When I woke up on the 20th of March 2020, after finding out just 48 hours before that my A-Levels were cancelled and today will be my last day of sixth form, my only worry was ‘what am I going to do with all this time?’.
I’m naturally a ‘busy’ person - at least I try to be. When I feel productive, busy and, quite frankly, overworked, I feel my best. I’ve always conceptualised the best version of myself as the woman who has a crammed schedule, constant influxes of adrenaline and 5 minutes here and there to catch my breath. The days when I know I’ll go to bed exhausted after a long day of commuting to school, sitting through hours of classes and spending my evening in the library before jumping on the bus again to fill my mind with more information by listening to an educational podcast or read a book, are days I look back at with nostalgia. So, the prospect of not being able to live my academic based intense lifestyle while the nation went into its first lockdown was something I couldn’t comprehend… and still can’t.
This problem, I later learned, is called toxic productivity.
With the impending lockdown 1.0 and 2 days to process my last days at school for a ‘while’ (little did I know I would never go back), I scanned the internet to find out ‘what can I do to pass the time’. The many news articles, blog posts and self-help guilds I read through all basically said the same thing. You need to learn a new skill, learn a new language, invent something, start a small business, organise a non-profit, run a marathon around your local park etc. etc. Okay, okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little but what I read from numerous articles gave the same sentiment; ‘you shouldn't be wasting your time’, ‘if you don’t come out of lockdown with X, Y, and Z you don’t lack time, you lack discipline and ‘now’s your time to become the entrepreneur you’ve always dreamed of being’. It felt suffocating. The screams from society that ‘YOU AREN’T WORKING HARD ENOUGH’ only fuels this toxic productivity that I had been experiencing, and I feel many others have too.
‘Toxic productivity’ is defined as ‘an obsession with radical self-improvement above all else.
Ultimately, it’s an unachievable goal; no matter how productive you are, the result you are left with is a feeling of guilt for not having done ‘more’ (according to clinical lead at Results Wellness Lifestyle, a health and fitness brand). Toxic productively and guilt go hand-in-hand. Guilt is the evil cousin that pops up at family occasions at the wrong time just to embarrass you. Just when you feel you’re finally being productive, the minute you ‘switch off’...guilt floods in to remind you ‘sleep is for the weak’. Guilt that I haven’t spent enough time working today. Guilt that the 30 minutes I spent on social media was 30 minutes I could have spent honing in on my new skill. This academic guilt was driven by my own desire to ‘be better’ and is something that most students are conditioned to believe is the right way of living. In fact, student or not, we’re constantly fed these mantras that ‘dreams are worth more than sleep’ and ‘the grind never stops’ which, as cliche and stupid as they sound now, is something that I for one truly believed was correct.
The entire idea of productivity is a consequence of capitalism. Think about it, we’re conditioned to think that a fruitful and worthy life is measured purely on what is tangible; whether it’s exam grades, a university scholarship or a house that you bought with the money you earned from your 9-5. If you can’t show your life's value by holding it in the palms of your hand or have it written on a to-do-list, is it actually worth anything? This is what we’re conditioned to think, and it’s toxic and it needs to stop.
Even though I, as well as the entire world, was processing the beginnings of a pandemic and our own personal turmoil for months on end, I feel the whole world was shoving toxic productivity down my throat. This ‘get up and grind’ mentality that had got me through 7 years of high school couldn’t be applied to this new situation I found myself in. Stuck between my four-bedroom walls with only wifi and social media to keep me connected to the outside world meant my motivation to ‘finally do all the hobbies I’ve always wanted to do’ rapidly vanished.
The amount of information accessible at our fingertips through the internet is incomprehensible and pretty daunting. With everyone taking to social media, especially celebrities, to update us on what they were getting up to in lockdown, it’s no wonder we always felt we needed to do more. Whether it was baking banana bread and making ice coffee from a Tik Tok tutorial or heading to Squarespace to attend every masterclass on the website, everyone was doing something. I, myself, was constantly switching between ‘hobbies... but I did so going to bed every night with all-consuming guilt that I STILL should be doing more. It’s like trying to escape quicksand and just as you think you’re back on stable land, the sand pulls you in further. I found myself scrolling through my Instagram feed but only being fed with the fake and fabricated ‘perfect’ lives of every other human, who were trudging through lockdown 1.0 seamlessly and becoming an entrepreneur at the same time.
While I had been dealing with being toxically productive for years, my reliance on social media in the last year, to keep in contact with my friends and the ‘online’ world, only made it more prominent. And now, I didn’t have a formal setting like school to keep me in this cycle of constant academic work. I only had myself to ‘blame’ for only ticking one thing off of my extensive ‘to-do-list’ that day. It took me a pandemic and a national emergency to realise that I had been living through a pattern of excessively productive days and nights to periods of total burnout. Why had I become the model for toxic productivity and burnouts? Because society was praising it.
Social media perpetuates this ‘hustle culture’; a social norm that places constant work over relaxation and views all personal pursuits as either productive or not. Although getting a good night's sleep is salient for our brain to process information from the day, essentially a key part of ‘a day's work’, sleeping is deemed ‘unproductive’ in hustle culture. I lived by the sentiment that ‘sleep is for the week’ for my entire A-Levels. According to this ‘rise and grind’ culture, working through the night and skipping meals indicates that you ARE working. This norm seems inescapable, especially in the extremely individualistic capitalist society we live in. But what I did was replace this ‘sleep is for the week’ platitude with ‘my health is my wealth’. It might seem small but reminding myself that something as fundamental as sleep is indeed fundamental for me, and is one way I tackle toxic productivity.
By now, we’ve all acknowledged that this period of lockdowns and restrictions in the UK may last a while longer, I just hope we don’t continue to let toxic productivity fester. More than that, I hope we don’t internalise capitalism any more than we already have as a society.
It’s good to rest. It’s good to recharge. It’s good to relax.
I’m someone who still gives into toxic productivity, but realising that not being ‘productive’ (whatever your definition of ‘productive’ is) does not equate laziness. Equating your happiness to how many hours of work you’ve done, how many coffees you’ve drunk to keep you awake and how many trivial tasks you’ve checked off your to-do-list will only lead to two things: burnout and stress out. Take it from someone with years of experience up her sleeves, it’s not worth the burnout.
Huge thank you to Emily for writing such a great relatable piece. I'm sure we've all struggled with toxic productivity at some point during each lockdown. But as Emily rightly states, take pride in being able to relax too. Don't let social media pressure you into achieving everything on your bucket list when in reality, that's just unrealistic. Yes, we must learn to adapt but we also learn to adjust and to separate work and relaxing.
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