High Functioning Anxiety is a thing.

And it's driving fundraisers to quit the profession. But there is another way.

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Salesforce’s Chief Business Officer Ebony Beckwith shared an article recently on the topic of “high-functioning anxiety”, a mental health condition that manifests as perfectionism, people-pleasing, overachieving, overworking, to name a few. People with high-functioning anxiety often look like total rockstars but are fueled by intense fear and stress - as if your brain gets into a toxic relationship with itself: Amygdala Kanye and Hippocampus Kim.

(Sidebar: I’m no neuroscientist but you get the idea)

But society - and especially the fundraising profession - rewards people with high-functioning anxiety. Like a cult driven by overachievement, we lionize people who work 80 hours a week and travel maniacally for their jobs. Rise and grind. Hustle baby. One more call. One more email. One more trip. One more meeting. One more…anything.

Thing is though, it’ll never, ever be enough.

A few years ago, I interviewed with a top-tier fundraising consultancy looking for a Campaign lead in the Northeast. The firm required its fundraising consultants to physically be on-site with clients Monday - Thursday, on average 16 days/month. In one interview session, I asked a would-be future colleague how she managed the travel schedule and her life. She said, “Oh I could not do this job without my boyfriend.” I then asked her if she had kids and she replied, “No way I could do this if I had kids.”

And since I had a working spouse and two young daughters, that was the end of that.

But there is a lot of admiration for this sort of fundraiser behavior. It’s as if being a full-time fundraiser means that fundraising is all you do, ever, and at all hours: You reply to emails in real-time, after hours, and on weekends. You sacrifice personal relationships for donor relationships, you choose your organization over yourself.

And while this might generate short-term success, it distorts expectations, and creates more actions, more follow-up, and more time on task. All of this leads to burnout, even higher levels of anxiety, and ultimately to staff turnover: both for the star performer and the team alike.

So what can we do?

For starters, instead of glamorizing the extra emails, the weekend commitments and superfluous travel, or the beyond-insane levels of service we sometimes provide to prospective donors (with little evidence of ROI, more on that in a future post), advancement leaders could do more to publicly acknowledge staff who achieve work-life balance, or work to establish appropriate boundaries between donor and organization, or find creative ways to prioritize their own mental and family health.

We could also call out extra (and unnecessary) additional effort as inefficient, or incentivize balance, healthy activities, or more time with family. We can implement flex work programs and 4-day work weeks that let fundraising professionals practice relentless self-care.

But most importantly, we can put a stopper in the bottom of the fundraising bucket, and let our staff know that there is a point at which enough truly is good enough.