Stop Slowly Killing Yourself: How Success and Happiness can Coexist in your Life
This one’s for the panicked perfectionists out there. The overachievers who feel guilty for taking a break. The stressed-out straight-A students convincing themselves that their anxiety, sleep deprivation, mental breakdowns will all be worth it in the end.
If you identified with that description in any way, keep reading. Let’s break down the toxic mindsets that fuel our unhealthy, unsustainable behaviour. And let’s find ways to change for good.
This is “Hustle Culture”
The grind never stops. No rest for the weary. Wake up at 5 am — no, better yet, sleep when you’re dead.
At some point or the other, you’ve seen, heard, or had these thoughts. You’ve felt proud of how little sleep you get, proud of spending an extra 5 hours to earn a 2% higher mark, proud of chugging coffee every day to stay awake. Hustle culture, the idea that working as much as possible guarantees success, is the driving force behind these ideas.
It’s okay. I feel you. The examples I used were all entirely based on personal experience, and I’m still guilty of feeling proud of unhealthy behaviour sometimes.
The hard-to-swallow truth is that hustling nonstop is nothing to be proud of.
That’s a bold statement (literally). Even as I write it, I’m getting defensive. I’m trying to justify my behaviour, and I would entirely understand that you’d try to do the same. It’s hard to change mindsets when one has held on to one belief for so long, but let’s look at what I’m actually feeling proud of. It’s one thing to logically know something isn’t healthy, and it’s another to understand what it really means.
Let’s say I’m getting 4 hours of sleep each day for three consecutive months. According to hustle culture, that means I’m hardworking and dedicated — but am I really? No, I’m merely shit at time-management. I‘m not optimizing my time properly to find a work/life balance, and as a result, every aspect of my health suffers. Is shitty time-management something to be proud of?
If you’re still not convinced, look critically at a “hustle” behaviour you proudly indulge in. Think about what it really means. Sleep deprivation? A gateway to weight gain, memory issues, lack of focus, and increased risk of early death. Chronic stress? A gateway to burnout, sleep problems, headaches and mental health issues.
When you start looking closer at these standards of hard work that hustle culture perpetuates, we realize that it’s a convincing, but ultimately false narrative that both glorifies and normalizes unhealthy behaviour.
The facts are that hustle culture does more harm than good in the long-run. Working longer ≠ being successful, and feeling overwhelmed all the time is a real problem that should be addressed rather than worn like a badge of honour. Hustle culture is, in reality, a celebration of how we routinely screw over our health, happiness and wellbeing in exchange for external validation. Let’s not partake in it anymore.
The Necessity of Moderation
In psychology, the Yerkes-Dodson Law states that performance increases as arousal (stress) increase, but only up to a point. When stress continues to increase, performance actually declines.
Therefore, it is important to regulate your levels of stress, to ensure that it doesn’t become detrimental to productivity. This means if you’ve got hours upon hours of free time, it would be most beneficial to take on another commitment instead of binging Netflix shows. Your new project would put you at an optimal level of arousal, likely resulting in a productive and successful performance.
However, you might also be on the other extreme end of the spectrum. If you find yourself chronically stressed and consistently struggling to fulfill your obligations, you’ll need to make some changes. For example, if you’re joining clubs and extracurriculars only to prove you’re just as involved as other people, it’s time to re-evaluate your decisions. It’s one thing to do it because you’re passionate, it’s another to do it because you’ll seem more “busy,” and therefore “productive.”
Again, the difficult truth is that working nonstop 24/7 isn’t sustainable in the future, and by partaking in that behaviour, we’re only hurting ourselves in the long-run. At the same time, I know how difficult it is to be honest with your time and drop an activity if you have to.
The good news — it’s not impossible. There are ways to manage stress and optimize time so that you can continue to kick ass without the pesky existential dread and hopelessness that burnout brings.
There is Still Hope
I won’t tell you to sleep 10 hours, work out 5 times a week, eat a well-balanced meal every day for the rest of your life, and become one of those impossibly perfect lifestyle influencers on Youtube.
Why not? It’s an unrealistic lifestyle, and the last thing I’d want to be is a hypocrite. Sometimes, circumstances outside our control force us to undergo some degree of stress. Work still exists, finals week still exists, and inevitably, stress is still something we have to deal with.
Unfortunately, we all have the same 24 hours in a day, so what we need to focus on is redirecting our time and evaluating how we spend it. When you look critically at where all those hours go, it becomes clear there are more effective ways of spending it. Here’s how to be wiser with your time:
Plan of Action:
Instead of making drastic changes, the key is to gradually modify your habits until you’re living each day with purpose and meaning.
- First, pay attention to all that you do in a day. Use Google Calendar or any notebook to write down what you’re doing each day and how much time you spend on it.
- Identify gaps where your time goes into meaningless, unhelpful behaviours, such as staying up till 1am stalking others’ achievements on social media and comparing yourself to them (been there done that).
- Redirect that time towards more helpful behaviours. For example, sleeping instead of staying up till 1am stalking others’ achievements on social media and comparing yourself to them.
- Repeat. Once you’ve begun redistributing your time to a more helpful activity, it’s all about repeating this process and maintaining progress.
Now, I know this sounds easier said than done, but using your time mindfully can create massive, exponential change in your life. I used this 4-step approach to juggle school and lots of activities while staying mentally healthy for the most part, and I can’t tell you how valuable that’s been.
It’s important to keep in mind that wellbeing and success can coexist. If we critically examine unhealthy uses of our time and realize that there are better ways to optimize the day, it’s conceivable, even doable, to succeed without sacrificing your health, social life, and every source of happiness in the world.
Forget hustle culture. Forget obsessing over productivity. Let’s start taking control of our own lives.
tl;dr
- Hustle culture is toxic and does more harm than good. We need to realize that it promotes and glorifies extremely damaging behaviour, such as sleep deprivation, burnout and poor mental health.
- In the long run, this will sincerely and thoroughly screw us over.
- Instead of overwhelming ourselves with work and feeling proud of it, let’s create a balance — according to the Yerkes Dodson law of arousal, only a moderate level of stress is good for optimizing performance.
- Too little stress or too much stress (which is probably what you’re facing) actually leads to lower productivity and poor performance.
- To create a healthy work/life balance, it’s important to start with small changes and gain momentum.
- Critically examine everything you’re spending on time in a day, and avoid time-wasters by prioritizing and redistributing time for certain activities.
- In a nutshell: Productivity ≠ feeling overwhelmed with everything you need to do. Burnout, stress, poor sleep ≠ signs of success.
- It’s possible to be both happy, healthy and successful in life, but it’s up to you to create that balance.
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