning. “Many over-functioners get stuck in a cycle where they work themselves to the point of burnout and then under-function until they can recoup and start over-functioning again,” she says. Over-functioning is exhausting, and only gives us the illusion of control.
That isn’t to say under-functioning is great either. Becoming frozen, and not knowing how to cope, certainly doesn’t “solve” anything either. And being an under-functioner can actually be a huge source of shame for people who’ve been lead to believe they were just “lazy” or not “driven” enough when they froze in the face of consuming stress or anxiety.
“Truthfully, I don’t buy into the idea that some people are just lazy,” says White. “Our behaviors always serve a purpose for us in some way, even if they do more harm than good. Procrastination for example, is often a form of stress relief. We feel better temporarily putting something off even if it makes it harder to do it in the future.”
How we change our coping style.
Ultimately, it’s on each of us to evaluate if this coping mechanism is serving our life, or just making us avoid our problems/try to control our anxiety. And if neither over nor under-functioning are working for us, HOW do we cope with life? “The goal for both over and under-functioners is to find balance,” says White. It’s to not swing to one extreme as a reaction. And to do this, we have to practice taking small actions that are outside our comfort zones, and go against our normal tendencies to over or under-function.
“For over-functioners, one of the most important things you can do is start planning breaks,” says White. “Practice delegating things to others, even if it is not done exactly how you want it. Practice pausing and thinking through your choices before immediately acting as a response to a problem. Not everything is a crisis that needs to be solved immediately.” Build a 20-minute walk into your afternoon each day, or make it a point to take 10 minutes to gather your thoughts before jumping into a crisis at work. Or if you’re overwhelmed with details planning your friend’s baby shower, instead of gritting your teeth and resenting all your friends who didn’t help, reach out to your friends and assign each of them a small task.
Under-functioning is a bit…trickier. Pausing and taking breaks might feel more do-able than doing things when we feel paralyzed.
But according to White, for under-functioners, “taking more action when they are stressed is a great way to push against their avoidant tendencies.” And we can practice this by doing small things at a time. Like making the effort to open the mail and pay the bills every Sunday, instead of tossing them in a pile because money stresses us out, and then paying penalty fees 3 months later when they’re overdue. Or, like answering emails the day we receive them so that we don’t have to stare at that stressful red bubble that tells us we have 35,637 unread emails on our phone.
If we keep working at it, maybe we’ll even become a…middle-functioner?
Marissa Pomerance is the Managing Editor of The Candidly. She’s a Los Angeles native and lover of all things food, style, beauty, and wellness. You can find more of her articles here.
