September 14, 2022 • 39 mins
This week talk about the cultural phenomenon of hustle culture, the rise and grind age of work and professional success. We also discuss the role of burnout in this relationship and how we can recentre our lives to avoid this type of exhaustion and free ourselves of the stress and pressures of the need to always be hustling.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello, Welcome, new listeners, old listeners,
first timers, whoever. You are so excited to have you
(00:26):
here on the podcast talking about some very exciting, fun,
relevant topics today, something that I've really wanted to cover
for a while, and that feels particularly relevant because I
obviously haven't posted for a haart minute, maybe like a
(00:47):
couple of weeks for this very reason. I've been absolutely
swamped with my actual job, my real job, hence the
motivation the inspiration to talk about hustle culture and burn
out on this episode. But before we get to that
topic and to all the psychology behind it, I just
(01:09):
want to update everyone about a new feature that this
podcast has so in I don't know, the last few
weeks we have gained so many new listeners, So welcome
to you all if you've just started listening in and
I thought it would be in a really amazing time
to start publishing some more personal and paid content, mainly
(01:32):
some of my guest episodes. Let's get friendly segment where
I chat to some of my friends other people I
know in their twenties just about their life experiences, the
struggles and situations they're finding themselves in some of my
love Line episodes where we answer love queries and questions
and conundrums that you guys send in. So a lot
(01:56):
of that content now I'm hoping to put out once
or twice a month, and I now have paid subscriptions,
which is super exciting, So if you feel called to,
you can sign up for that on Spotify if that's
where you're listening, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm super excited to be kind of moving into that
new stage of the podcast and being able to offer
(02:19):
some more interesting and niche and personal content to those
who are frequent listeners. So thank you for all the
support so far, and for those who have already subscribed
in that capacity, obviously still putting out the regular episodes
that you can listen to at your leisure, but for
(02:39):
people who are wanting to hear some more of that stuff,
please feel free to subscribe, and thank you for all
of the support so far. Anyhow, with that aside, this week,
we are talking about a highly requested topic that I
get on Instagram all the time. We are talking about
hustle culture and we're talking about burnout. The two often
(03:02):
go hand in hand and have super important ties to
psychology and surprise, surprise, our twenties. So our main topic
of the day is hustle culture. This is a term
that I think has come about pretty recently, and I'm
sure we've all encountered it in some capacity. Perhaps I
don't know, you've seen it talked about on TikTok or
(03:24):
Instagram on your for you page, especially if you're in
the corporate lifestyle or on that pathway. You've heard about
it amongst friends. If you haven't heard about it, think
phrases like rise and grand and people are constantly talking about,
almost bragging about their long hours and relentless schedule. It
is super common, I think, in our twenties and in
(03:45):
the early stages of our careers to really be like
striving and aiming for a work life balance that is
more centered on work and success and gaining money and
status and promotions and all of those kinds of things.
I think I am definitely at fault of buying into
(04:06):
hustle culture, and I'm trying to be more conscious of
how this lifestyle and this image and almost this kind
of philosophy has become indoctoratenated into my own mind and
my working habits and patterns. Hence this episode, and we're
also going to be talking about burnout. Burnout is kind
(04:28):
of a separate thing, I think, in many ways, but
there are heaps of links. And I think that you
don't need to be buying into hustle culture to be
experiencing burnout. And maybe you're someone who's working super hard
in a crunch period at work, but you might not
necessarily be burnt out. But I thought that they really
did go hand in hand and complimented each other quite well.
(04:49):
For this episode, we're going to be talking about a
bunch of things. We're going to be talking about why
hustle culture and you know, the expansion about working hours
beyond the nine to five and passive income and trying
to you know, seek promotion, and that work heavy lifestyle
(05:09):
has become so much more i don't want to say popular,
but so much more common for people in their twenties.
And who benefits from that, what the impact of that
has been on society and culture and on an individual
level around our mental health and that's why burnout comes
in that is a really interesting relationship to me. And
(05:33):
I'm going to be talking about what the impacts of
long term quarters or levels and long term stress and
long hours and a lack of sleep does to our
body and does to our minds and our well being,
and why it's important to have aspirations beyond financial and
career success in our twenties. It's so critical for our
(05:55):
long term development, especially in our formative years, to achieve
a health work life balance and to center ourselves on
what we really want in the future, because this is
where our patterns and our expectations for our life kind
of start to take form and take shape. So super interesting,
very relevant, and hopefully you get something out of this
(06:18):
if these kind of topics have been something that's been
on your mind recently as it has been on mine. Okay,
So what's hustle culture? What are we talking about today? Essentially,
hustle culture teaches us that there is always more money
(06:40):
to make, a bigger title or a promotion, a higher
wall to climb, and it is a state of kind
of constant hustling, as the name says, or working with
complete and utter commitment to your work, maybe with no
timeout or breaks, skipping meals, rest time, maybe even sleep,
to continue working towards your professional goals. It's really centered
(07:05):
on our relationship with work, and hustle culture has emerged recently,
I think in the past thirty twenty years, even kind
of as this new type of lifestyle in which work
is at the center and our personal priorities and our
personal lives are kind of pushed to the side. We
(07:26):
could talk about capitalism, we could talk about all of
those structures that we exist in, but sadly, this is
a psychology podcast, so we're going to be talking more
about the mental element to this kind of recent phenomenon,
and we're also going to take a moment to reflect
on hustle culture and what it is that we're after,
and how we can consciously take care of ourselves whilst
(07:49):
we reach and carve out our ambitions. How is it
that we can recenter our aspirations and our goals and
what we actually want, whether that's an our professional or
personal lives, whilst also maintaining balance and incorporating other important
elements that are crucial for our well being. So I
(08:10):
think Hustle culture glorifies overworking as sort of a badge
of honor. It often sets up an environment of fear, guilt,
and shame, especially when you don't feel like perhaps you're
running at the same pace as everyone around you. Hustle culture,
this phenomenon of working harder and working more, is a
(08:30):
social structure. It's a social phenomenon that only has power
because other people buy into it. And as a collective,
we start to see a trend in the way that
we work now and in a way that we've been
socialized to feel about work, which is that it's become
a lot more important and that we should be prioritizing
(08:50):
our professional ambitions, perhaps over our more personal ambitions. So
hustle culture as a cultural and social phenomenon is really interesting.
I think it's become normal because ambition has become disguised
as a lifestyle rather than as a means to an end.
