The Common Effect of Being Productive All the Time

What I learned from it

A few months ago, I was in a moment of exhaustion and frustration.

I was trying to be as productive as possible, and eventually, things stopped working. I would fall into fits of crying and nervousness.

This cycle kept going until, in a psychology class, I learned something that came as a punch in the gut.

I came to understand, physiologically, what was happening to me and that if I continued to take things the same way, they would only get worse. Since then, I’ve wanted to pass this learning on because I know that this isn’t just my process.

It’s widespread how much people are trying to be productive, living exhausting journeys that negatively affect their mental health. According to the WHO, depression is the most disabling mental illness in the world.

What I (and maybe you too) was experiencing

With a degree in journalism, but trying to change areas, I was (and am) doing research for a master’s degree at university, freelancing in journalism, and a degree in psychology.

I had to be “100% productive” to cope with everything. I had intense schedules, and everything fitted in with no gaps. For the first few days, it worked. I’d check off the tasks, be super proud of myself, and think, “See how I can get everything done? All I have to do is stay organized.”

It turned out that it wasn’t…

After a while, I couldn’t keep to the schedule. I’d have to read a paragraph three times to understand it, everything I tried to write was terrible and then I’d look at the schedule and despair.

Eventually, I would fall into crisis: I would get tachycardic and nervous, cry compulsively, believe I was a failure, doubt everything I was doing, and think that this crisis was going to slow me down even more, that I didn’t have time “to stay in this situation, feeling sorry for myself.”

Then came the class that was a punch in the gut.

The lesson was about the HPA axis, cortisol, and its relationship with anxiety and depression.

The HPA axis (Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal) is a hormonal regulatory structure responsible for preparing the body for situations of attention or imminent need for action.

Imagine when a man in the jungle needs to hunt and escape from a jaguar or when, nowadays, we need to hand in an important piece of work or prepare to run a marathon. In these situations, the HPA axis is activated, producing hormones that prepare the body for this.

One of these hormones is Cortisol.

We wake up and as we need to prepare for the day — remember the meeting, make lunch, meet the deadline — cortisol levels rise. As cortisol goes into the body, it activates our productive capacity. To a certain extent, it’s an upward curve:

Greater need for attention > Higher cortisol levels > Greater productive capacity.

“Damn, I love cortisol? Where do you buy it? I want to inject it into my veins to be more productive!”

Calm down! This point where more cortisol is synonymous with more productivity is exactly the point in my story where I fit everything into a crazy marathon and managed to accomplish it. But, friends, the human body wasn’t designed to live in a marathon.

The cortisol level in the body needs to rise at times of need (for attention, work, struggle, escape), and fall at times of safety when it’s unnecessary to feel in danger.

If cortisol levels keep going up, or if they keep going up, your productivity level won’t keep going up! The productivity curve stops rising and starts falling.

What used to be attention becomes stress, and stress starts to damage you. Your memory starts to fail, anxiety symptoms increase (high blood pressure, tachycardia), your immune system drops and your rational response is impaired.

It’s at this point that we start to find it difficult to do things and to reason, and therefore, productivity drops, and all the feelings of frustration and anxiety rise. It’s at this point that I would go into crisis, and everything would fall apart…

The dangers of flirting with anxiety

The HPA axis is like a little cortisol tap, and we have two “employees” operating this tap: the amygdala and the hippocampus.

The amygdala (not the one in the throat, the one in the brain) receives stimuli from the outside world and gives rapid “emotional” responses. The hippocampus, on the other hand, is responsible for retrieving information and memories and managing a certain amount of “rationalization”.

Imagine you’re walking down the street alone. If you see two guys on a motorcycle, for example, your amygdala sends out a robbery danger signal, turning on the cortisol tap and preparing your body to run if necessary. Your hippocampus, on the other hand, reminds you that there’s a police station right next door and that this is a very safe neighborhood, declaring that you can turn off the cortisol tap because such a robbery wouldn’t happen.

