Toxic Productivity: How To Climb Out
I find it difficult to enjoy the moment because I fear not being productive with my time. Sound familiar?
All creatives have a badge of honor which they gift to themselves for:
Not sleeping on time and doing work instead
Not having any personal time because your calendar is full
We’ve convinced ourselves that the less we respect ourselves, the more hardworking and better off we are. But on those days, you’ll feel that you’ve lost control over the day. You stop paying attention to your emotional state and start pushing through any pain. You even start to resent your work.
You begin to talk down to yourself and start to ignore your needs. You then start to feel like you need to compete with yourself. Healthy competition is okay but it becomes a constant need to be better or faster than you were yesterday. This in turn results in you having a dissatisfying relationship with yourself.
There is one obsession I’ve faced where productivity has made me selfish - where I start to feel that every action or decision I make has to have some type of impact. As a creative, that’s a bad road to be on because you start to become result oriented rather than enjoying the process.
One challenge I've encountered while trying to lead a somewhat productive lifestyle is becoming overly fixated on self-development and finding my purpose. This obsession has left me little room to simply enjoy life and be happy. In fact, I reached a point where I lost touch with how to have fun and even began neglecting my social life due to my relentless pursuit of the next task or goal.
In retrospect, I've come to realize that learning is akin to working out. Just as we exercise to maintain physical fitness and improve our mental well-being, if we devote the majority of our time solely to working out and turn it into a life mission rather than a complement to our lives, it can have detrimental effects. We inadvertently start measuring our self-worth based on factors like a weight lifted or the intensity of our workouts. We’re focusing on the wrong metric
You can still do that by all means but you’ll start to feel unhappy because you never asked yourself where to draw the line. When to say enough. That’s when learning becomes toxic. Im not saying learning shouldn’t be part of your journey but it shouldn’t be a purpose of your life, it should be a part of it. It shouldn’t measure the value you bring in.
The most common advice I’ve encountered to solve this is to look for ‘sustainable improvement.’ Jordan Peterson has stated that in order to reach that, you have to go to the deep end. If you’re in your 20s then this is the best time to do that, because you have to push yourself to your limits and then pull back. That way you have a benchmark. That’s when you put ‘play’ into your life.
There was research done in 2010 in which people who study animal behavior found that social ‘play’ in rats produces pre-frontal lobe development (which is the highest part of your brain that is responsible for the highest cognition). Thus ‘play’ (social play in particular) is very detrimental to maturity.
[Link to the study: The role of the medial prefrontal cortex in the play fighting of rats - PubMed (nih.gov)]
In short: take a break, take days off. Not every action has to have a purpose. The right decisions can only happen when you’re in the right state of mind.
Stephen Covey once said:
“If your ladder is up against the wrong wall, you will just get to the wrong place faster”
