Has anyone else moved from consulting to an internal role and felt… uncomfortable with the quiet?
I recently moved from strategy consulting into an Internal Firm Services (IFS) role after several years in consulting, and I’ve noticed something I wasn’t expecting.
I’m… uncomfortable when things are quiet.
Not because I have nothing to do, but because for the first time in a long time, I actually finished everything I set out to do this week.
I had a clear goal, completed it, sent everything off, addressed comments, and now the expectation is essentially, “Great, let’s pick this up again next week.”
Objectively, this is healthy.
But my brain keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.
In consulting, especially on some of the teams I worked on, “finished” rarely meant finished. There was always another request, another deck, another rework, another last-minute fire drill, or the feeling that if you weren’t constantly busy, you weren’t adding enough value.
Weekends often became catch-up time because you knew something would inevitably explode the following week.
What’s been interesting about IFS is that the work is still important and there are definitely deadlines, but the culture feels different. People seem much more respectful of boundaries. If something isn’t finished by Friday, the conversation is often, “Let’s discuss it next week,” rather than creating a culture of panic or shame.
The strange part is that my nervous system doesn’t seem to trust it yet.
When it’s quiet, I don’t immediately feel relaxed.
I feel like I should be finding more work, proving my value, improving my utilization, or preparing for something that hasn’t happened yet. And at the same time, everything that has happened to me in the past five years, everything I’ve avoided feeling, it’s just starting to creep up.
Has anyone else experienced this after leaving consulting (or another high-pressure environment)?
How long did it take before “quiet” stopped feeling like danger?
Did you struggle with feeling guilty when you actually had capacity?
Did your relationship with work eventually become healthier, or did it take conscious effort to stop equating constant urgency with productivity?
I’m really curious whether this is a common adjustment or if anyone has any advice for retraining your brain after years of operating in “everything is urgent” mode.