For our head and body to function properly, the two need to work together, regulating our needs.

At certain times in life — in busy months, in intense periods — our cortisol levels will rise too high and cause all this damage: stress, anxiety, fatigue, forgetfulness, and low immunity. If this period is temporary, despite being a difficult process, it soon passes.

However, when occasions of intense or constant stress stop being occasional and become recurrent, the damage that cortisol causes can be greater: the functioning of the hippocampus is impaired, making it difficult for us to regulate anxiety properly.

The consequence of this is that what used to be occasional stress, having become a constant in a person’s life, can turn into an anxiety or depression disorder, which doesn’t go away easily once the situation that caused the stress is over.

Excess cortisol also decreases the production of a protein called BDNF, reducing our neurons’ ability to regenerate and transmit information.

What I learned from this

At that point in my life, whenever I wanted to rest, I felt guilty. I felt that I was privileged and that I was being weak for not being able to cope with an intense routine. I would force myself to do more and berate myself if I didn’t succeed.

When I got sick (which was constantly due to low immunity), I even thought it was unconscious self-sabotage, a spoiled desire to justify myself to people and say that I needed to rest, when in reality, I should have been trying harder.

I’ve had friends who’ve had anxiety attacks, who’ve been put on medication, and I could see how hard it was for them… But somehow, in my head, I imagined that their workload had been much greater than mine, and so I — who hadn’t yet gone three nights without sleep nor suffered from chronic anxiety — couldn’t use the anxiety card to justify the luxury of my rest.

From that lesson, I understood that I wasn’t proving myself to anyone by giving up my rest. I saw that I was digging the grave of a future anxiety disorder and that there was no point in romanticizing overexertion, waiting for the day to come when I would have a clinical diagnosis of anxiety so that I could start taking care of myself.

I find it sad that I had to understand that productive logic was anti-productive to legitimize my rest and self-care. I had to see that it was physiologically impossible to maintain constant productivity while listening to my psychologist and my own needs.

It’s sad how we value society’s logic of tiredness, of merit based on sacrifice, but I’m glad I realized this in time. I started taking care of myself before more serious damage was done to my mental health.

Taking care of yourself doesn’t mean letting go of responsibilities

No. I won’t go around quitting my job or dropping out of college. I can’t, and I won’t. These are my responsibilities, my livelihood, and my life plan. Thinking about self-care and taking care of anxiety is not synonymous with moving to the beach or doing yoga.

My routine is the same (it’s even gotten a little heavier recently). What has changed is the way I deal with this routine and how I let it affect me.

1. I’ve stopped feeling guilty for wanting to take a break.

2. I understood that giving myself some breathing space was not an irresponsible or lazy attitude but a strategy that kept me even more productive.

3. I started eating my meals more calmly.

4. I rethought my priorities. If before I wanted to do everything and a bit more — read the necessary book and the other complementary one — I started to think about doing well what was essential.

If I was stuck on a task, I gave myself the right to stop for a while, to end the day and think “I’ll come back to this tomorrow with a fresh head”.

5. I understood that negotiating deadlines was nothing to be ashamed of or a sign of incompetence.

6. I also learned to say “no” to tasks and commitments that weren’t important to me.

The schedule is still hectic, and there are still difficult days, but taking more care of myself — and by “taking care of myself,” I mean listening to and meeting my needs with affection — has done me a lot of good. It has even improved my performance in the jobs I’ve been doing.

I don’t mean “take more care of yourself so that your work gets better results”. Not at all.

What I wanted to show is how this excessive pressure for productivity hinders our entire lives and even the results of the work that requires such stress.

You can’t meet certain productivity expectations and maintain them for long. It’s not your fault, it’s not a defect or an individual issue. It’s because we’re not built for it. Our body (and our brain is part of it) can’t take it!

I want to say: take care of yourself for your own good. Listen to your needs: rest more, talk more, get up more, sleep a little more.

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