Understanding and Shifting Away from Toxic Productivity

You may have heard the ancient Greek myth that tells the story of Sisyphus, a king who was banished by Hades and doomed to spend eternity rolling a boulder up a hill. Every time Sisyphus reached the top, the boulder would slip back down the hill, forcing him to start from the beginning all over again. Philosophers, poets, and artists have offered a variety of explanations for what this myth signifies, but my first thought upon reading it was, Hmm—his eternal task kind of seems familiar. Doing the same thing over and over again, getting tired but continuing nevertheless, finishing a task only to start a new one without ever being able to see or appreciate your progress. I could relate to Sisyphus—I’d been pushing myself for what seemed like an eternity. More importantly, I was starting to feel the immense strain from my own boulder weighing me down after all these years.

As a therapist, I’m trained to look at the “why” behind the “what.” Since the quantity of my workload didn’t seem to impact the quality of how I felt, I decided to look at my problem through the lens of behavioral psychology. I dove into the research on habit change, motivation, time management—all ingredients that play a role in how productive we are. I tested out a variety of techniques and theories on myself: habit stacking, the Eisenhower Matrix, and the Pomodoro Technique among others. While these strategies did help me feel more organized and in control of my time, they failed to change the way I saw myself in relation to others, the way I felt about my achievements, or the way I valued myself as a human. Whether I found myself with free time at the end of the day or passed out in bed with my laptop open in front of me, that inner critical voice continued to tell me that what I was doing was not enough.

It finally dawned on me that these weren’t just fleeting thoughts or simple products of stress or desire. This was the voice of my emotional foundation. The emotional foundation is the underlying structure that defines both our internal and external worldview. Formed by our early experiences, temperament and personality, beliefs and value system, and emotional dynamics, it guides your thoughts, decisions, and habits.

Because the emotional foundation serves as the basis for how we move through the world, we tend to accept it as an unchangeable truth—This is just who I am. The truth is that the emotional foundation has parts that are learned, which means we can unlearn them. But until I examined my emotional foundation more closely, that inner critical voice wasn’t going anywhere.

Throughout childhood, our parents and teachers encourage us to mine our potential for all we can achieve. In college, our scope expands—we want to maximize our contribution to the world, leave our mark, and make a difference for the better. But as some of us reach adulthood, these lofty goals tend to boil down to a single, urgent imperative: in order to have value, we have to produce more value. Without our noticing, our sense of self shifts away from our internal potential toward what that potential can produce: education, salary, material possessions, relationships, reputation. Our personal value is measured not by what we’ve produced already, but by how today’s production can help us produce tomorrow. Add this together with our competitive results-driven world filled with messages to “rise and grind” or “go the extra mile” and it’s no surprise that we are never satisfied.

This brings us to pursuing productivity relentlessly, to the point that we prioritize it over our physical, emotional, and mental health—in other words, we sometimes choose positive production over our basic human needs. Doing this builds habits like perfectionism, overcommitting, insecurity, self-neglect, and isolation. Even our proudest achievements cease to have any meaning for us; they’re simply a row of checkmarks on a never-ending list, a line of stepping stones toward a destination we will never reach. This is what I call toxic productivity.

Being productive is not, in and of itself, a toxic action. In fact, productivity is the driving force in achieving goals and simply getting things done. This is why it’s so important to shift your mindset from toxic productivity to healthy productivity. My new book Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Time and Emotional Energy in a World That Always Demands More provides information, reflections, and exercises that will help you will learn to identify the connection between productivity and self-worth, learn more about the subtle ways it can show up in your life, and reimagine your own relationship with productivity.

Of course, as I’ve learned from my own experience, even shifting to healthier habits can end up having a toxic effect if we approach with the same old perfectionist mindset. Instead, I recommend an “80/20” approach to integrating new habits into your life. If you can’t commit to doing something every day, aim to do it for three days out of the week. If you don’t have time or energy to work through an entire reflection exercise (like the one below), work on it for 15 minutes now and do another 15 tomorrow. Starting small and slow helps make a new habit into a practiced skill. Give yourself the grace and space to meet yourself where you are at, to be slow and intentional with your changes, and ultimately, to build a life that you are in love with.

Exercise: Keep, Stop, Start

Reflect on your current productivity habits with the following questions. What will the next 30 days look like for you?

1. Keep: What do you want to keep doing in the next 30 days?
2. Start: What do you want to start doing in the next 30 days that you are not doing right now?
3. Stop: What do you want to stop doing in the next 30 days?

In this free excerpt from Toxic Productivity, you’ll see a a few of my strategies for clients who need to cultivate a healthier perspective on achievement.