And millennials, I guess young people in particular, perhaps if
(09:13):
you're a recent graduate, you're particularly likely to fall into
this kind of like workaholism that hustle culture perpetuates. You know,
the seventy eighty hour work week and that kind of
hustle mania has become something that has been drilled into
us as society kind of breeds into this idea that
(09:37):
work is more important than the other things that make
life important. Maybe that's not making a lot of sense,
but I think life doesn't just center around what we
do to make a living, and often whilst we're making
money and chasing our career goals, we can lose sight
of what's important, like family and hobbies and creativity and
(09:59):
self care, all of which are really really crucial to
our well being. Work is not our only purpose in life,
and hustle culture really benefits when we forget that statement,
when we forget that promise that work is not our
only purpose in life. I saw this really interesting quote
(10:20):
around this that I think is super interesting. It was
from Twitter, which is really random because I'm not, you know,
traditionally on Twitter, but it says, and I'm going to
quote it here because I think it's a really interesting
thing to talk about when we're considering the role of
hustle culture in our work lives. Hustle culture takes so
(10:43):
hustle culture is about killing the beauty in patient discovery,
the power of creative process, and rewarding a focus of
a mission without an expiration date. I thought that was
super super relevant here, rewarding focus of a mission without
an expiration date. This is why hustle culture is unhealthy
(11:05):
and unnatural. When we set goals for ourselves, the most
effective type of goals we can set are those that
we can easily reach and which have small incremental steps
that we can follow enrich which to get there. That
is really crucial, and that's what psychology tells us about
(11:26):
how our brain works. If you've set out to run
a marathon, you're not going to perhaps finish or get
the time you want, or get to the point where
you can even run half of it. If in the
back of your mind is I have to run forty
two kilometers. My goal is to run a marathon. It's
a marathon. It's a marathon. Know. The way that we
(11:47):
can achieve goals such as the marathon example is by
breaking them up into smaller components that we can work towards.
For example, you know, let me finish this next five
k and then it's a water break, and then after
five k I'll get to ten and then I'm only
a quarter of the way there. Small incremental steps and
(12:07):
small incremental goals are the most successful way to kind
of reach our ambitions. Now, let's put that in the
context of hustle culture, and that quote I read hustle
culture does not see life and our goals and our
ambitions in that light. It is about this constant striving
and pushing and working for more, and that more is
(12:31):
not always tangible, it's not always obvious to us exactly
what we're working towards, and our goals are kind of
subsumed by an ideology of just working for the sake
of it and for the image of being devoted and
being and pushing yourself to the limits, which is entirely unhealthy.
And if you're someone who in your professional life you
(12:54):
have very serious goals, this idea that you just need
to be constantly pushing and put and pushing and striving
towards us and setting unnatural limits for yourself and unhealthy
boundaries isn't actually going to allow you to reach those
certain marks and goals and ambitions that you've set for yourself,
because there is no incremental goal building insight. Hustle culture
(13:19):
is just this sense, this all encompanying sense of working,
but working for what that is the real question, And
we're seeing people, perhaps like you and I in our twenties,
continually being consumed with just the idea of our career
as the sole pillar of our identity and either pretending
or genuinely believing that this is a satisfying and happy
(13:42):
way to go about life, despite the fact that within
those broader ambitions that you might set for yourself, you
don't actually have time to sit back and consider exactly
what you're working towards. What are those incremental goals, what
are those small things that would make your life more
meaningful and more purposeful in the short term. I think fundamentally,
(14:06):
hustle culture and the hustle culture we see in this
day and age is about work dominating your time in
such an unnatural way that we have no time to
actually live our lives and experience the beautiful things that
bring a sense of actual purpose, and it has pretty
severe impacts on our mental health. If you're pursuing a
(14:29):
seventy eighty hour work week, especially if it's for image
based purposes rather than for achieving a genuine goal that
you might have, it's likely that you're going to reach
the end of your tether a lot sooner than if
you dialed it back and took your time and went
slowly about how you approach your career and your professional life.
(14:52):
Hustle culture, This idea of working really hard leads us
to believe that our worth is only limited to how
reductive we are to how much we produce, the amount
of work we put out. It's hustle culture teaches us
that the thing that is most important about our identity
and our self concept is our outputs, is what we produce.
(15:14):
And we know that that is not the case. We've
talked about this on the podcast before, but our self
concept is not one dimensional. The way that we see
ourselves and the way that we yeah view ourselves as
individuals and what is important is not one dimensional. It's multifaceted,
and it is defined and created and built by many
(15:38):
different elements. If we only focus on one element of
that equation and one element of our self concept, the
rest of these important things and these important pillars like family,
like hobbies, like creativity, like passion, those things fall away
and you end up becoming i would say, quite shallow,
(16:01):
and you feel quite unsatisfied with your life. That is
I think the massive problem with hustle culture it views
It allows us to view ourselves as the sum of
our output rather than as a product of our inputs
and a product of the things that we choose to
(16:22):
prioritize within ourselves. Work is one element of a healthy
self concept. We spend a lot of time during our lives.
If you're, you know, one of the lucky ones in
this doesn't apply to you, congratulations. But for the majority
of people, we spend eight hours, nine hours a day,
(16:43):
five days a week, producing things for others, producing things
for the company we work for, or for the organization
we work for, or for the institutions we work for.
Work as an important element of life. We're not going
to disregard that, And you know, I'm not going to
push the philosophy that we all need to quit our
jobs and live in the forest. Work is really important,
(17:05):
but if it begins to subsume the other things, the
outcome of that is not going to be entirely healthy
or fulfilling. There are other elements of our lives which
aren't focused on output, which are equally important. Our familial
and our personal relationships don't necessarily have the same tangible
product associated with them. As our work lives do, but
(17:28):
they're equally important. The same thing can be said about
our hobbies or our creative outlets. You know, if you
play sport on the weekend, that might not necessarily have
a productive output, but it really contributes to your overall
sense of self and our well being. Hustle culture and
this ideology of working hard, of pushing yourself, of letting
(17:51):
your professional life consume you, puts all of those other
elements and facets of your identity at risk if you're
not paying attention. The other kind of outcomes of hustle
culture are perhaps more physiological and physical. So if you're
working really hard, if you're obsessed with this image of
(18:12):
being a hard worker, it can lead to lifestyle changes
that have pretty negative impacts on our mental health, things
like skipping meals, not allowing yourself time for rest or
for sleep, or to socialize. And it creates a toxic
environment that pressures you to work constantly and makes you
(18:33):
feel like you can never say no. It doesn't allow
for the establishment of healthy boundaries. And the result of
all of these kind of lifestyle changes, this pressure on
our ability to say no, this pressure on our boundaries
and our expectations for our lives results often in burnout,
(18:55):
and burnout as a result of working really hard has
not only short term impacts on our general state of
mental well being, but also on your long term health.
