Do You Overfunction or Underfunction?

We all have different ways of contending with anxiety.

I’m hosting a weekend workshop (via Zoom) on Human Design with Emma Dunwoody on Saturday, July 27th at 4pm PST—come join us! Generate your chart on Emma’s site if you haven’t done this before and bring it with you to the call—Emma will be taking us through the basics and then we’ll dig into some of your questions. This is for paid PTT subscribers, the link to register is at the end of the email behind the paywall. Hope to see you there!

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There are few concepts that are more immediately helpful to me in times of high stress than a concept from therapist Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger, The Dance of Fear, and so many more classics.

Paul Klee, “In the Kairouan Style, Transposed in a Moderate Way,” 1914, LACMA

As she explains, when times of high anxiety hit, there’s a fork in the road that at least I can recognize in my own behavior and relationship (hint: I overfunction).

This is from Dance of Fear, where she writes: “Overfunctioning and underfunctioning are automatic ways that we respond to stress and try to dampen our own anxiety, especially when we don’t have a clue about where the real threat lies or what to do about it. As with pursuing and distancing, our particular style of managing anxiety in relationships is not good or bad, better or worse. Each style of managing anxiety has both positive and problematic aspects.” She continues:

If you overfunction under stress, you may:

• Feel you know what's best, not just for yourself but for others as well.

• Move in quickly to advise, rescue, mediate, and take over.

• Have difficulty sitting back and allowing others to struggle with their own problems.

• Avoid anxiety about your own personal goals and problems by focusing on others.

• Have difficulty sharing your own vulnerable underfunctioning side, especially with those who are viewed as having problems.

• Be labeled the person who is “always reliable” or “always together.”

If you underfunction under stress, you may:

• Have several areas where you just can’t get organized.

• Become less competent under stress, then inviting others to take over.

• Tend to report physical or emotional symptoms when stress is high in your family or job.

• Become the focus of gossip, worry, or concern.

• Earn such labels as “the fragile one,” “the sick one,” or “the lazy, incompetent one.”

• Have difficulty showing your strong, competent side to intimate others.

Lerner notes that overfunctioners and underfunctioners tend to pair up—and then exacerbate the tendency in each other. “If you overfunction for an underfunctioner, that person will underfunction even more. Ditto for pursuers and distancers. If you pursue a distancer, he will distance more—and vice versa. It’s an unfortunate irony: The ways we navigate relationships to relieve our personal anxiety in the short run only make things more stressful in the long run.”

I rush to overfunction—it makes me feel so much better in the moment, but then yes, it exacerbates a dynamic that ultimately drives me nuts. After all, one of the sticky “stories” I worked on during the workshop that Courtney Smith and I led in May was: “I’m the only one who can do it right, therefore I should do it all.” This is peak overfunctioning. I hate this story (a belief that I enact in my life all over the place) and worked hard all weekend to shift it into something more balanced and helpful: “I’m more powerful when I have support.”

Besides romantic partnerships, family systems, friendships, and some work relationships, we also tend to play these tendencies out in the wider culture. In response to the political stress from the past few weeks, my friends are in two camps: Compulsive news consumption and posting in order to feel like they are doing something (you could argue that they are) versus those who are refusing to engage. As someone who has historically tended to do the former tactic, I’m trying something new for me: I read my friend

Jessica Yellin

’s newsletter (and pay attention to her Instagram of the same name, News Not Noise), as she does an excellent job of synthesizing and explaining what’s happening around the world, without using outrage to stoke anxiety (and engagement). And then I’m doing what I always do, which is reading books—not so much about this moment, but because I want to understand people who don’t think or vote in the way that I do. (Recent highlights include Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, Frank Bruni’s The Age of Grievance, Ken Wilber’s Finding Radical Wholeness, and Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap.)

Meanwhile, I urge you to counterfunction, if only to try something new—if you power work through your anxiety, will yourself to do nothing but sit on the coach and watch Love Island. If you tend to fall apart in the face of stress force yourself to go on a walk and make a to-do list. These may be entrenched patterns, but we don’t have to let them define us.

For related content from Lerner on overfunctioning, you can find the major takeaways from The Dance of Anger here, along with my podcast conversation with Lerner here.

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6/21: Cracking mental illness with Karl Deisseroth, M.D., PhD
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6/7: Connecting with the divine with Nicole Avant
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My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.