By Heather Caldwell, MA, LPC
The Importance of Rest, Sleep, & Repair
American culture values work and productivity. We have many narratives that support this, such as the ability to pull oneself up by their bootstraps; if we work hard enough, we can succeed; and those who don’t work hard and don’t succeed are “lazy” and therefore don’t “deserve” success. We see these sorts of narratives everywhere, and while some are explicit, like the bootstrap success story, they can often be implicit messages coming from friends, families, the workplace, and media outlets.
Implicit messages can be found in shared stories that verge on mini competition around how much we work as evidenced by how little we sleep. It can sound something like this:
Person 1: I am sooo tired. I’ve got this big promotion coming up this week and I’ve barely slept trying to get everything ready for it.
Person 2: Seriously! I hear you. I swear this week I’m lucky if I’m getting 4 hours of sleep. Between the kids and my job, I mean, the other day I forgot to eat until … I don’t know… dinner! I woke up early to get a head start on work emails and this project I’m working on had me working through lunch, and then before I knew it the kids asked ‘what’s for dinner?’!
Person 1: Right, after dinner yesterday I sat back down to finish up some work and before I knew it, it was 1 am! The morning alarm rolls around quickly when you’re up half the night working.
Person 2: I was so exhausted yesterday it was all I could do after dinner to plop on the couch and watch a few episodes of a show before bed.
Success is something we’re supposed to work towards at all costs. We see this in movies, magazine success stories, and TV programs. Only when we’ve become successful can we rest and enjoy life. This can lead us to feel that we always need to be productive and to always strive for success. It can also lead to feelings of guilt for “taking time off” or even for not being productive enough without household chores, errands, or plans on our day off.
And while work and productivity often have rewards, such as paying bills, putting food on the table, work promotions, and buying the occasional splurge, vacation, or even a house, they also have drawbacks, such as the elusive definition of success and what we sacrifice along the way. This blog post has three parts. The first section explores potential negative impacts from this cultural narrative. The second focuses on stress and the impacts on your mental and physical self. The third offers reflections on what success means to you and resources to help you make a shift towards personal success.
Part 1
Productivity Culture and Negative Impacts
The cultural narrative around productivity, success, and our ability to create it on our own if we work hard enough is often a false one and impacts us to varying degrees depending on all sorts of factors including race, gender, weight/size, sexuality, socio-economic backgrounds, generational priviledge or lack thereof, and physical location. This blog post doesn’t address such factors, however these factors are incredibly important to understanding our story and therapy is a wonderful and supportive space to explore how these factors might impact you.
Even though we might have differing factors that impact us, we share similar manifestations of the narrative in our daily life.
Work/workplace over self/others
One way the narrative may impact you is by placing higher importance on work than on yourself or others. Work can take over our life if we let it. By not having a healthy work/life balance, it’s easy to skip dinner with a loved one to complete a report or project, miss a kid’s baseball game for a late afternoon meeting, or reschedule your dentist appointment for the third time for a job brief with an employee.
When this happens, you are implicitly saying the job or company is more important than your partner(s), kid(s), or yourself. An argument can be made that it’s important to show up and do the work you were hired to do. But it is also important to reflect on if you’re sacrificing or negatively impacting relationships for a job that can’t love you back.
Are you sacrificing relationships for a job that can’t love you back?
Self-abandonment
In order to be productive and feel like you’re always moving forward, an empty calendar spot may not stay empty for long. Whether it’s sneaking a quick trip to the gym, doing a load of laundry, or tackling a backlog of emails, that space often gets filled. A downfall of over-scheduling, is that it can
Increase our anxiety by keeping you always on the go and oftentimes always running late,
Feed feelings of overwhelm where there’s just too many things to do, which in turn either keep you stuck and prevent doing anything or can minimize your ability to feel successful,
Keep you from having unstructured time to be creative, follow an impulse, play with the kids/dogs, or make time for you,
If personal stuff is planned, it easily gets overridden to make room for ‘work’ because it’s ‘easy’ (even expected) to say yes to work requests and hard to keep a firm boundary and say yes to you and your personal plans.
These are recipes for burnout, workplace fatigue, dissatisfaction with work/life, illness, and utter exhaustion!
Are you sacrificing your physical health in order to be “successful”?
Sacrifice: diet, hobbies, relationships,
health, sleep
In order to get everything done in 24-hours, we sacrifice, we start to negotiate with ourselves, we pull back - not from work but from our lives. This appears in our diets. When you don’t have time to pack a lunch or even take a lunch break, food choices easily become unhealthy. Grabbing a bag of chips from the vending machine, eating at the desk or even skipping lunch altogether can easily lead to consuming an excess of non-nutritional calories or mindlessly eating as you multitask. This can contribute to physical and mental exhaustion, brain fog, and increased body aches and diminished physical health.
