How to Let Go of Your Productivity Addiction
Bookmark this post for when you "need" to be productive.
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?