How to Let Go of Your Productivity Addiction

Bookmark this post for when you "need" to be productive.

Recording the Real Self-Care audiobook.

In my book Real Self-Care, I define the three most common reasons we turn to faux self-care:

• Escape

• Achievement 

• Productivity

A couple weeks ago I dove into the third item on the list — productivity — and wrote about how, in a society built upon slavery and capitalism, productivity by definition won't save us and in fact, upholds those toxic systems. The piece was the most read and shared that Therapy Takeaway has had so far.

Today I want to share some additional Therapy Takeaways for those of you who are questioning how productivity shows up in your life, and are curious about how to stop worshiping at the altar of productivity. 

First, a caveat: None of the three coping skills I named above (escape, achievement, or productivity) are morally bad. In fact, I called them coping skills in my book for a reason. These are outcomes we have learned to turn to in order to deal with difficult human feelings like shame, ambivalence, even grief. As a psychiatrist, I know that you can’t take away someone’s coping skills without first offering them new skills in place. Like, when you are drowning, productivity might be your *only* life raft. That’s okay and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. My goal for today’s Therapy Takeaway is not to sink your life raft. It’s to help you see that it *is* a life raft, and that *maybe it might be worth considering other psychological tools that can help you swim to shore.*

Why do we keep coming back to productivity as our savior? Our cultural obsession with production is a symptom of our need to control, predict and measure. They are symptoms of capitalism and white supremacy, because both require a caste system as the natural order of society. By nature a caste system must have a top and bottom. You have to be able to name, label, and put people into categories for all of this to work properly. Productivity porn, just like wellness, serves to keep the system running, not to help individuals step off the rat race. It also fails to answer deeper questions like, who is allowed to be productive? And why do we care so much about productivity? Again, it comes back to order, control and the illusion of mastery.

But what about those of you, who, like me, use productivity as a life raft?

For example, there was a period of about two weeks at the end of May where, despite being burnt out from my book launch, I was determined to GET ALL THE THINGS DONE. This was me gripping to control as a way of coping with the rollercoaster that is seeing your life’s work in the public eye. And, yes, it’s also true that my ability to execute in my clinical work and also in my creative work has real meaning and value. The risks associated with forsaking productivity are not imagined — we all have people who depend on us and bills to pay, right? But, you know, maybe, I did not need to be so hell bent on making it all happen *right now*. Maybe there was space for productivity to be priority #3, and for rest and reflection to be priorities #1 and #2? 

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Your Therapy Takeaway:

For today’s Therapy Takeaway, I’m diving deeper into how to unwind ourselves from productivity, in particular if you are someone like me who has used productivity (or, the illusion of it) as a life-raft. No these are not magic solutions – but they will help you align yourself more with being as opposed to doing

Identify your fear

In my practice I find that fear (which often manifests as anxiety) lurks closely underneath productivity addiction. It’s the patient who says “well if I don’t make my billable hours this month then I won’t make partner, and if I don’t make partner this year then I’ll *never* make partner” or “if I don’t make sure I do three daily reading exercises with my child who has medical needs, then she will never read”. The key here is to notice that fear causes us to catastrophize and miscategorize a *risk* with an absolute. Yes, hitting deliverable targets and keeping up with your kids’ treatment plan are both important variables in achieving an outcome. But, when we hold those variables too tightly, we are giving them too much meaning and in turn, diminishing our long term ability to actually achieve the said goal (eg. over-valuing the short term and de-valuing the long term).

Name your ego

Are you the person in your social circle who immediately jumps in to offer solutions and problem solve? That’s not a bad thing! Your solutions are probably very helpful. And, allow yourself to reflect on how being the fixer – whether in your family, on your team at work, or in your social life – is the role that feels more comfortable to you. Practice naming this in conversations: “I’d normally offer a suggestion for how to fix this problem, but I’m working on doing and solving less these days as a way to feel more comfortable with uncertainty.”

Uncouple the dopamine link

Nobody is asking you to let go of productivity all together – that’s impossible and not healthy! The goal here is to create psychological distance from making productivity your top priority. We can do this by delaying the time between the panicked feeling of “I’ve got to get this done/ I’ve got to figure this out” and in taking action. This requires decoupling yourself from the dopamine hit you get when you check something off of your list or solve a “problem”. I suggest making a new note on your notes app, and for a week, keep a list of specific times where you make productivity a 3rd line priority instead of your top line priority. Jot down what happened, and if there were benefits. At the end of the week, take 15 minutes to review what you noticed. 

Tweak your language

Kaitlin Curtice, Indigenous author and poet, who writes the Substack The Liminality Journal writers in her book Living Resistance “our practices of presence, embodiment, and radical self-love as resistance will take shape depending on where we are in time and space.” Kaitlin describes a cyclical understanding of productivity, which is deeply entwined with her Potawatomi heritage. You can tap into this yourself by shifting your language – instead of saying “sprint” or “marathon,” try “cycle” or “season.” (I’m working on this myself too)

Focus on process, not “Getting it Right”

If you’ve noticed, there is a theme here: we live in a culture that overvalues doing and de-values feeling. At the core of letting go of productivity is allowing yourself TO FEEL and to not immediately shut your feelings off when they are distressing to you. This doesn’t mean that it’s healthy to be in your feels all the time. No, that’s called clinical depression. The key to well-being is the ability to move between feeling and doing, to be able to contextualize, and to be flexible. The psychological skill that we need is the ability to “see” when productivity for productivity’s sake is a reasonable priority and when we are using productivity as a mask for deeper emotional fears or conflicts. 

I hope that these tips help you uncover when you are using productivity as a stand-in for feeling hard feelings AND where productivity is something that is useful for feeling like a competent and agentic human being in a world that constantly pushes us to the max. 

Like all change work, this is hard, and it takes time (not weeks, not months, yes, YEARS). And that’s good news, because it means we have the space to mess up, not be perfect, and try again. 

Xo, 

Pooja

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ICYMI

Join: Lucy and Gemma educator Dr. Linda Ojo MD MPH will be in this APA webinar on June 15

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What We’re Loving

I jumped for joy when I saw that Sara Petersen had interviewed Sehreen Noor Ali, co-founder of Sleuth. Sehreen is a mom of a daughter with complex medical needs, and she speaks so eloquently about grief and loneliness. Sleuth simplifies how parents understand and steer their kids health. Of course her conversation with Sara Petersen touches on influencer culture and how sanitized it is, and how we rarely see kiddos with medical conditions or complications and how isolating that can be for parents. — Pooja