The experience of your health or the state of your
health in a moment might feel inconsequential, but especially when
we're young, and we're in our formative years and we're
(19:15):
in our twenties, the pressure you put on your mind
and your body, you know, because of your career, because
of your work life, will have long term impacts on
you physically. And burnout is just one of those components. Okay,
we've been pretty damning of hustle culture, and we've been
(19:36):
pretty damning of the pressure to make your professional in
your work life the center of your self concept and
your existence. But let's talk about some of the consequences
for your psychological wellbeing and your mental state. Burnout. Burnout
is this other topic I really wanted to bring into
this into this discussion. We hear a lot about it.
(19:57):
I think burnout is a phrase that is pretty common
in most corporate lifestyles at UNI for people who are
really being forced into a lifestyle that demands a lot
of your time, either because of your professional aspirations or
even some of your personal aspirations. Burnout can come as
(20:21):
a result of many different pressures acting on someone at once.
It is a state of complete mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.
I want to state this and I want to make
a little disclaimer here. Often people equite burnout with stress.
The two are not the same. You can experience moments
(20:47):
of stress, and it's very easy to bounce back from them.
You know you've got an upcoming deadline at UNI or
at work. It's very normal to feel stressed about that
because of time, pressures and other factors that are contributing
to that. Stress and burnout, though, are completely different. Burnout,
like I said, is it an ongoing state of exhaustion
(21:08):
rather than a momentary or short lived period of heightened anxiety.
So with stress, you might be overly engaged and more
worried and anxious and feel irritable and a sense of
urgency and a sense of energy. But with burnout, it's
very different. Burnout is different from stress because stress is
(21:32):
often associated with high levels of energy, high levels of excitement.
Excitement and the arousal of our central nervous system. Whereas
burnout is the stage that comes after elongated period of stress,
and it's characterized by complete disinterest, disengagement, sense of feeling
(21:52):
numb and blunted emotions, negative cynical, catastrophic thinking, difficulty concentrating
and paying attention, difficulties sleeping, rather than a sense of
kind of heightened excitement. So stress and prolonged stress is
what contributes to burnout. But they're very, very different concepts,
(22:15):
and that's something I really want to kind of stress
for people who might be listening, because a big sign
of burnout, and a big warning sign of burnout is
heaps of periods of stress that are going to contribute
to a state of mental and physical exhaustion. So there
(22:35):
is a reason that this happens. There's a reason that
we reach a state of feeling completely numb and completely
burnt out and unable to function when we are experiencing
periods of heightened anxiety. This puts pressure on our central
(22:57):
nervous system and on our body. So we can think
about this from a really simplistic biological sense. You've got,
you know, something coming up at work, something that's really
stressing you out, upcoming exam period, something along those lines.
In response to that, your brain and your body identifies
a threat. It identifies something that your mind and your
(23:21):
body and you as a person that going need to
need to overcome. So the way that it would traditionally,
the way that our brain would normally see a threat
like that, is to increase our body's capacity to respond
in a fast and efficient manner. And the way that
it does that is by flooding our body with a
(23:43):
bunch of chemicals and neurotransmitters which heighten our systems, which
heighten our senses, so that this upcoming I don't know,
stressful event, this upcoming you know, almost danger or urgent
kind of situation and can be dealt with. If you
think about I don't know, walking into an exam and
(24:06):
getting that racing heart rate, feeling like your brain is jittery,
that you literally can't write the words fast enough, the
time is passing really quickly or perhaps really slowly. This
altered sense of time, this heightened sense of focus, that
is your body responding to the neurotransmitters and the chemicals
(24:27):
like nora penephrin and adrenaline that our body releases when
it feels that it's going to have to respond very
actively and acutely to a stressful situation. So that is great.
That reaction is exactly what we want our body to do.
If there is a threat, or if there's something that
we are feeling that we're going to need more resources
(24:48):
to deal with, we want our body to respond appropriately.
We perhaps want to be able to focus better. We
want to be able to react quicker to prompts and
two things in our environment. It might be causing us
anxiety or causing us stress. That is the thing that
our body has learned how to do and has been
(25:10):
built to do over generations and generations of development and
of growth and of survival. But those periods of heightened
cortisol and nour adrenaline and noua penephrin levels, they have
consequences for our bodies. Our bodies are not naturally meant
(25:30):
to be in a state of heightened arousal and anxiety
for extended periods of time, nor are they meant to
have back to back periods of this flooding and release
of energy into our body and into our cells and
into our blood and into our systems. So if you
are experiencing a lot of these small periodic moments of
(25:54):
intense arousal and intense dress back to back. What happens
is that the levels of cortisol in your body begin
to rise. Cortisol has a great, great function. Like I said,
it's really important for allowing us to respond to immediate
kind of dangers in our environment or to respond efficiently
(26:14):
to you know, long term things that are threatening our
state of equilibrium. But if it is in our blood's
dream perpetually or for too long, it does start to
have pretty negative consequences. Particularly one of the main things
that we will see, and this is the reason why
we experience burnout. If you know, the grind and hustle
(26:38):
culture has been really for forcing us to work hard
for a little while. What we'll see is our immune
systems start to go down and start to deplete. Our
immune response begin to become weaker. You might begin to
see that you're getting more acne or you're having changes
(27:00):
in appetite. That if you know you have a cut
on your arm or you cut on your body, it's
taking longer to heal. If you're a woman, your periods
or your mentional cycle starts to become more irregular, and
that is because of those long term effects of cortisol. Cortisol,
when it's been in our body too long, when we
have excessive amounts, begins to have negative impacts on our
(27:24):
physical well being. It's no longer just a mental thing.
It's no longer that your body and your brain is
responding to things and your immediate environment. It now becomes
more prominent and more significant on a more physiological and
biological level. Like I said, you can have you can
(27:45):
see a lot of these physical impacts. But the one
thing that it does which links back to this idea
of burnout, is that it exhausts your body. Your body
is being put under pressure, not by a physical or
external stulus, not by you know, doing excessive exercise or
being forced through a physically demanding situation, but it's being
(28:08):
put under pressure internally. Cortisol, the way that it's released
and the way that it acts on our body activates
our flight or fight systems. This prepares your muscles, it
prepares your mind to um you know, be ready for danger.
But if that those signals are being sent for too long,
(28:28):
we begin to feel exhaustion. You begin to you know,
get sick easier, and all of those other symptoms that
we were explaining, and it leads to burnout. Your body
reaches a state of complete internal physical exhaustion and it
can no longer function. It breaks down, It breaks down
(28:49):
your sense of equilibrium and sense of stability within your body.
Your health begins to feel the toll of excessive stress
and sessive pressure that's been put on your mind and
your body and your overall sense of well being. So
this is what burnout is. That is the biological basis
of burnout. Periods of intense stress and long periods repeated
(29:13):
periods of intense stress result in hormonal and neural imbalances
within our body that places internal pressure on our systems
and causes us to reach a state of exhaustion. Okay,
let's talk about that a little bit more. Say that
you're at that state of being incredibly burnt out. I'm
(29:34):
sure that we all have felt this, have all experienced this.
