Burnout deep dives: Rest and recovery 4
Including my tips for combatting toxic productivity culture to effectively alleviate burnout
Welcome to the final of August’s emails, which have all been themed on rest and recovery.
So far, we have covered:
The Effort-Recovery Theory and the importance of having adequate rest and recovery for mental wellbeing and burnout prevention
How to structure your work rest and recovery times to help prevent burnout
The evidence based advice about how you must rest to have an effective burnout recovery
For the final of this series, I’m going to cover once of the huge problems that we will face when planning how to rest and recover properly: toxic productivity culture.
Toxic productivity can be described as the uncontrollable need to feel productive at all times, at all costs, and it can become harmful to your mental and physical health.
Productivity culture has a lot to answer for, and especially in burnout.
Katina Bajaj couldn’t have put the cultural problem with toxic productivity better than in this article:
“As we race to our jobs, churn through never-ending to-do lists, and run from meeting to meeting, eyes glazed over from the frenzied nature of our daily lives, many of us believe that we need to work this way in order to deserve rest. Our culture is so obsessed with this chaos, which writer Tim Kreider describes as “an endless, frantic hamster wheel for survival.”
In modern society, we have put the capitalist ideal that we must always be productive on such a pedestal that the idea of producing nothing (or doing nothing) is so uncomfortable that we avoid it entirely, to the detriment of our mental health.
At the height of my burnout, instead of giving myself vital permission to rest and restore my mental and physical health, I constantly fretted that I wasn’t doing “enough” if I wasn’t being productive, doing something, or achieving something with my rest. I berated myself for not being productive and not being quick enough to recover.
So much of my self worth up until that point had been tied up in my identity of being productive. My nicknames at work were “Baby Bullet” and “Pocket Rocket” on account of my diminutive stature and high productivity levels. The mere thought of letting go of productivity was a total affront to my sense of self worth, at a very vulnerable time where I had lost so much of my identity that I was desperate to cling onto whatever vestiges of my former self remained.
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