The Brain Chemistry of Checking Out
Everyone thought she’d stopped caring. That wasn’t it.
I knew what was coming about three meetings before anyone else noticed.
She used to be that person.
The one who spoke first.
The one who filled the silence when a question landed badly and everyone pretended to take notes.
The one who volunteered so quickly it looked like enthusiasm, not reflex.
Managers loved her. Teams relied on her. Someone once described her as “high potential,” which is corporate shorthand for we will give you more responsibility and call it development.
Then she did something deeply unsettling.
She stopped.
Not dramatically. Not rudely. Not in a way that could be escalated or documented. She didn’t disengage. She adjusted. She spoke less. Listened more. Let other people go first.
By week three, someone said,
“Do you think she’d checked out?”
By week four, a manager said,
“She just didn’t seem as motivated as she used to be.”
By week five, I was already bored. This was always the part where organisations mistook self-preservation for attitude.
From the outside, it looked like disengagement.
From where I was sitting — very comfortably, in the warm sunpatch of repeated organisational mistakes — it looked like a nervous system doing its job.
People don’t stop caring because they’re lazy.
They stop offering themselves up when the environment stops feeling safe.
And that’s where it got interesting.
Because when someone goes quiet like that, you can label it.
Checked out.
Low energy.
Not as engaged as she used to be.
Or you can follow it.
So naturally, I followed.
Not in a creepy way. More in the way a cat follows a familiar sound in a house it already knows too well. No drama. No breakdown. Just curiosity. This pattern never started where people thought it did.
Nothing had “happened” in the way organisations recognised as an incident.
No shouting. No complaint. No HR-shaped moment.
But there had been a shift.
A meeting where her idea was acknowledged and then quietly parked.
A project reframed at the last minute without her in the room.
A stretch assignment that stretched everything except her authority.
Each one small enough to explain away.
Taken together, unmistakable.
People noticed. Of course they did. The quiet didn’t go unseen. The hesitation registered. But the system only knew how to talk about behaviour, so everything got flattened into attitude.
“She was less engaged.”
“She didn’t seem as motivated.”
Convenient framing. It kept the problem personal. Contained. Manageable.
What it avoided was the more uncomfortable truth. By the time someone looked “less engaged,” the change had already happened somewhere far less negotiable than mindset.
Not in her head.
In her body.
I recognised the pattern because I’d felt it before. Not academically. Not from a book. From experience.
There’s a moment — quieter than people expect — where something underneath makes a decision before your brain has time to narrate it. You’re still turning up. Still nodding. Still doing the work. But the environment has been reclassified.
Not dangerous.
Just not worth relaxing in.
You don’t think I’m disengaging now.
You just stop volunteering.
Stop offering ideas that require belief.
Stop spending energy on things that might disappear without warning.
You become careful. Efficient. Sensible.
Very good at surviving.
Once you’ve noticed that downgrade in yourself, it’s hard to miss it in others. You see it in the pauses. In the careful phrasing. In the way someone suddenly prefers work with clean edges and predictable outcomes.
From the outside, it looked like checking out.
From the inside, it felt like being practical.
By that point, I was already on the desk. No one had invited me. Someone’s pen fell to the floor. No one noticed. They were busy debating motivation.
She was at her desk when the message came in.
Not urgent.
Not unreasonable.
The kind of request that ended with “Should be quick” and quietly assumed she would make it so.
She read it once.
Then again.
Before, she would have replied immediately. Clarifying questions. A suggested approach. A small improvement no one asked for but everyone would later rely on. She would have pre-empted the problem before it existed.
Instead, she stared at the corner of her desk and thought — briefly, seriously — that what the situation needed was a landline.
Not to call anyone.
Just to have one.
A beige one. Heavy. With a cord. Something with enough physical presence to make a point when slammed back into its cradle.
There was no one to slam it down on. That wasn’t the point. The point was the permission. The ritual of saying: this is where frustration gets to exist out loud.
She looked at her laptop instead. Thin. Polite. Always watching.
She typed a response.
Short. Accurate. Contained.
She answered exactly what was asked. Nothing more. No suggestions. No future-proofing. No extra line at the end offering help beyond the scope of the question.
She read it once.
Sent it.
Nothing bad happened.
That was the part no one noticed.
The work still moved. The request was satisfied. The world didn’t collapse because she hadn’t given the additional ten percent she used to give by default.
Somewhere in the background, a part of her noted this. Filed it away. Not emotionally. Practically.
So we don’t need to do all that anymore.
She took a sip of her coffee. It was cold. She drank it anyway.
If there had been a landline on the desk, she might have slammed it down right then. Just once. For the satisfaction.
Instead, she adjusted her chair and opened the next task.
From the outside, she looked focused.
From the inside, she was learning exactly how little she could give and still be considered “engaged.”
What was actually happening was much less dramatic. Her brain had stopped treating work as a place for possibility and started treating it as a place to move carefully.
Effort stopped feeling rewarding. Optimism became expensive. The parts of her that used to roam were called back in.
Not because she’d stopped caring.
Because her system had stopped subsidising uncertainty.
While everyone else debated engagement, I watched her do something very reasonable.
She answered the question that was asked, not the one she could see coming. She chose the task with the clearest edges. She stopped being the person who caught things before they fell apart.
That role cost more than it paid back.
She was still at her desk. Same chair. Same notebook. Same half-cold coffee she’d forgotten was there. If you passed her in the corridor, you’d think nothing had changed.
She was polite. Responsive. Still delivering.
She just didn’t offer herself up anymore.
Someone noticed she was quieter.
Someone else decided she was less engaged.
No one connected it to the meeting three months earlier. Or the project that had changed shape without her. Or the way responsibility kept expanding while authority never did.
None of it was dramatic enough to point to. That was the problem.
From where she was sitting, this wasn’t disengagement. It was budgeting. Energy, attention, belief — all finite. She’d stopped spending them where the return was unpredictable.
I stayed where I was. Nearby. Watching. Knocking another pen to the floor for my own amusement.
She wasn’t checked out.
She was still there. Still capable. Still paying attention.
She’d just learned, very quietly, what not to give away for free.
And if you’re wondering whether she stayed — really stayed — the answer probably wasn’t in her performance right then.
It was in how long she thought that version of herself needed to exist.
That’s usually when people start leaving.