You know, maybe it was when you're doing your final
exams for school, or like I said, you've got a
lot of deadlines coming up for UNI or for work,
and even a lot of pressure in your personal life.
I think that's the other important thing is that work
and academic pressures don't occur in a vacuum. You know,
(29:56):
if you've got a lot going on at work, it's
not like the rest of your life is put on pause.
You'll also have personal problems and you know, personal dramas
or things that you need to deal with. You've got,
you know, all of these other elements such as what's
going on in the world, which will be contributing to
that exhaustion and that stress and that pressure that's being
(30:18):
put on your body. So what do you do? What
do we do burnout? If it's you know, somewhat inevitable
or if it's going to happen at times, how do
we create an environment and create patterns and healthy habits
that allow us to bounce back and allow us to
(30:39):
you know, get back to a point of equilibrium and
of normal functioning. So the main thing that we need
to address is perhaps reducing that stress to begin with.
Let's reduce the trigger for this excessive quarters or level
this excessive exhaustion. Being able to identify what is causing
(31:01):
you to feel burnt out, whether that be work or
academic pressures, is crucial for putting yourself back on the
right pathway and reducing overall levels of exhaustion and stress
that are occurring in your life. So is there something
that can be done to reduce the pressure and reduce
(31:21):
the things and the number of items that are kind
of stacking up on your plate. If the answer is yes, fantastic, great,
if you can do something about it, If you can
minimize the amount of pressure and external pressure you're feeling
on yourself, that is fabulous, congratulations. But there are other
things that need to be done. And if that's perhaps
(31:42):
not the case and not something that you can do
in that moment, there are lifestyle changes and choices and
behavioral patterns and modifiable lifestyle patterns that you can make,
and changes that you can make that reduce the impact
of cortisol on your body. The first thing to do,
and I think one of the primary things that's often suggested,
(32:06):
is to focus on diet, sleep, and exercise. These are
three ways that we are able to kind of control
the reactions and the kind of subconscious beyond our control
reactions that are occurring in our body. Making sure you're
getting those eight hours eating healthy foods and good foods
(32:28):
for you, hydrating so that your body has all of
the resources that it needs to respond properly to stress
in your environment is crucial, and exercise that is one
of the main ways that we can release pent up
cortisol and adrenaline levels within our body by giving it
an actual outlet and a kind of way to release
(32:50):
all of that energy that's within our body putting pressure
on us internally. It's very interesting because one of the
suggestions that a psychologist might give to you, or a
doctor might give to you if you're having a panic attack,
is to engage an excessive exercise because that is the
best way to release pent up energy and chemical reactions
(33:14):
in your body. Cortisol is looking to respond to something
in our environment, So by exercising regularly, we're giving it
that thing that it needs to respond to. We're giving
it its outlet, and that really allows us to kind
of alleviate the pressure that it's putting on our internal systems.
I think there's other things that can also really contribute
(33:35):
to reducing the level of burnout and exhaustion and stress
we might feel, and that's making sure that we prioritize
the things that we know make us feel well. This
comes back to hustle culture. If your work and your
professional life are the pillar around which everything else stands.
(33:56):
It's very likely that you're probably not putting in enough
energy and effort into the things that genuinely bring you
a sense of purpose and bring you a sense of
happiness and goodness. So recentering your life along kind of yeah,
Recentering your life along the things that are important greatly
(34:20):
reduces the likelihood that we are going to reach a
state where our body is going to force us to
take a break, when our body is going to physically
tell us to stop. One way that I find this
is really useful. One way that I find that's really useful,
like a habit and a pattern that I get into,
(34:41):
is non negotiables in my life. Things and things that
I plan each week that have nothing to do with work,
have nothing to do with my professional output, that are
non negotiable to me, no matter how much needs to
be done, you know, within my job, no matter how
much people asking of me. These are things that I
(35:02):
do not compromise on. And there are things that I
find personally fulfilling. One of them is the podcast. Another
one is rock climbing or having a physical outlet that
I do every single week. Every Wednesday, I go rock
climbing and at seven thirty, no matter what else is
going on, even if someone's asked me to work late,
(35:23):
that's a non negotiable for me. I will clock off
and I will go and do it, because that's important
for creating balance in my life. Seeing friends regularly as well.
If you know, I've gone a few days without having
a social contact beyond my work life or beyond the
people that I kind of I'm surrounded by work. Although
(35:44):
they're lovely, you know, I do want to have conversations
and see people that have nothing to do with what
I do from you know, nine am to five pm,
So that's really important as well. Making time to connect
with family and with friends is a great way to
avoid getting to a point of mental exhaustion, where like
(36:06):
I said, your body is going to force you to
take a break. In this day and age. With our
changing attitudes and cultural attitudes around the role of our
professional work life in our broader existence and broader self concept,
it is really easy to buy into hustle culture and
(36:28):
to buy into the idea that the only way to
get ahead is to work unreasonable hours and sacrifice the
important parts and meaningful elements of our life. I don't
think that's the case. I think it's possible to do
well in your career and to have professional aspirations whilst
still remaining focused and clear and scented on what is
(36:51):
really really important. I think maintaining those healthy boundaries around
what's important to you and what's a non negotiable in
your life really also helps us avoid that kind of
pattern of exhaustion and stress and burnout that we've talked about.
So I hope that this episode has kind of shed
(37:11):
a bit of light. It was a bit of a ramble.
I think it was just something I really wanted to
discuss on the podcast this week and just kind of
dump my thoughts and my knowledge out upon all of yous.
So hopefully you got something out of it. If you're
experiencing something similar, if you're kind of stuck in the
corporate way of thinking and this day and age as
way of thinking around work, take a step back and
(37:36):
make sure that what you're doing in your life aligns
with what you actually want. It's very easy to be
passive and to fall into the social and cultural and
professional expectations that our jobs and our community and our
society demands of us. But taking time to really think
about what is going to make your life meaningful for
(37:58):
you will inevitably have amazing benefits for your mental health,
your physical health, and your long term well being, and
probably even benefits for your career in the long term.
You know, when your body is forcing you to take
a break, it's really not going to take no for
an answer, and no matter what deadlines you have on,
(38:20):
you're not going to be able to push through that.
So hopefully this has been a nice reminder on the
importance of balance and thank you as always for listening.
If you've enjoyed this episode and you feel cool to,
please leave a review or a five star rating on
Apple Podcasts or Spotify wherever you're listening right now. It
really does help the podcast grow. And if you're interested
(38:43):
in paid subscriber content, like I said, that's now available,
so get onto it. If you feel the neat if
you want to listen to more of my voice maybe not, Yeah,
there's links somewhere. I'm sure you can figure it out.
