Pioneers Club Podcast #7: Reclaim Your Time – The Art of Guilt-Free Resting for High-Performance
Time to listen: 15:16
Time to read: 14:00
Introduction
Monika This is the Pioneers Club podcast.
Patrick The Community Podcast for driven Entrepreneurs and leaders.
Monika Here you can connect with like-minded people, create a sense of belonging and gain more agency in your daily life.
Hi, my name is Monika and I’m your host. I help entrepreneurs and leaders with big ideas go from feeling overwhelmed, scared and confused to being clear headed, confident and focused as they go after their goals.
I’m a mental and systemic coach and primarily focus on topics such as resilience, agency, high performance and goal pursuit, helping my clients thrive in their business with more ease.
Patrick And I’m your co-host, Patrick. I’m an entrepreneur in the fast paced media industry, and I help people tell stories. As a producer and production manager, I work with a global network of partners to create engaging content, combining media and technology to create value and impact.
I went or live through the topics of our podcast, just like you and will try to ask the questions you might have.
This week’s focus: guilt-free resting
Patrick So welcome back to this week’s episode. And we have to start with a term that you told me while preparing for this episode.
Apparently everyone knows what it’s about. Apparently everyone immediately connects the dots.
What is productivity anxiety and why is it important that we talk about it today?
Monika So productivity anxiety is this term that whenever I introduce my clients to it, whenever I talk to someone about it, they instantly get what it means. Because we all know this feeling of being stressed about not doing enough and not being productive enough.
So I think it comes from our hustle culture that that is even more driven right now and that this anxiety is even more prevalent in today’s culture. Because we have just this constant imperative of being productive. Doing more, like sleep has lost all meaning. We are kind of glorifying the people that work until 11 and get up at 4 a.m. and then they work out and then they are super productive and they have all these kinds of results that they are portraying, at least, because I’m very skeptical about how it works.
But hustle culture has glorified this picture of being super focused on always being productive without any kind of diversification of activities, resting, recharge, having fun things that you’re doing, and doing things that are not meant to deliver an outcome.
Speaker 2 So that’s why we’re talking about it today. Because resting is actually an important part of work. I have to take one step back. Take a break. Recharge myself to be creative again, to be able to work at all again. And that’s why we’re here today. We talk about how to rest in a way that I don’t feel guilty for taking a break.
Most common challenges with & misconceptions about resting
Monika Because this is one of the major challenges that people experience with resting.
First of all, they have a wrong idea of what it means to rest. They think it’s an act of being passive and just sleeping. Oftentimes, this is one of the most misconceptions that I hear, “Well, I can’t sleep that much.” Yes, of course you can’t. But resting means a lot of different things.
Second, that rest actually is productive, that people need it to stay on their peak and to deliver still high quality, focused, efficient and impactful work and outcomes.
Resting without feeling guilty is also a hell of a challenge for many people.
Patrick So when we talk about resting without feeling guilty, we obviously have to talk about the productivity anxiety that you mentioned. Because we always feel like, and especially in this day and age, where you can work from your computer all the time, your phone goes off all the time, day and night. We have to talk about how to deal with this productivity anxiety.
Monika I think especially for entrepreneurs, freelancers, it’s even more challenging because they are not given some natural boundaries of when there are working times. Usually you would come to an office, you would have other people around you as well. And productivity anxiety is not limited to self-employed people, but there is this challenge of dealing with it and actually recognizing that you are already in an unhealthy state of not resting and constantly being anxious or stressed about being more productive. Because there is just no feedback whether what you are doing is still normal.
So how do you deal with it, actually, when you recognize that you should rest? If you recognize that there is something going wrong. If you can’t even close your laptop in the evening anymore without feeling guilty. How do you deal with that?
Because then you get this additional stress of feeling guilty about not working, but then also feeling guilty about not being able to relax. So what I get oftentimes is kind of I’m losing my time twice, I’m not productive and I’m not resting, but I’m just in this hyper-tense state.
Patrick It’s also like work and personal spaces get mixed up. You don’t have this clear boundary anymore. Okay, now I’m working, now I’m resting. Or, not even resting, but I’m taking time for myself. And it all becomes this one weirdly interconnected thing.
You’re working at home on your couch. You’re not in the office. Your phone goes off all the time. Also, you should spend some quality me-time on the couch at home, but it’s associated with work, so it all becomes entangled. And it’s just one big weird thing.
Monika Yes, that’s a lot of very different messages that you then send to yourself or that you get sent from outside. And it’s very difficult to navigate this, especially if there is this constant monologue running in your head, “Oh, I should be doing more.” And you have this never ending to do list.
What I see oftentimes, though, is one of the major challenges that comes with facing this productivity anxiety is that people think that there is this imaginative “Once things are solved. Once I have taken care of this, then I’ll be able to unwind. Then I’ll be able to relax.”
But realistically, there will always be things that are unfinished. There will always be things that either go wrong and you need to solve them or that you will be inspired to do more of. And then you will grow.
Patrick So they are always pushing it into the future. So at the end of the day, they’re not doing it at all.
Monika Yes. Which is why I say always, it’s okay to be stressed at times. It’s also okay to say, “Listen, this is a season where I just can’t relax really. I need to push this through.” But there needs to be a very clear deadline behind that. So three weeks or whatever, depending on the intensity and depending on which kind of stress you are confronted with. It has to have a deadline.
Just the same as you wouldn’t send an athlete to a continuous marathon that goes 365 days a year. He has rest as one of the most important factors that will allow him to then deliver at the marathon.
