Five Antidotes to Hustle Mentality

Mar 27

Get better work done by slowing it down.

All work is hard.

Hustle porn will try to convince you that if you love what you do, it’s not work. And that might be the case sometimes, especially when you reach a state of flow.

But at some point, work will feel like work. And you won’t want to do it. And that’s OK.

You weren’t born for work

Google hustle quotes and you’ll find platitudes like:

“Hustlers don’t sleep. They nap.”
“Nobody cares. Work harder.”
“Good things happen to those who hustle.”
“If you see me less. I’m doing more.”

My fundamental problem with hustle culture is that it assumes that value and meaning come from what you can accomplish, and that the only way to accomplish great things is to work and work and work some more.

Ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll tell you I’m no slouch, but I also know the dangers of buying into hustle culture. For years I sleep-starved myself, placed my identity in what I did, and bought into the lie that the only value I bring to the world is what I produce.

The result was throwing my back out, drinking too much, chronic anxiety, and the inability to sit still for more than a few minutes. I was irritable, ignored my family, and my spiritual life suffered.

I learned the hard way that we’re not born for work and work alone. Being a complete human being requires making space in other areas of our life.

Work gets harder when you work too hard

If you don’t get enough sleep, your work will suffer. There’s a lot of research on this, but long story short, productivity goes significantly down when you get less than seven hours of sleep per night. Contrary to hustle culture’s claims, burning the midnight oil doesn’t make you more successful…quite the opposite. Plus there’s horrible health implications to lack of sleep. Read Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep,” to get an in-depth look at the evolutionary importance of sleep.

If you value your output vs. your outcomes, you can easily fall into the trap of hustling on all the wrong things. Success comes from getting the right things down uncommonly well, not on doing what is most common: doing lots of things rather poorly. Focusing on what is most essential takes creating space, not doing more.

If you sacrifice your relationships in order to do more, you’re building a recipe for mental health issues. Anxiety, depression, and a host of mental illnesses can be linked to a decrease in community. Pour overworking on top of that, and you’re creating a dangerous scenario for yourself.

All of these factors and more make it clear that working more can actually make your work harder, and thus make it harder to be successful. Getting stuck in the hustle spiral can be devastating because you think if I just push a little harder, I’ll finally have my breakthrough. Most likely, though, it will be a breakdown instead.

Accept that work is hard

Seneca wrote, “There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.”

All our great ambitions take hard work. And most great things take time. Accept this and come to the table rested and ready to engage, and you’ll get far more done over the long haul than those hustlers out there.

Aesop knew this and gave us the fable The Tortoise and the Hare. Maybe we’d all be better off if we read children’s stories again.

Here are some things I do in order to better prepare myself to engage with my hard work.

Get some exercise

Most knowledge workers are pretty sedentary. After all, we spend hours upon hours hunched at a desk pounding away on a keyboard (much to the chagrin of our lower backs). This sedentary lifestyle can actually sap your energy and dull your mind.

Lately I’ve set aside 30 minutes to walk around my neihborhood. I listen to podcasts or an audio book, and just let my mind wander. Not only do I come back to work more energized, I’ve also had sparks of insight and creativity while walking that help me to solve some big problems I’ve been working on. Those 30 minutes walking probably saved me hours of tired and ineffective hustle.

According to the Mayo Clinic, exercise can help you:

Gain confidence. Meeting exercise goals or challenges, even small ones, can boost your self-confidence. Getting in shape can also make you feel better about your appearance.
Take your mind off worries. Exercise is a distraction that can get you away from the cycle of negative thoughts that feed anxiety and depression.
Get more social interaction. Exercise may give you the chance to meet or socialize with others. Just exchanging a friendly smile or greeting as you walk around your neighborhood can help your mood.
Cope in a healthy way. Doing something positive to manage anxiety or depression is a healthy coping strategy. Trying to feel better by drinking alcohol, dwelling on how badly you feel, or hoping anxiety or depression will go away on their own can lead to worsening symptoms.

Read a book

From time to time, we all need to be inspired. When I’m struggling to capture my thoughts and translate them into anything meaningful, I pick up a good book and let my subconscious go to work on what I was working on.

Reading helps me to often make connections I wouldn’t otherwise make. I’ve found that spending even 15 minutes reading rather that actively working on problems can often help unlock key insights, saving me hours again.

Some people find it helpful to read a book related to the problems they’re working on. For me, any book will do, and in fact I find I make more interesting connections by reading unrelated topics.

Take a nap

Really. It’s OK. No one works well when they’re exhausted. If you try, you’ll just create more work for yourself later by producing poor work that needs to be redone. Though it seems counterintuitive, the best thing you can do to increase your productivity is not work more but to be well rested. If you’ve been burning the midnight oil and can’t remember how to spell even simple words, just take a nap and come back to your work with a fresh, well-rested mind.

Eat some food and drink some water

Chips don’t count. Neither does coffee. You need to have a healthy, balanced diet to feed your mind and keep your body health.

This is the one I’m most guilty off. I skip meals frequently in the name of productivity or because I’m on a roll. It’s horrible for my body, and it makes me a poor writer because my energy levels are down and my mind isn’t as sharp as it could be. So, take the 30 minutes to have lunch. Grab that bowl of cereal in the morning. And eat your veggies. Your work will be healthier—and so will you.

Also, watch your water intake. Studies have shown that fatigue can often be linked to dehydration.

Change it up

Finally, I’ve found something as simple as moving to a different location for work can be immensely helpful. Working at home is great. I love it. But I get quite lonely in my little office space sometime…and bored. Not everyone will suggest this, but I like to work in different areas of my house to mix things up. Just the change of scenery alone helps my mind feel more refreshed and to start making different connections. I can’t explain it. It’s just magic.

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Jake Johnson