And as always, thank you for listening. I will be
back next week. Don't know what we're talking about yet,
but if you have suggestions, reach out on Instagram and
(39:06):
i'll get to it. Thank you so much,
Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello, Welcome, new listeners, old listeners,
first timers, whoever. You are so excited to have you
(00:26):
here on the podcast talking about some very exciting, fun,
relevant topics today, something that I've really wanted to cover
for a while, and that feels particularly relevant because I
obviously haven't posted for a haart minute, maybe like a
(00:47):
couple of weeks for this very reason. I've been absolutely
swamped with my actual job, my real job, hence the
motivation the inspiration to talk about hustle culture and burn
out on this episode. But before we get to that
topic and to all the psychology behind it, I just
(01:09):
want to update everyone about a new feature that this
podcast has so in I don't know, the last few
weeks we have gained so many new listeners, So welcome
to you all if you've just started listening in and
I thought it would be in a really amazing time
to start publishing some more personal and paid content, mainly
(01:32):
some of my guest episodes. Let's get friendly segment where
I chat to some of my friends other people I
know in their twenties just about their life experiences, the
struggles and situations they're finding themselves in some of my
love Line episodes where we answer love queries and questions
and conundrums that you guys send in. So a lot
(01:56):
of that content now I'm hoping to put out once
or twice a month, and I now have paid subscriptions,
which is super exciting, So if you feel called to,
you can sign up for that on Spotify if that's
where you're listening, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm super excited to be kind of moving into that
new stage of the podcast and being able to offer
(02:19):
some more interesting and niche and personal content to those
who are frequent listeners. So thank you for all the
support so far, and for those who have already subscribed
in that capacity, obviously still putting out the regular episodes
that you can listen to at your leisure, but for
(02:39):
people who are wanting to hear some more of that stuff,
please feel free to subscribe, and thank you for all
of the support so far. Anyhow, with that aside, this week,
we are talking about a highly requested topic that I
get on Instagram all the time. We are talking about
hustle culture and we're talking about burnout. The two often
(03:02):
go hand in hand and have super important ties to
psychology and surprise, surprise, our twenties. So our main topic
of the day is hustle culture. This is a term
that I think has come about pretty recently, and I'm
sure we've all encountered it in some capacity. Perhaps I
don't know, you've seen it talked about on TikTok or
(03:24):
Instagram on your for you page, especially if you're in
the corporate lifestyle or on that pathway. You've heard about
it amongst friends. If you haven't heard about it, think
phrases like rise and grand and people are constantly talking about,
almost bragging about their long hours and relentless schedule. It
is super common, I think, in our twenties and in
(03:45):
the early stages of our careers to really be like
striving and aiming for a work life balance that is
more centered on work and success and gaining money and
status and promotions and all of those kinds of things.
I think I am definitely at fault of buying into
(04:06):
hustle culture, and I'm trying to be more conscious of
how this lifestyle and this image and almost this kind
of philosophy has become indoctoratenated into my own mind and
my working habits and patterns. Hence this episode, and we're
also going to be talking about burnout. Burnout is kind
(04:28):
of a separate thing, I think, in many ways, but
there are heaps of links. And I think that you
don't need to be buying into hustle culture to be
experiencing burnout. And maybe you're someone who's working super hard
in a crunch period at work, but you might not
necessarily be burnt out. But I thought that they really
did go hand in hand and complimented each other quite well.
(04:49):
For this episode, we're going to be talking about a
bunch of things. We're going to be talking about why
hustle culture and you know, the expansion about working hours
beyond the nine to five and passive income and trying
to you know, seek promotion, and that work heavy lifestyle
(05:09):
has become so much more i don't want to say popular,
but so much more common for people in their twenties.
And who benefits from that, what the impact of that
has been on society and culture and on an individual
level around our mental health and that's why burnout comes
in that is a really interesting relationship to me. And
(05:33):
I'm going to be talking about what the impacts of
long term quarters or levels and long term stress and
long hours and a lack of sleep does to our
body and does to our minds and our well being,
and why it's important to have aspirations beyond financial and
career success in our twenties. It's so critical for our
(05:55):
long term development, especially in our formative years, to achieve
a health work life balance and to center ourselves on
what we really want in the future, because this is
where our patterns and our expectations for our life kind
of start to take form and take shape. So super interesting,
very relevant, and hopefully you get something out of this
(06:18):
if these kind of topics have been something that's been
on your mind recently as it has been on mine. Okay,
So what's hustle culture? What are we talking about today? Essentially,
hustle culture teaches us that there is always more money
(06:40):
to make, a bigger title or a promotion, a higher
wall to climb, and it is a state of kind
of constant hustling, as the name says, or working with
complete and utter commitment to your work, maybe with no
timeout or breaks, skipping meals, rest time, maybe even sleep,
to continue working towards your professional goals. It's really centered
(07:05):
on our relationship with work, and hustle culture has emerged recently,
I think in the past thirty twenty years, even kind
of as this new type of lifestyle in which work
is at the center and our personal priorities and our
personal lives are kind of pushed to the side. We
(07:26):
could talk about capitalism, we could talk about all of
those structures that we exist in, but sadly, this is
a psychology podcast, so we're going to be talking more
about the mental element to this kind of recent phenomenon,
and we're also going to take a moment to reflect
on hustle culture and what it is that we're after,
and how we can consciously take care of ourselves whilst
(07:49):
we reach and carve out our ambitions. How is it
that we can recenter our aspirations and our goals and
what we actually want, whether that's an our professional or
personal lives, whilst also maintaining balance and incorporating other important
elements that are crucial for our well being. So I
(08:10):
think Hustle culture glorifies overworking as sort of a badge
of honor. It often sets up an environment of fear, guilt,
and shame, especially when you don't feel like perhaps you're
running at the same pace as everyone around you. Hustle culture,
this phenomenon of working harder and working more, is a
(08:30):
social structure. It's a social phenomenon that only has power
because other people buy into it. And as a collective,
we start to see a trend in the way that
we work now and in a way that we've been
socialized to feel about work, which is that it's become
a lot more important and that we should be prioritizing
(08:50):
our professional ambitions, perhaps over our more personal ambitions. So
hustle culture as a cultural and social phenomenon is really interesting.
I think it's become normal because ambition has become disguised
as a lifestyle rather than as a means to an end.
