DONT turn down your feelings and turn up your hustle

I recently saw a photo captioned “Turn down your feelings and turn up your hustle.”?

It got me thinking about the focus on hustle culture, and how it’s become the norm to let work dominate everyday life, leaving hobbies, family, and friends to take a back seat.??

I’ve found that when you take time off, you don’t start recharging and relaxing properly until day 2 or 3. If I don’t take time out to re-charge regularly, I realise I’m only working at around 70-80% capacity.

The prevalence and normalisation of ‘hustle culture’ is fascinating yet damaging if not balanced with enough downtime.

There seems to be an idealised concept that if you are working constantly, you will see instant results. There exists an overarching belief that “busier always equals better,” and from this comes more money, happiness, and progression. This is rarely true.??

Whilst hustle culture glorifies overworking, it simultaneously sets up an environment of pressure and guilt, especially if you feel like you’re working behind the pace of others around you.??

CEO of Black Mental Wellness, Nicole Cammack, put forward some very real consequences of “feeling the need to do more”:??

• Feel obligated to say “yes” to every tasked you’re asked to do, even if your current workload is already full??
• Feel hesitant to take off annual leave, or even a full hour for lunch??
• Respond to messages or emails after hours or over the weekend??

Although hustle culture places prominence on working longer hours and in turn, being more successful, many employees living this hustle motivated lifestyle often fall victim to burnout. Almost ironically, sufferers of burnout take longer to complete tasks, feel demotivated, procrastinate, and lose interest in parts of their job – the exact opposite of what hustle culture encourages.??

One of hustle cultures biggest downfalls is it looks only into the future, and never focuses on the present. ‘I’ll send that email when I get home,” “I’ll make that call on the weekend.”??

People are missing out on the here and now and are instead confined by internal and external pressures heightened by this culture of always doing more. More deadlines, more meetings, more hours. People grow so accustomed to being on autopilot that we often forget to be attuned to our surroundings and ourselves and take time to actually enjoy our jobs.??

Everyone is wired differently, and what works for one person, may not work for you.??

It’s important to remember the difference between hustle and lifestyle. Something that has been carried through from pandemic is the ability for people to work when they need to, not when they should be. If your manager works until 11pm because they’ve left work at 3:30pm to pick the kids up from school and are pre-occupied with parent duties until 8pm, they may clock-on until late to catch up - this isn’t hustle this is lifestyle.??

When I send an email late at night for whatever reason, I make a specific point to mention that the email doesn’t have to be responded to and that just because you’re working, your employee doesn’t have to be.??

Find the balance.??