Why Work Can Feel More Exhausting When You’re an Introvert

For years, there was something about the way I worked that I didn’t really understand.

I could start the day feeling motivated, focused and ready to get loads done. Then I’d have a few meetings, a load of conversations, a couple of people needing things from me and suddenly the work I’d planned to do that afternoon felt ten times harder.

I wasn’t physically tired. I hadn’t necessarily done anything particularly difficult. But mentally, I was done.

Like a lot of introverts, I just assumed this was something I needed to get better at. Maybe I needed to be more resilient. Maybe everyone felt like this and I was just worse at dealing with it. Maybe this was simply what having a demanding career felt like.

It took me a long time to realise I was thinking about it completely wrong.

The work itself wasn’t always what was exhausting me. It was everything surrounding the work.

The bit of your job nobody accounts for

Think about what happens during a completely normal working day.

You might have a meeting at 9am, another at 10am and a Teams call at 11am. Somebody messages you with a question while you’re trying to concentrate. You have lunch with colleagues. Your manager grabs you for a quick conversation. Then there’s another meeting at 2pm.

None of those things necessarily looks particularly demanding.

But you’re not just sitting there.

You’re listening to people, processing what they’re saying, working out what’s relevant, thinking about your own response, deciding whether to say it, finding the right moment to come in, reading people’s reactions and constantly switching your attention between different people, problems and conversations.

If you’re also conscious of how you’re coming across, there’s another layer on top of that. Do I look engaged enough? Should I say something? Have I been too quiet? Does everyone think I disagree? Should I turn my camera on? Why am I thinking about what my face is doing on Teams instead of listening to what Steve is saying?

Then the meeting finishes and your calendar tells you that you’ve finally got two free hours to do some proper work.

Except there’s a problem.

You’ve got the time. You just haven’t necessarily got the same amount of energy you had at the start of the day.

I call this the Performance Tax

The Performance Tax is the extra cognitive and emotional energy you spend navigating everything surrounding your actual job.

It’s the energy spent being “on”. The meetings, interruptions, visibility, social interaction, context switching and all the little bits of professional performance that are so normal we barely notice we’re doing them.

Everybody pays some version of this tax. But I think a lot of introverts can end up paying considerably more of it than they realise.

That’s an important distinction because introversion is often reduced to whether somebody is quiet, shy or likes spending time alone.

It’s more complicated than that.

One of the things we know from personality research is that introversion and extroversion are associated with differences in how people respond to stimulation and reward. That doesn’t mean every introvert experiences work in exactly the same way, but it helps explain why environments with lots of interaction, noise and stimulation can feel very different from one person to another.

Then add the cognitive demands of a modern working day. Every time you switch context, process another conversation, read another social cue or move from one meeting straight into another, your brain is doing something.

You can barely say a word in a meeting and still come out of it mentally exhausted.

Quiet doesn’t mean your brain hasn’t been busy.

This changed how I thought about productivity

I used to get into the office at 6am.

Yes, I liked having the place to myself. Obviously. 😂

But there was a much more practical reason for it.

I knew that those first few hours were when I could get the work done that actually required my brain. If I had three or four meetings in the morning and left that work until the afternoon, there was a good chance I’d be staring at it wondering why something that would have taken me an hour at 7am suddenly felt almost impossible.

At the time, I didn’t understand why.

I just knew how I worked, so I’d unconsciously built a system around it.

Years later, I realised I’d figured out the solution before I properly understood the problem. I was protecting my best cognitive energy for my most important work before I’d paid the Performance Tax.

That’s completely changed how I think about productivity.

We’re obsessed with managing time. We block out calendars, write to-do lists, prioritise tasks and desperately try to find an empty hour somewhere in the day.

But an empty hour isn’t necessarily an hour of useful cognitive capacity.

Two hours before a morning of meetings can feel completely different from two hours after them. Having the time to do something doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve still got the energy to do it well.

For me, that’s a far more useful way of understanding why some working days feel the way they do.

Then there’s the Performance Tax we create ourselves

This is where I think it gets particularly interesting for introverts.

Some of the tax comes from the environment. You can’t always avoid the meetings, interruptions or interactions that are part of your job.

But some of it comes from the additional performance we put on top.

Speaking in a meeting because you’re worried you’ve been too quiet, rather than because you actually have something useful to add. Staying at a networking event long after you’ve run out of energy because leaving early might look antisocial. Rehearsing something in your head five times before saying it. Trying to appear more enthusiastic or outgoing than you naturally are. Worrying about whether your quietness is being interpreted as disengagement.

None of those things appears on your job description.

But they all take something from you.

And if you’ve spent years being told you need to “speak up more”, “put yourself out there” or “come out of your shell”, there’s a decent chance you’ve learnt to perform a version of yourself at work without even realising you’re doing it.

That’s Performance Tax too.

The answer isn’t avoiding everything that drains you

I want to be really clear about this because there’s a lot of terrible advice about introversion online.

Being an introvert isn’t an excuse to avoid meetings, difficult conversations, presenting, leadership, networking or anything else that makes you uncomfortable.

I’ve spent more than 20 years building my career as an introvert. I’ve led international teams, spoken on stages, trained thousands of people and reached the C-suite. None of that happened by hiding from situations I didn’t particularly enjoy.

But it also didn’t happen because I eventually transformed myself into an extrovert.

I got better at understanding where my energy was going and whether I was getting anything useful in return for it.

Sometimes paying the Performance Tax is absolutely worth it. Speaking at a conference costs me energy, but there can be enormous value in doing it. A difficult conversation might drain me, but avoiding it could create a much bigger problem. Building an important professional relationship might require me to put myself in an uncomfortable situation.

The point isn’t to eliminate the tax.

It’s to stop paying it when you don’t need to.

How much are you paying?

That’s the question I’ve become much more interested in.

Not simply: How busy am I?

But: Where is my energy actually going?

You might discover that meetings are your biggest drain. It might be an open-plan office. It might be constant Slack or Teams interruptions. It might be networking. It might be the amount of energy you’re spending trying to appear more extroverted than you actually are.

Once you can see it, you can start making better decisions about it.

You can protect periods of focused work. Avoid stacking meetings when you have some control over your diary. Give yourself recovery time after something particularly demanding. Stop speaking in meetings purely to prove you’re engaged. Build professional relationships in ways that suit you rather than forcing yourself to “work the room”.

None of that means lowering your ambition.

If anything, I think it’s the opposite.

It’s about making sure you’re spending your limited energy on the things that actually move your career forward.

How Much Performance Tax Are You Paying?

I’ve been developing this idea as part of Introvert OS, the career system I’ve created around everything I’ve learnt about building a successful career as an introvert.

But I’ve taken the entire first section and turned it into a completely free guide called Why Introverts Get Overlooked at Work.

It goes much deeper into the Performance Tax, including professional masking, cognitive social load and the hidden ways modern workplaces can cost introverts energy. Most importantly, I’ve included a Performance Tax Score exercise that helps you identify where you’re paying yours and which parts might actually be unnecessary.

GET WHY INTROVERTS GET OVERLOOKED AT WORK – FREE

You might discover you’re not actually exhausted by your job.

You might just be spending far more energy than you realised on everything surrounding it.

And once you understand where the tax is coming from, you can start deciding which bits are actually worth paying.