And millennials, I guess young people in particular, perhaps if
(09:13):
you're a recent graduate, you're particularly likely to fall into
this kind of like workaholism that hustle culture perpetuates. You know,
the seventy eighty hour work week and that kind of
hustle mania has become something that has been drilled into
us as society kind of breeds into this idea that
(09:37):
work is more important than the other things that make
life important. Maybe that's not making a lot of sense,
but I think life doesn't just center around what we
do to make a living, and often whilst we're making
money and chasing our career goals, we can lose sight
of what's important, like family and hobbies and creativity and
(09:59):
self care, all of which are really really crucial to
our well being. Work is not our only purpose in life,
and hustle culture really benefits when we forget that statement,
when we forget that promise that work is not our
only purpose in life. I saw this really interesting quote
(10:20):
around this that I think is super interesting. It was
from Twitter, which is really random because I'm not, you know,
traditionally on Twitter, but it says, and I'm going to
quote it here because I think it's a really interesting
thing to talk about when we're considering the role of
hustle culture in our work lives. Hustle culture takes so
(10:43):
hustle culture is about killing the beauty in patient discovery,
the power of creative process, and rewarding a focus of
a mission without an expiration date. I thought that was
super super relevant here, rewarding focus of a mission without
an expiration date. This is why hustle culture is unhealthy
(11:05):
and unnatural. When we set goals for ourselves, the most
effective type of goals we can set are those that
we can easily reach and which have small incremental steps
that we can follow enrich which to get there. That
is really crucial, and that's what psychology tells us about
(11:26):
how our brain works. If you've set out to run
a marathon, you're not going to perhaps finish or get
the time you want, or get to the point where
you can even run half of it. If in the
back of your mind is I have to run forty
two kilometers. My goal is to run a marathon. It's
a marathon. It's a marathon. Know. The way that we
(11:47):
can achieve goals such as the marathon example is by
breaking them up into smaller components that we can work towards.
For example, you know, let me finish this next five
k and then it's a water break, and then after
five k I'll get to ten and then I'm only
a quarter of the way there. Small incremental steps and
(12:07):
small incremental goals are the most successful way to kind
of reach our ambitions. Now, let's put that in the
context of hustle culture, and that quote I read hustle
culture does not see life and our goals and our
ambitions in that light. It is about this constant striving
and pushing and working for more, and that more is
(12:31):
not always tangible, it's not always obvious to us exactly
what we're working towards, and our goals are kind of
subsumed by an ideology of just working for the sake
of it and for the image of being devoted and
being and pushing yourself to the limits, which is entirely unhealthy.
And if you're someone who in your professional life you
(12:54):
have very serious goals, this idea that you just need
to be constantly pushing and put and pushing and striving
towards us and setting unnatural limits for yourself and unhealthy
boundaries isn't actually going to allow you to reach those
certain marks and goals and ambitions that you've set for yourself,
because there is no incremental goal building insight. Hustle culture
(13:19):
is just this sense, this all encompanying sense of working,
but working for what that is the real question, And
we're seeing people, perhaps like you and I in our twenties,
continually being consumed with just the idea of our career
as the sole pillar of our identity and either pretending
or genuinely believing that this is a satisfying and happy
(13:42):
way to go about life, despite the fact that within
those broader ambitions that you might set for yourself, you
don't actually have time to sit back and consider exactly
what you're working towards. What are those incremental goals, what
are those small things that would make your life more
meaningful and more purposeful in the short term. I think fundamentally,
(14:06):
hustle culture and the hustle culture we see in this
day and age is about work dominating your time in
such an unnatural way that we have no time to
actually live our lives and experience the beautiful things that
bring a sense of actual purpose, and it has pretty
severe impacts on our mental health. If you're pursuing a
(14:29):
seventy eighty hour work week, especially if it's for image
based purposes rather than for achieving a genuine goal that
you might have, it's likely that you're going to reach
the end of your tether a lot sooner than if
you dialed it back and took your time and went
slowly about how you approach your career and your professional life.
(14:52):
Hustle culture, This idea of working really hard leads us
to believe that our worth is only limited to how
reductive we are to how much we produce, the amount
of work we put out. It's hustle culture teaches us
that the thing that is most important about our identity
and our self concept is our outputs, is what we produce.
(15:14):
And we know that that is not the case. We've
talked about this on the podcast before, but our self
concept is not one dimensional. The way that we see
ourselves and the way that we yeah view ourselves as
individuals and what is important is not one dimensional. It's multifaceted,
and it is defined and created and built by many
(15:38):
different elements. If we only focus on one element of
that equation and one element of our self concept, the
rest of these important things and these important pillars like family,
like hobbies, like creativity, like passion, those things fall away
and you end up becoming i would say, quite shallow,
(16:01):
and you feel quite unsatisfied with your life. That is
I think the massive problem with hustle culture it views
It allows us to view ourselves as the sum of
our output rather than as a product of our inputs
and a product of the things that we choose to
(16:22):
prioritize within ourselves. Work is one element of a healthy
self concept. We spend a lot of time during our lives.
If you're, you know, one of the lucky ones in
this doesn't apply to you, congratulations. But for the majority
of people, we spend eight hours, nine hours a day,
(16:43):
five days a week, producing things for others, producing things
for the company we work for, or for the organization
we work for, or for the institutions we work for.
Work as an important element of life. We're not going
to disregard that, And you know, I'm not going to
push the philosophy that we all need to quit our
jobs and live in the forest. Work is really important,
(17:05):
but if it begins to subsume the other things, the
outcome of that is not going to be entirely healthy
or fulfilling. There are other elements of our lives which
aren't focused on output, which are equally important. Our familial
and our personal relationships don't necessarily have the same tangible
product associated with them. As our work lives do, but
(17:28):
they're equally important. The same thing can be said about
our hobbies or our creative outlets. You know, if you
play sport on the weekend, that might not necessarily have
a productive output, but it really contributes to your overall
sense of self and our well being. Hustle culture and
this ideology of working hard, of pushing yourself, of letting
(17:51):
your professional life consume you, puts all of those other
elements and facets of your identity at risk if you're
not paying attention. The other kind of outcomes of hustle
culture are perhaps more physiological and physical. So if you're
working really hard, if you're obsessed with this image of
(18:12):
being a hard worker, it can lead to lifestyle changes
that have pretty negative impacts on our mental health, things
like skipping meals, not allowing yourself time for rest or
for sleep, or to socialize. And it creates a toxic
environment that pressures you to work constantly and makes you
(18:33):
feel like you can never say no. It doesn't allow
for the establishment of healthy boundaries. And the result of
all of these kind of lifestyle changes, this pressure on
our ability to say no, this pressure on our boundaries
and our expectations for our lives results often in burnout,
(18:55):
and burnout as a result of working really hard has
not only short term impacts on our general state of
mental well being, but also on your long term health.
The experience of your health or the state of your
health in a moment might feel inconsequential, but especially when
we're young, and we're in our formative years and we're
(19:15):
in our twenties, the pressure you put on your mind
and your body, you know, because of your career, because
of your work life, will have long term impacts on
you physically. And burnout is just one of those components. Okay,
we've been pretty damning of hustle culture, and we've been
(19:36):
pretty damning of the pressure to make your professional in
your work life the center of your self concept and
your existence. But let's talk about some of the consequences
for your psychological wellbeing and your mental state. Burnout. Burnout
is this other topic I really wanted to bring into
this into this discussion. We hear a lot about it.
