Hustle Culture Makes us Sick - How to Leave it Behind

You might not realize that you’re having to overcome hustle culture every single day - not just in your business, but in everyday life - and the subtle social pressure to function the way hustle culture says you should is hiding in most daily interactions, often making you feel physically sick or anxious.

The way out of this is to become aware of how much this message is influencing you and consciously choose a different path.

The secret message of hustle culture, especially in the self-help zone, is that you should be improving yourself regularly. You should be getting rid of old habits that don’t serve you and continually making progress toward a goal that constantly moves out a little further.

You might even find yourself thinking right now, “Well, of course I need to work on myself or I won’t make progress.”

Hustle culture has embedded itself in every corner of our minds to the point where we truly believe we’d become lazy couch potato people if we don’t constantly improve ourselves.

This brings up a really important point: hustle culture is fear-driven.

We are afraid of so many things that could happen if we don’t push ourselves and strive to be better as much as possible. We might not meet that goal. We might not make income. We might not have a certain outcome we’re hoping for in a certain timeframe.

This is exactly why all this self-pressure from hustle culture is a lie our minds are telling us.

Whenever I bring this up and use my favorite phrase that I coined - “Slacker Magic” - someone inevitably says, “But, if I really slack off, I’ll never do those things that really need to get done that I hate doing.”

We automatically assume that unless we force ourselves and pressure ourselves to get things done we won’t do them. We assume we need to be treated like children who will be punished if they don’t clean their room, inside our own heads!

This is only natural.

This is what we’ve been taught!

Well, let me be the example for just a minute. In this current world of social media, if you have been around me for even just a few days, you can instantly tell that I am getting a LOT of sh*t done.

If you read what I’m posting, you can see how much content I produce for my business. You can see the programs I offer. You can see how present I am in my business and what I’m up to. You can see that I’m single parenting an amazing daughter. You can see that I’m dealing with chronic physical symptoms from a major surgery.

Yet, here I am, talking about Slacker Magic. Talking about taking more and more and more actual time for yourself to rest and restore your spirit. Talking about taking mental space for yourself before you dive into a workday or a project or a home chore.

The exciting thing about leaving hustle culture behind is that you’ll discover the reverse of what you think is actually the reality. The MORE you rest, take amazing care of you, partake in delight and fun, and really trust your inner wisdom, the more you actually get done.

It’s EXACTLY the opposite of what you might think!

You even get those yucky things like taxes and folding laundry done. (If you hate those as much as I do! ;-) )

Here’s why:

If your emotional, mental, and physical being has what it truly needs to function well, you feel like a different person than the person who is drained, depleted, tired, exhausted, and not inspired.

For example, just about every week in my business I have a day where I’m not quite as energized or enthused about my to-do list. Every time, my mind tells me I should push through and get it done anyway.

Sometimes, I believe what it’s saying and I try to get all the things done. They take a really long time. I feel worse. I get a headache. Pain flares up where pain had died down. I run into roadblocks.

This just happened to me this past week on Wednesday. I had a huge project I was working on and all of the above things happened. I ran into a major roadblock with technology and simply couldn’t move forward. Then, I remembered that instead of pushing through, I need to slack off!

When I slack off, the pressure gets released. Now there’s time for elements of what I’m trying to create to come together as needed without me even working on them. Ideas show up that I didn’t have before. Other people take actions that I didn’t even know I needed in order to make a project work better.

The universe is conspiring to help me, so when I give it the space and time to do so, magic happens.

Last week, I finally stepped away from everything on Wednesday and took the rest time that I truly needed.

Thursday, I woke up to solutions in the business. Overnight, issues were solved without me having to do a thing. People I’d reached out to for help on Wednesday helped me in just a few minutes on Thursday. This is what happens when I’m restored - things just work better all around.

Here’s the other cool part. Sometimes, your inner wisdom is telling you to rest now because you’ll need your reserves. On Thursday, I woke up to an emergency dental problem for my daughter.

Without having taken the slower, more restful time for the last half of Wednesday, I would have been fried on Thursday morning and wouldn’t have had the bandwidth to handle the stress of an emergency without it affecting my body, mind, and spirit.

As it was, I had the energy and the bandwidth, so I was able to move through the crisis without feeling stressed or getting irritable with her.

Our bodies, minds, and spirits are always telling us how much bandwidth we have and when we need to take the time to restore ourselves. If we pay attention, everything just works better. If we don’t - that’s when we start to get sick, end up in pain, or have tons of anxiety. Our bodies reach limits and let us know!

The key is to stop for just a few seconds before you push forward and check in with your body, mind, and spirit. Is everyone actually on board to move forward? If not, what do you really need?

What does your body need?

What does your mind need?

What does your spirit need?

Meet those needs, even if it’s just in a small way, and you’ll have far more bandwidth and much less anxiety or pain as you move forward. You’ll hear the message before your body has to yell via strong symptoms.

I promise, you’ll still get sh*t done. Why? Because you’re tuning into your inner wisdom, and it’s the best get-it-done support you could ever have. It’s looking out for your overall well-being. It knows you need to get your taxes done on time!

It will call you toward your taxes just when you have the right bandwidth, the support is there for you, and the time is right. I call this Right Timing.

You’ll get them accomplished. You won’t get overloaded and sick. You will feel far less stressed.

It takes a certain amount of trust to listen to this inner call rather than force yourself to work on things when you feel like crap. The more you do it, however, the more you see that the flow is guiding you and it’s got your back.

I hate laundry, and yet I get the laundry done. Never through pushing. Only through listening to that pull when it calls me. I’m on top of most things in my life, and I put my slack time first.

Are there times we have to push ourselves? Sure. Sometimes it’s necessary because outside circumstances create a deadline. But, we can go right back to slacking as soon as possible!

Helping you get into this slacking and massive productive rhythm while escaping hustle culture so that you can feel better in your body, inspired, get more done, and even have more financial flow in your business is what I do in my group program. In the program, you get one other thing that’s necessary to escape hustle culture - a community of other humans who are also leaving that culture behind.

There’s nothing more helpful that getting social support and social feedback that it’s ok to change this pattern. This starts to override the training you’ve had since childhood to pressure and push yourself to get things done, no matter what, and constantly improve yourself.

When you’re around others on the same path, hearing this new message every day, your mind lets you relax into the new way. Positive reinforcement is huge. When you’re trusting flow, you’ll naturally make choices to shift and evolve as a human rather than forcing yourself to change and improve. It’s a relaxed, kind approach that allows your body to relax daily and drop out of pain and anxiety-creating patterns.

This is what happens inside the group program!

You can learn more about this program and others here.