Is the hustle culture toxic?

All of us have heard of hustle culture and how you work almost all day with minimum breaks or sleep time which lasts not more than 5 hours and 4 hours, some even go as far as 2 hours! But the real question is if these methods which we keep on a pedestal to reach success even work? We here at Layman will try to point out everything which is wrong with hustle culture.

Only productive humans are valued

In hustle culture, if you are not grinding day in and day out then you are made to feel guilty?that you didn’t work so the whole day has gone to waste which you will never get back again. This implies that life is only worth living if you work and all the other aspects of life are just?meritless.

Leads to burnouts

When you work every day for countless hours without breaks for weeks and months, there?comes a time when you lose the energy to work for days at a stretch. This usually happens?because your brain is given so little time to rest. This results in your brain’s amygdala enlarging (The part that controls emotional reactions). It causes more moodiness and has a more robust?stress response when startled.

Less sleep

In the book “Why do we sleep” written by Mathew Walker it is stated that adults should get no sleep less than 7 hours, but these numbers are drastically low when you are part of the hustle?culture. Due to less sleep, your brain gets more sluggish. Some of the most common?symptoms are lower alertness and concentration, bad memory, and having microsleeps.??Done too long can have irreversible brain damage to the nerves of the brain

Work-life balance

?Another thing that you do not get when part of the hustle culture is work-life balance.?You won’t have time to meet your friends, family and all your other loved ones and feel distanced and won’t be able to enjoy your hobbies. Since homo sapiens are social beings who?need to hear and feel other homo sapiens' voices and touch, without it you feel lonely and might?start feeling depressed. The Covid-19 lockdowns are the perfect example of when we felt?lonely and needed other people.?

In conclusion, hustle culture is very damaging to you in every aspect of your life. We at Layman encourage you to work but to work with sufficient breaks and a proper sleep schedule. To work but to have a balance between your social life and your hobbies. We encourage you to be a human, not a machine.

By ?????????????????? ????????