(19:57):
I think burnout is a phrase that is pretty common
in most corporate lifestyles at UNI for people who are
really being forced into a lifestyle that demands a lot
of your time, either because of your professional aspirations or
even some of your personal aspirations. Burnout can come as
(20:21):
a result of many different pressures acting on someone at once.
It is a state of complete mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.
I want to state this and I want to make
a little disclaimer here. Often people equite burnout with stress.
The two are not the same. You can experience moments
(20:47):
of stress, and it's very easy to bounce back from them.
You know you've got an upcoming deadline at UNI or
at work. It's very normal to feel stressed about that
because of time, pressures and other factors that are contributing
to that. Stress and burnout, though, are completely different. Burnout,
like I said, is it an ongoing state of exhaustion
(21:08):
rather than a momentary or short lived period of heightened anxiety.
So with stress, you might be overly engaged and more
worried and anxious and feel irritable and a sense of
urgency and a sense of energy. But with burnout, it's
very different. Burnout is different from stress because stress is
(21:32):
often associated with high levels of energy, high levels of excitement.
Excitement and the arousal of our central nervous system. Whereas
burnout is the stage that comes after elongated period of stress,
and it's characterized by complete disinterest, disengagement, sense of feeling
(21:52):
numb and blunted emotions, negative cynical, catastrophic thinking, difficulty concentrating
and paying attention, difficulties sleeping, rather than a sense of
kind of heightened excitement. So stress and prolonged stress is
what contributes to burnout. But they're very, very different concepts,
(22:15):
and that's something I really want to kind of stress
for people who might be listening, because a big sign
of burnout, and a big warning sign of burnout is
heaps of periods of stress that are going to contribute
to a state of mental and physical exhaustion. So there
(22:35):
is a reason that this happens. There's a reason that
we reach a state of feeling completely numb and completely
burnt out and unable to function when we are experiencing
periods of heightened anxiety. This puts pressure on our central
(22:57):
nervous system and on our body. So we can think
about this from a really simplistic biological sense. You've got,
you know, something coming up at work, something that's really
stressing you out, upcoming exam period, something along those lines.
In response to that, your brain and your body identifies
a threat. It identifies something that your mind and your
(23:21):
body and you as a person that going need to
need to overcome. So the way that it would traditionally,
the way that our brain would normally see a threat
like that, is to increase our body's capacity to respond
in a fast and efficient manner. And the way that
it does that is by flooding our body with a
(23:43):
bunch of chemicals and neurotransmitters which heighten our systems, which
heighten our senses, so that this upcoming I don't know,
stressful event, this upcoming you know, almost danger or urgent
kind of situation and can be dealt with. If you
think about I don't know, walking into an exam and
(24:06):
getting that racing heart rate, feeling like your brain is jittery,
that you literally can't write the words fast enough, the
time is passing really quickly or perhaps really slowly. This
altered sense of time, this heightened sense of focus, that
is your body responding to the neurotransmitters and the chemicals
(24:27):
like nora penephrin and adrenaline that our body releases when
it feels that it's going to have to respond very
actively and acutely to a stressful situation. So that is great.
That reaction is exactly what we want our body to do.
If there is a threat, or if there's something that
we are feeling that we're going to need more resources
(24:48):
to deal with, we want our body to respond appropriately.
We perhaps want to be able to focus better. We
want to be able to react quicker to prompts and
two things in our environment. It might be causing us
anxiety or causing us stress. That is the thing that
our body has learned how to do and has been
(25:10):
built to do over generations and generations of development and
of growth and of survival. But those periods of heightened
cortisol and nour adrenaline and noua penephrin levels, they have
consequences for our bodies. Our bodies are not naturally meant
(25:30):
to be in a state of heightened arousal and anxiety
for extended periods of time, nor are they meant to
have back to back periods of this flooding and release
of energy into our body and into our cells and
into our blood and into our systems. So if you
are experiencing a lot of these small periodic moments of
(25:54):
intense arousal and intense dress back to back. What happens
is that the levels of cortisol in your body begin
to rise. Cortisol has a great, great function. Like I said,
it's really important for allowing us to respond to immediate
kind of dangers in our environment or to respond efficiently
(26:14):
to you know, long term things that are threatening our
state of equilibrium. But if it is in our blood's
dream perpetually or for too long, it does start to
have pretty negative consequences. Particularly one of the main things
that we will see, and this is the reason why
we experience burnout. If you know, the grind and hustle
(26:38):
culture has been really for forcing us to work hard
for a little while. What we'll see is our immune
systems start to go down and start to deplete. Our
immune response begin to become weaker. You might begin to
see that you're getting more acne or you're having changes
(27:00):
in appetite. That if you know you have a cut
on your arm or you cut on your body, it's
taking longer to heal. If you're a woman, your periods
or your mentional cycle starts to become more irregular, and
that is because of those long term effects of cortisol. Cortisol,
when it's been in our body too long, when we
have excessive amounts, begins to have negative impacts on our
(27:24):
physical well being. It's no longer just a mental thing.
It's no longer that your body and your brain is
responding to things and your immediate environment. It now becomes
more prominent and more significant on a more physiological and
biological level. Like I said, you can have you can
(27:45):
see a lot of these physical impacts. But the one
thing that it does which links back to this idea
of burnout, is that it exhausts your body. Your body
is being put under pressure, not by a physical or
external stulus, not by you know, doing excessive exercise or
being forced through a physically demanding situation, but it's being
(28:08):
put under pressure internally. Cortisol, the way that it's released
and the way that it acts on our body activates
our flight or fight systems. This prepares your muscles, it
prepares your mind to um you know, be ready for danger.
But if that those signals are being sent for too long,
(28:28):
we begin to feel exhaustion. You begin to you know,
get sick easier, and all of those other symptoms that
we were explaining, and it leads to burnout. Your body
reaches a state of complete internal physical exhaustion and it
can no longer function. It breaks down, It breaks down
(28:49):
your sense of equilibrium and sense of stability within your body.
Your health begins to feel the toll of excessive stress
and sessive pressure that's been put on your mind and
your body and your overall sense of well being. So
this is what burnout is. That is the biological basis
of burnout. Periods of intense stress and long periods repeated
(29:13):
periods of intense stress result in hormonal and neural imbalances
within our body that places internal pressure on our systems
and causes us to reach a state of exhaustion. Okay,
let's talk about that a little bit more. Say that
you're at that state of being incredibly burnt out. I'm
(29:34):
sure that we all have felt this, have all experienced this.