You might also notice that you pull back from other more enriching areas of your life. For example, due to being too tired, you might skip a monthly book club meeting or dinner with a friend. You might skip the gym (again) or stop doing creative projects. You might become irritated when the kids or the dogs become loud or want attention. You might lean more towards numbing out or drifting away from the present moment by spending more time scrolling on social media, binging television shows, or partaking in substances that help us numb out.
If you put all your energy to your work, you might be less emotionally available to those you love.
On the surface the pause or break provides temporary relief, however, it doesn’t offer anything long-term or fill the proverbial cup. In fact, many times it can contribute to feelings of malaise or even add to anxiety as this time wasn’t “productive” or you didn’t do enough to “deserve” it. Instead, you give your all to the workplace and come home empty, exhausted, and shrinking back from things that might fill you back up. This starts to take a toll on relationships as you might not be as emotionally available to be with your partner(s). It also impacts sleep by keeping you awake at night, feeling restless, staying up late worrying, having anxiety dreams, and waking up already exhausted.
Part 2
Stress: Impacts and Importance
When we’re exhausted and under stress, whether from internal or external pressures, we easily fall into a hyperarousal/hypoarousal cycle. The hyperarousal state, usually felt as anxiety or over or excessive worrying, can cause you to feel on edge, contribute to brain fog, and create a ripe environment for looping thoughts. The hypoarousal state, usually felt as depression, exhaustion, or burnout, can cause you to feel unmotivated, hopeless, and create a ripe environment for negative self-talk. The cycle between these two states negatively impacts the brain’s production of neurotransmitters, such as GABA, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, cortisol, adrenaline, and histamine. These neurotransmitters are linked to depression, anxiety, sleep-related issues, autoimmune diseases, nervous system regulation, and more.
At times it may feel like you’re stuck in a cycle with no way out. Or that because you’re so exhausted and have no time, there’s no space to make changes. The good news is that with some personal changes—even small ones—your body, brain, and nervous system can repattern, giving you more time, energy, capacity for enjoyment, and personal success.
Even small changes in routine can give your nervous system a break.
Part 3
Personal Success: Reflections and Resources
Prompt:
Grab a journal or voice recorder to capture your thoughts
Many of us have ideas around work success and/or financial success. However, we are often lacking a definition for personal success. Begin thinking about your life and what you’d like it to look like, feel like, be like.
What do you want your days to look like? Ideally, in a perfect world, how would you like to feel when you wake up? How much sleep would you like to get? What would be the quality of your sleep? What would you like your morning routine to look like and feel like? How would you like your days to feel? What pace or level of pressure/need would you like your days to have? How much routine or change do you want in your life?
What sort of connections do you want to have with others—your coworkers, partner(s), friends, kids, parents, neighbors, pets? What relationships do you want to foster and which ones no longer serve you or do you want to let go of? What does the relationship with your partner(s) look like, feel like or what do you want from your future partner(s)? What do you want your sex life or intimate life to look like, feel like, and how frequently?
What sorts of hobbies would you like to have or what qualities would you like in non-work activities? What would you like to learn, try, and improve upon in your personal life? What would you like to spend more time doing? Where would you like to visit or what experiences would you like to have?
What would you like your evenings to look like? What would you like to have time for that you don’t have time for now? What would you like your weekends or day(s) off to look like?
What would you like the overall feel of your life to be? Five years from now, what would you like your personal life to look like and/or to feel like? Ten years from now, what are some personal (not work related!) goals you’d like to achieve?
What do you want your life to feel like?
Read back over this list. What do you notice? What themes can you pull out from this exploration? How do these personal wants align with your current life and lifestyle? Identify 1-3 areas where you’re already working on an item listed or already achieved in your personal life. Identify 1-3 areas that could use support or you’d like to change.
What blocks, negative beliefs, or systemic obstacles prevent you from achieving these desires and goals? What stands in your way? Identify one area where you can make a small change. Identify one area that you feel would require a big change, feels scary to look at or change. Identify supportive people in your life who you can share this with and who might be able to help you on your journey.
The therapists at Evolve in Nature can help you explore your personal story and feelings of productivity and success as well as help unpack the implicit or explicit factors that impact your life. If you or someone you know could use additional support, contact us today!
Also, see the compiled list of resources below.
Resources for reducing stress, building better sleep habits, and making shifts:
Reading
Apps to help with meditation, anxiety, and stress
Each of these has a section for sleep, including meditations, podcasts, story-scapes, soundscapes, and more:
Headspace
Calm
Insight Timer
Emotional exploration and tracking
App: How We Feel