Balancing Work and Mental Health: Overcoming the Drive to Hustle Harder
Hustle culture can be all-consuming, and it can be easy to prioritize work over your mental health. You already know that it’s crucial to find a balance to avoid burnout and maintain your well-being, but how do you implement the mental health/work life balance “shoulds” when your brain is driving you to work more, longer, harder?
Regaining Your Mental Health in a Hustle Culture: Tips and Strategies
Here are some tips and strategies to help you regain your mental health in a hustle culture:
- Accept where you are now: Awareness of wanting something different with acceptance of where you are now is the first and biggest step to positive change. Without it, your current “Work harder, longer, better to succeed” mindset will take over any attempt to initiate change. Taking deep and purposeful breaths creates an environment of acceptance around your current inner state of being. You are still a healthy normal, good human being even if you can’t stop the work overdrive right now. Remind yourself that.
- Take full responsibility: You may have started your job with good intentions, yet you simply got off track. Don’t let the demands at work, the expectations of customers, inadequacy of co-workers, or your fear of finances be to blame. When you do, you give your power away. You got off track because you care about work and forgot to pay attention to the other things in life that you care about. That’s it.
- Change your mindset first: A “Work harder and longer to succeed so someday you can enjoy” mindset is full of emotions that propel you into automatic action. When you change your mindset first, you can work from a grounded and balanced state within, develop the healthy habits you know you need, leave work at the door, and enjoy the other aspects of your life.
- Get support: Commit time to work on your inner clarity and life balance. If you could do this on your own, you would have by now. Find a friend to do this with you, join a group, or hire a professional.
Remember, maintaining your mental health is crucial to your overall well-being. By accepting where you are, taking full responsibility, changing your mindsets first, and getting support, you can maintain your mental health in the face of hustle culture.