You know, maybe it was when you're doing your final
exams for school, or like I said, you've got a
lot of deadlines coming up for UNI or for work,
and even a lot of pressure in your personal life.
I think that's the other important thing is that work
and academic pressures don't occur in a vacuum. You know,
(29:56):
if you've got a lot going on at work, it's
not like the rest of your life is put on pause.
You'll also have personal problems and you know, personal dramas
or things that you need to deal with. You've got,
you know, all of these other elements such as what's
going on in the world, which will be contributing to
that exhaustion and that stress and that pressure that's being
(30:18):
put on your body. So what do you do? What
do we do burnout? If it's you know, somewhat inevitable
or if it's going to happen at times, how do
we create an environment and create patterns and healthy habits
that allow us to bounce back and allow us to
(30:39):
you know, get back to a point of equilibrium and
of normal functioning. So the main thing that we need
to address is perhaps reducing that stress to begin with.
Let's reduce the trigger for this excessive quarters or level
this excessive exhaustion. Being able to identify what is causing
(31:01):
you to feel burnt out, whether that be work or
academic pressures, is crucial for putting yourself back on the
right pathway and reducing overall levels of exhaustion and stress
that are occurring in your life. So is there something
that can be done to reduce the pressure and reduce
(31:21):
the things and the number of items that are kind
of stacking up on your plate. If the answer is yes, fantastic, great,
if you can do something about it, If you can
minimize the amount of pressure and external pressure you're feeling
on yourself, that is fabulous, congratulations. But there are other
things that need to be done. And if that's perhaps
(31:42):
not the case and not something that you can do
in that moment, there are lifestyle changes and choices and
behavioral patterns and modifiable lifestyle patterns that you can make,
and changes that you can make that reduce the impact
of cortisol on your body. The first thing to do,
and I think one of the primary things that's often suggested,
(32:06):
is to focus on diet, sleep, and exercise. These are
three ways that we are able to kind of control
the reactions and the kind of subconscious beyond our control
reactions that are occurring in our body. Making sure you're
getting those eight hours eating healthy foods and good foods
(32:28):
for you, hydrating so that your body has all of
the resources that it needs to respond properly to stress
in your environment is crucial, and exercise that is one
of the main ways that we can release pent up
cortisol and adrenaline levels within our body by giving it
an actual outlet and a kind of way to release
(32:50):
all of that energy that's within our body putting pressure
on us internally. It's very interesting because one of the
suggestions that a psychologist might give to you, or a
doctor might give to you if you're having a panic attack,
is to engage an excessive exercise because that is the
best way to release pent up energy and chemical reactions
(33:14):
in your body. Cortisol is looking to respond to something
in our environment, So by exercising regularly, we're giving it
that thing that it needs to respond to. We're giving
it its outlet, and that really allows us to kind
of alleviate the pressure that it's putting on our internal systems.
I think there's other things that can also really contribute
(33:35):
to reducing the level of burnout and exhaustion and stress
we might feel, and that's making sure that we prioritize
the things that we know make us feel well. This
comes back to hustle culture. If your work and your
professional life are the pillar around which everything else stands.
(33:56):
It's very likely that you're probably not putting in enough
energy and effort into the things that genuinely bring you
a sense of purpose and bring you a sense of
happiness and goodness. So recentering your life along kind of yeah,
Recentering your life along the things that are important greatly
(34:20):
reduces the likelihood that we are going to reach a
state where our body is going to force us to
take a break, when our body is going to physically
tell us to stop. One way that I find this
is really useful. One way that I find that's really useful,
like a habit and a pattern that I get into,
(34:41):
is non negotiables in my life. Things and things that
I plan each week that have nothing to do with work,
have nothing to do with my professional output, that are
non negotiable to me, no matter how much needs to
be done, you know, within my job, no matter how
much people asking of me. These are things that I
(35:02):
do not compromise on. And there are things that I
find personally fulfilling. One of them is the podcast. Another
one is rock climbing or having a physical outlet that
I do every single week. Every Wednesday, I go rock
climbing and at seven thirty, no matter what else is
going on, even if someone's asked me to work late,
(35:23):
that's a non negotiable for me. I will clock off
and I will go and do it, because that's important
for creating balance in my life. Seeing friends regularly as well.
If you know, I've gone a few days without having
a social contact beyond my work life or beyond the
people that I kind of I'm surrounded by work. Although
(35:44):
they're lovely, you know, I do want to have conversations
and see people that have nothing to do with what
I do from you know, nine am to five pm,
So that's really important as well. Making time to connect
with family and with friends is a great way to
avoid getting to a point of mental exhaustion, where like
(36:06):
I said, your body is going to force you to
take a break. In this day and age. With our
changing attitudes and cultural attitudes around the role of our
professional work life in our broader existence and broader self concept,
it is really easy to buy into hustle culture and
(36:28):
to buy into the idea that the only way to
get ahead is to work unreasonable hours and sacrifice the
important parts and meaningful elements of our life. I don't
think that's the case. I think it's possible to do
well in your career and to have professional aspirations whilst
still remaining focused and clear and scented on what is
(36:51):
really really important. I think maintaining those healthy boundaries around
what's important to you and what's a non negotiable in
your life really also helps us avoid that kind of
pattern of exhaustion and stress and burnout that we've talked about.
So I hope that this episode has kind of shed
(37:11):
a bit of light. It was a bit of a ramble.
I think it was just something I really wanted to
discuss on the podcast this week and just kind of
dump my thoughts and my knowledge out upon all of yous.
So hopefully you got something out of it. If you're
experiencing something similar, if you're kind of stuck in the
corporate way of thinking and this day and age as
way of thinking around work, take a step back and
(37:36):
make sure that what you're doing in your life aligns
with what you actually want. It's very easy to be
passive and to fall into the social and cultural and
professional expectations that our jobs and our community and our
society demands of us. But taking time to really think
about what is going to make your life meaningful for
(37:58):
you will inevitably have amazing benefits for your mental health,
your physical health, and your long term well being, and
probably even benefits for your career in the long term.
You know, when your body is forcing you to take
a break, it's really not going to take no for
an answer, and no matter what deadlines you have on,
(38:20):
you're not going to be able to push through that.
So hopefully this has been a nice reminder on the
importance of balance and thank you as always for listening.
If you've enjoyed this episode and you feel cool to,
please leave a review or a five star rating on
Apple Podcasts or Spotify wherever you're listening right now. It
really does help the podcast grow. And if you're interested
(38:43):
in paid subscriber content, like I said, that's now available,
so get onto it. If you feel the neat if
you want to listen to more of my voice maybe not, Yeah,
there's links somewhere. I'm sure you can figure it out.
And as always, thank you for listening. I will be
back next week. Don't know what we're talking about yet,
but if you have suggestions, reach out on Instagram and
(39:06):
i'll get to it. Thank you so much,
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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