Hustle By Recovery

This isn’t a story of work-life balance via unplugging. This is a story of maintaining your momentum so you can crush all the career goals you’ve ever had

- Marissa Gainsburg

Ah, hustle. A word so charged, just hearing (or seeing) it probably makes you want to put down this magazine and get stuff done. For your own sake, please don’t! Truth is, while a go-go-go approach may seem like the fast track to checking all your professional boxes, you’re only setting yourself up to lose steam right before the finish line. “Think of your brain as a muscle. For it to function at its best, it needs recovery time after a long and demanding workout,” says Dr Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT in the US. That’s what a long week’s – even day’s – work is: an endurance challenge. Especially for us women.

The pressure to live up to our potential not only as individuals, but as a gender is very real. Millennial women are more stressed than guys – and more than ever before – citing work and money as their top strain, per a new survey. In fact, 72 percent copped to never saying no at the office, likely in an attempt to climb the ladder faster.

We get it, but that doesn’t mean the approach is effective. Most of us have witnessed how the constant grind dings our health: we wind up sick, retreating from friends and family or blowing off the gym in favour of bed. It also thwarts our best work efforts because in a race to do it all, we multitask, which leads to greater error correction, not greater productivity. The result? More stress and feelings of failure, two mentalhealth bummers.