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Picture two people facing the same brutal Monday: back-to-back meetings, an inbox that never empties, a deadline that keeps moving. One is quietly drowning. The other, somehow, stays afloat. It’s the same job and the same pressure. What’s different?
Chances are, it’s the people around them.
Over the past few decades, a compelling body of research has assembled a striking case: Social connection doesn’t just make work more pleasant. It fundamentally changes how difficult and threatening challenges appear to us.
Hills Look Steeper Alone
In a now-famous 2008 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers had participants stand at the base of a steep hill wearing a heavy backpack and estimate its steepness. Those who stood alone rated the hill as significantly steeper than those standing beside a friend. The effect grew stronger the longer and warmer the friendship. In a follow-up, participants who merely imagined a supportive person nearby also saw the hill as less steep, while imagining someone they disliked made it look steeper still.
The researchers concluded that the brain treats supportive relationships as a kind of psychological energy. When you feel connected, your nervous system lightens the load. The perception of the challenge changes.
This sits within a much larger body of evidence. Social support shifts how the brain appraises stress, moving us from a threat state (not enough resources to meet the demands) to a challenge state (I can handle this). That shift shows up in lower cortisol, reduced blood pressure, and measurably better performance under pressure.
Enter Relational Energy
Research on relational energy, the feeling of uplift and renewed zest that follows a positive interaction, bridges the social support literature and the daily reality of work. We have all felt it: a conversation that leaves you more motivated than when it started, or a leader who leaves energy in the room rather than draining it.
In my forthcoming book with Kim Cameron, Relational Energy: How to Beat Burnout and Ignite Your Team (Berrett-Koehler, January 2027), we identify a distinctive quality of leaders who are perceived as energizing: They helped their people feel less overwhelmed by stressors. Across the board, the energizing leaders we interviewed demonstrated to their team, consistently and credibly, that they had their back and were committed to their success. That signal — you are not alone in this — transformed how pressure was experienced.
Critically, these leaders knew their own support was only half the equation. We found that they were equally purposeful about fostering camaraderie within the team, cultivating relationships among members, not just between themselves and each individual. Collective support, the sense that the whole group is in it together, was just as powerful a buffer as anything a leader could provide. A team that genuinely has each other’s backs perceives the work differently.
This maps onto the hill study mentioned. The hill doesn’t shrink, but when someone trustworthy stands beside you and the whole team is behind you, your nervous system reads the situation differently. The demand is the same; the perceived resources are greater. The result is challenge rather than threat.
The Workplace Is Not Exempt
Burnout is often framed as a workload problem: too many tasks, too little time. Those things matter. But research increasingly points to something running underneath: the erosion of social connection. When people feel isolated and unseen, the same tasks that might feel challenging begin to feel overwhelming. For instance, the email backlog may look like evidence of failure. The workload stops feeling manageable and starts feeling insurmountable.
Lazarus and Folkman’s foundational stress and coping theory tells us stress is not simply a property of situations. It results from an appraisal, a judgment about whether our resources measure up to the demands we face. Social support is one of our most powerful resources, and unlike many, it is shaped by the culture and relationships of the places we spend most of our waking hours.
The Leader’s Dilemma and Its Answer
Most leaders are caught in a bind. On one side, there’s relentless pressure to perform. On the other, there’s a team already stretched and at risk of burning out. More pressure feels like it will break people, but easing up feels unaffordable.
Our research and the work of others make it clear: It is not the volume of demands alone that drives burnout. It is facing those demands without perceiving support and compassion from others. Leaders who invest in genuine connection, who make their commitment explicit, who build cultures of mutual support, are changing the psychological conditions under which their team encounters pressure. They are making the hill look smaller, without removing it.
What This Means in Practice
Create supportive connections before they are needed. The protective effect comes largely from perceived availability, the belief that support is there, not just from receiving it in a crisis.
Harness the exponential effect of relational energy so morale doesn’t rest on the leader alone. Each positive interaction deposits into a reservoir the team draws on when pressure peaks.
Recognize that camaraderie is a strategy, not a perk. Build connections among team members, not just between yourself and each individual. Mutual trust is the infrastructure that determines how a team weathers difficulty.
Emphasize quality over quantity. The hill studies found that warmth and duration predicted perception more than mere company. A smaller team with genuine trust offers far more protection than a room of polite strangers.
The Antidote Was Relational All Along
We tend to treat burnout as an individual problem requiring individual fixes: better habits, more boundaries, and improved resilience. Our research redirects attention to the quality of our workplace connections — to the leader who conveys “I have your back” and to the team whose members show up for one another and share a genuine sense of camaraderie.
The work won’t get easier. But together, the hill looks different.
