A while back I wrote a post how friendship and coaching (or therapy), can start to blur.
It struck a nerve.
That got me thinking about the deeper theme sitting underneath, one that doesn't get nearly enough attention.
Emotional labour.
Emotional labour is one of those terms that's either completely unknown or been flattened by overuse.
It shows up insiduously in wellness content, relationship advice, workplace conversations, usually in the form of a complaint.
That's a shame, because the original concept is genuinely rich. And understanding it properly changes how we move through professional and personal life in ways that can be underestimated.
Where It Comes From
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term Emotional Labour in 1983, to describe the labour involved in managing not just tasks, but feelings.
Our own and other people's.
The effort of staying calm when you're not calm. Of holding space for someone else's distress while quietly setting your own aside.
Hochschild called it labour because it costs something.
It depletes a resource.
And because it looks like just being there for someone, we rarely treat it as such.
What she identified was a specific kind of work: the management of one's own emotional state in order to produce a particular emotional response in someone else.
She called it labour deliberately. Because it costs something. It draws on a finite resource: our emotional energy.
And unlike physical or cognitive labour, it tends to go unacknowledged, both by the people performing and receiving it.
Later on additional research like Wharton's 2009 review in the Annual Review of Sociology expanded the concept significantly, showing how emotional labour functions not just in formal work settings but across social contexts including, crucially, in relationships we don't think of as transactional at all.
Friendships. Creative communities. Peer networks.
Grandey's research, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, drew a useful distinction between what she called surface acting (managing outward expression while feeling something different internally) and deep acting, which involves actually working to shift one's internal emotional state to match what's required.
Both are effortful. Deep acting tends to be more sustainable but requires considerably more skill and self-awareness to do well.
Why Creatives and High Performers Are Particularly Exposed
As creatives, we live in a particular kind of emotional weather.
- Uncertainty about whether the work is good enough.
- The vulnerability of putting something personal into the world and waiting to see how it lands.
- Cycles of momentum and stagnation that follow no logical pattern.
We turn to the people closest to us to help carry it. Naturally.
Reaching out to a friend for support is an instinct.
But when we ask a friend to help us process, it is real, effortful, and even costly work.
Without a framework, without training, and without the boundaries that make that kind of work sustainable, it can badly.
Friends will usually say yes, because they love us, and saying otherwise might feel like abandonment.
But the cost of expectations that were not designed for that dynamic can accumulate quietly.
Since writing that earlier post, my work has expanded beyond musicians and artists. I've been coaching high performers across fields with nothing to do with music or conventional creativity.
What's struck me is how consistently this conversation lands the same way regardless of context.
Session musician or senior consultant, the dynamics are remarkably similar. We are not taught, anywhere really, to accurately assess the emotional cost of what we ask of the people around us.
And so the debt accumulates, unacknowledged by everyone involved.
Emotional labour can look like conversation.
A long phone call, a coffee, a late-night text exchange.
It doesn't feel like we're asking for something substantial.
We are.
The creative life compounds this in specific ways.
When the work is also the identity, the emotional weight being carried is more than just logistical.
Asking a friend to help hold the question of who you are and whether any of this matters is a significant request to make of someone also just trying to live their life.
The dimension of competitiveness and bias rarely gets acknowledged honestly either.
A friend who is also a peer in the same field or has known you from a different phase of your life is not a neutral party.
They may care about you deeply but carry complicated feelings about your journey, success, struggle, or visibility. Their definition of support on offer is filtered through a lens covering up blindspots for both parties.
The Line That Doesn't Get Named
Understanding emotional labour starts with learning to identify the line.
The point beyond which what's being asked of someone stops being friendship and starts becoming something else entirely — something that has its own dedicated, trained space for good reason.
This comes up constantly.
- Friends too proud to seek therapy or coaching who end up offloading onto whoever is available.
- Colleagues who think coaching is a scam but won’t hesitate to ask for your qualified advice repetitively ending with ‘good talk’.
- Communities where certain members quietly end up doing far more emotional lifting than they ever signed up for.
But let’s have a little more compassion for the human condition. One confronted with levels of pressure unprecedented in history.
I like to use the plumber analogy here.
If a friend happens to be a plumber, they might help you out with a minor problem once.
Goodwill, no invoice, no fuss.
But if we find yourself calling them every time something leaks, expecting the same quality of attention, the same patience, the same expertise for free, indefinitely, it’s just disrespectful.
The dynamic changes. The friendship changes. And the quality of the support changes too.
Not because they stopped caring, but because the arrangement was never designed to hold that kind of weight.
Therapy and coaching exist because qualified support requires investment. In training, in practice, in maintaining the kind of objectivity that makes the support actually useful. When we bypass that and inadvertently turn to friends, colleagues, or community members instead, we place them in an awkward position. One where the honest answer, "this is beyond what I can offer you here," becomes almost impossible to say without someone’s feelings getting hurt along the way.
Now you’ve lost both a decent plumber, and your friend.
What It Actually Takes to Do This Better
Developing emotional literacy.
Grandey's work suggests that deep acting, actually working with one's internal emotional state rather than just managing its surface expression, is more sustainable and less depleting than suppression or performance.
This requires being able to identify what you're actually feeling with some precision, which is a skill, not a given. Most of us have a working vocabulary of about five to eight emotional states. The actual range is considerably larger.
Expanding that vocabulary, whether through therapy, reflective practice, or simply paying closer attention, changes what's available to you in high-stakes emotional moments.
Understanding our own thresholds.
The research on emotional exhaustion consistently shows that the damage is cumulative and slow-building. We routinely overestimate how much we have left because the depletion isn't linear. It tends to plateau and then drop sharply.
Knowing our own patterns and taking them seriously before the drop is a discipline that most high performers apply to physical recovery but rarely to emotional capacity.
Getting clearer on what we're actually asking for.
Festinger's social comparison research suggests that a significant portion of what we bring to peers for 'support' is actually a search for validation of a conclusion we've already reached. That's a different need than genuine inquiry, and it tends to put the person receiving it in an impossible position.
So either we confirm what we want to hear, or risk the relationship.
Developing the habit of identifying which one we’re actually after, before the conversation starts, cleans up the dynamic considerably.
Knowing when a container is the wrong size.
Some emotional and professional needs are simply beyond what informal relationships can hold well. Recognising that isn't blanket commentary on the quality of those relationships. It's an attempt to assess what different kinds of relationship are designed for.
Conclusion
The concept of emotional labour deserves more than a passing reference in a conversation about burnout or boundaries. It's a precise and useful lens on something that affects the quality of our relationships, our work, and our capacity to show up for the people who matter to us.
Getting better at it isn't about becoming more guarded. It's about becoming more accurate — about what's being asked, what's being given, and what the arrangement can actually sustain.
References
Hochschild, A.R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.
Wharton, A.S. (2009). The Sociology of Emotional Labor. Annual Review of Sociology, 35, 147–165.
Grandey, A.A. (2000). Emotional Regulation in the Workplace: A New Way to Conceptualize Emotional Labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), 95–110.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. HarperCollins.
Festinger, L. (1954). A Theory of Social Comparison Processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.
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