Time to Drop the Grind Culture
The grind culture has a lot to answer for and it really starts as early as school; running around from class to class, navigating social complexities, followed by hours of homework, all to do it all again the next day to be judged on your intellectual ranking through exams and marked work. What I did was never enough, no matter how hard I pushed and how desperately I tried to prove myself. Any success I did have was short lived because I could not realistically maintain that standard with the energy I innately ran on. For many years I would blame parents and teachers for expecting a lot of me, but I soon saw that I myself maintained this pressure in jobs I entered into. I even sought a fast-paced career in TV where the pressure was always on and there was no end to what needed to be done. It got so extreme that on rare occasions I would get to see friends I would fall asleep in a chair in the corner, exhausted from the week or month that had led up to that point. I still felt like I could do more though, I should work out more, eat better, spend more time studying for the nutrition course I was doing. Once qualified as a nutritional therapy and leaving TV I still felt the constant need to do more, to be more. I would look at all the productivity hacks time tricks, but in reality I was so exhausted when I wasn’t working that I really struggled to get anything else done. I had been running on a treadmill for nearly 30 years and I was tired, in fact I think it took close to 5 years of consciously slowing down that my body started to move out of ‘fight or flight’ mode.
Throughout those years I had very little access to much intuitive knowing, I struggled to even think beyond what my day would look like. There was no space in my day, my mind, my body to even consider trusting that life could work out if I stopped pushing and starting allowing it to simply happen. 2019 was the year it all had to stop, I had incredibly high anxiety and suffered many panic attacks, showing up to work in the morning was a real struggle to the point where I wondered how much longer I could feasibly maintain it. Life had become unbearable, and still I had the thoughts racing through my head that I needed to do more, needed to be more. Once the panic attacks started to show up at work I had to make a change, I knew I wasn’t going to take medication so I my only option was to start facing the emotions I had been running away from. I started to try all manner of different healing modalities, began journalling what emotions where coming up, and developed a continued acceptance that I needed to slow down. Gradually the anxiety lowered and dissipated, I became calmer and clearer and I could finally start to process the large emotions I had been bottling. Big life questions became less over-powering and I could actually acknowledge the situation in-front of me for what it was, not as scary as I had built it up to be.
Now I hear people berating themselves for not being where they think they should be, and my first thought is always- take a breath, slow down, allow yourself some space to let this all unravel. There response is usually, ‘but I can’t, I need to achieve this, I need to work on that, I’m not where I should be’ and in all honesty it’s heart breaking. To hear someone reduce themselves to who they ‘should be’ and all the ways they aren't that yet. Don’t let the world and all their expectations fool you, you are already enough, and the slower you take it, the easier it gets.