Patrick Yeah, and also this demand to work all the time, to keep pushing myself. Like my brain has to be turned on all the time. It takes a toll on your mental health. Like when I’m doing this for a very long time, I’m getting depleted. My energy gets sucked out, basically.
Monika Of course, it drains your energy. It doesn’t allow you to be as efficient anymore. It doesn’t allow you to be as creative and able to make decisions anymore. So you need also to spend more time and more energy in doing the things that you would have done before at a faster pace.
This is also a cycle that oftentimes then leads to burnout, that people need to kind of… they realize that they have less resources to do things, they are less focused, less concentrated, less creative as well. So need they need more time to do the same things. So they push themselves even further because now they feel guilty about not being able to realize the same things in the same time. So they work even more. And this goes into this horrendous cycle of not being able to stop.
However, if you tell these people to just stop and relax, it oftentimes doesn’t work because your mind is just simply in such a state of overdrive that lying down and just not thinking is not an option anymore.
How to reclaim your time & energy and take intentional breaks
Patrick So how then do I get in a break? Especially for people who are driven, focused, and don’t necessarily feel the need to stop.
Monika So first, if you realize that you are already in this toxic cycle of burnout or just at the moment of falling into burnout, please go to your doctor and a therapist. These are the people who can actually help you because in this state already your body is in a completely different state.
However, if you are just noticing right now that you are in this constant state of pushing yourself and driving even further, further, further, and you can’t stop and you know that you should, but you don’t know how. There are a lot of practical steps that you can take. And yes, I’m going to say it’s not about just self-care in the term of doing something for yourself and just resting, like sleeping. But you need also discipline in rewiring your approach to the whole topic.
Patrick But we don’t want to let it get to this point, right?
Monika This is it. It’s better, of course, to not even allow it to get to this point. And there it’s important to understand that being productive over a longer period of time means that you need to be active, but also resting, just like an athlete.
So what does this mean, though, if you understand that, okay, I need to rest. I need to change my approach to productivity. And it’s not this hustling mindset, but it’s also not a passive state. What do I need to do?
It’s about realizing what the things are that will actually give you energy. These are your resting states, the things that fill you up. And this can be sleep, but it can also be sports, a specific type of sports. It can also be certain types of people that you meet and that you connect with in certain settings. It’s all about finding your personal “energy fillers”, what I call them. And then also finding your “energy suckers”, the things that take energy from you.
Once you have this cocktail, this little portfolio of things where you know what gives you energy and what takes energy from you, you can then schedule it in and really get a little bit more disciplined about these types of activities on my schedule.
You can either use the analogy of a project plan or you can think about it simply as a bank account. If you take money out, you also need to put money in. And, of course, the earlier you think about it and the more consistently you put money back in, the less you have to worry about taking money out at certain points of time. The same goes for your energy. If you don’t have it scheduled in… And this is where people also then stumble oftentimes because we are just so driven by urgent things and work is always urgent. Other people call us. And if it’s not in our schedule, we will definitely just postpone it. And then when we have a point of time where we say like, okay, I can take 1 or 2 hours now for myself, then we don’t know exactly what we are going to do.
Strategies to deal with feelings of guilt while resting
Patrick So we’re talking a lot about guilt free resting. But then when I actually take a break and I do feel guilty, what do I do with this guilt? How do I deal with feeling guilty for taking a break, then?
Monika Well, it’s not that easy to answer this because the guilt could be stemming from anything. It could be that you have just internalized all of these hustle messages, hustling culture messages so much that you don’t even allow yourself to listen to yourself anymore and to take a different approach. It could be that you are already in a state, in a rhythm that you have learned from maybe workaholic parents, maybe from a family system. So this guilt is might be more difficult to dissect.
What will definitely help, though, is get the help of other people and really shift your focus intentionally. Shift your attention by choosing activities, by choosing things that you can do, maybe not in an exaggerated amount of time, so you don’t need to schedule in like one week of holidays. This might be an overwhelming task to take on if you don’t know how to rest right now. But then go for a brunch with a friend where you commit to not talking about work. And you know maybe even that this friend and you have so many interesting conversations that it will not allow your mind to just drift off and talk about work or think about work anyways.
Patrick I guess we also have to normalize talking to people, telling them I’m not working right now. I’m taking time off. I’m taking a break for my well-being, mental health, just because I want to take a break also, I mean.
Monika Of course, definitely. It makes it a lot easier if you have a network of people who understand the importance of resting, of diversity, of really allowing yourself to be human. And you as a human are so much more complicated than just having one specific goal and one task and one activity.
How to use the end of the year to slow down & check in with yourself
Patrick I think that’s especially important when we talk about this time of the year. End of the year, we’re reflecting on what has been good, what has been bad about this year and how do I want to move forward and change… change for the positive for next year?
Monika Definitely, the end of the year is a great time to actually reflect. Just like you said, when we naturally are maybe prompted to think about what we have done, what we have invested energy in, and how we want to move forward.
This time of slowing down, maybe even taking time with your family, taking time with friends to check in with yourself. After every activity that you are doing, checking in with yourself. Looking at “Has this given me energy? Has this taken energy away from me? How much did I enjoy this and why right now?” will help you to find – over the next few weeks – the energy fillers that is, hopefully that can then be planned into your schedule as you move into the next year.
Now it’s your turn!
Patrick If you enjoyed this episode, share it with your fellow entrepreneurs so they can listen too. Simply grab the link to this episode or grab the link to the podcast and send it to them.
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Monika Also, don’t forget to connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram and let us know: what was one helpful thought or insight you gained from this episode.
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Patrick See you in the next one.
