Do You Work Until You Drop? If so, This Practice Will Help
Photo by Jannis Brandt/Unsplash
Before we explore the consequences of working too hard, let’s get one thing straight: there is absolutely nothing wrong with hard work. In fact, many happy, healthy people work long, intense days, especially if that involves something they love or is deeply meaningful for them. Doctors, therapists, artists, writers, nurses, teachers, charity workers – people in these professions may work hard, but if it’s caring for others or creating beautiful art, work is not a chore, but a fundamental part of a flourishing life.
I count myself as one of these people, because I love what I do. Helping people heal from childhood trauma, in my therapy sessions, as a supervisor, writing books and posts like this, recording guided meditations: I love it all. So I work long, hard days, which suits me just fine.
But like many people, I do have the tendency to work a little too hard. I’m really driven and can find it hard to switch off. I tend to wake about 6am and my brain seems to have this big On switch, which clunks into place as soon as my eyes open and then I’m thinking about clients and therapy and psychology and pondering various existential questions (plus a little football) until I collapse into sleep. So it’s a fine line between effortful but meaningful work and driven, relentless, exhausting work. And this post is all about the latter kind, for all those of you who, like me, often push yourself a bit too hard.
How manager parts manage your life
There are many ways of understanding the reasons for our overworking tendencies, but one of the most convincing comes from internal family systems (IFS) therapy, one of my favourite models. IFS is based on the idea that you are not one self but have multiple parts inside your mind, fulfilling different functions. Some of these parts are hurt, young aspects of your self, holding painful memories from childhood. Others try to protect them – and you – from ever being hurt in the same way. And these are further dividied into firefighters (highly impulsive and reactive, trying to extinguish the flames of your pain) and managers, the busy, hardworking parts that manage your life.
Typical managers include the Perfectionist, Critic, Worrier, Workaholic, Intellectual and Gym-Obsessed parts. The Striver, which we are focusing on here, motivates you to achieve, be the best, push on through, grind, hustle and work, work, work until you drop. This part is encouraged by Western culture, in which we are all expected to work stupidly long hours, always available to our companies, if we work for one, or busting a gut to build our own business. Striving is seen as admirable, impressive, competitive even: I wake at 5am every day, have a freezing-cold shower, send my first batch of emails, work out super-hard for an hour, then hit the office till 10pm and go again the next day.
Again, there is nothing wrong with hard work and ambition. We all have times in our lives and careers where we have to push through an especially tough period, moving house, having a baby, planning a big wedding, hitting a major deadline or working towards a launch. It’s when you work like this every day that it becomes a problem, because your poor frazzled mind, brain, nervous system and body are not designed for this. We humans are striving to manage 21st-century schedules using neurological and bodily hardware designed for the Stone Age.
We are shaped by evolution for short, intense bursts of activity followed by long periods of absolute rest. Hunt and catch an antelope, cook and eat it, then laze about in the cave. Or climb that huge fig tree, spend hours digging for roots and harvesting plants, eat and then snooze. Clear periods of being intensely on and then completely off, not this constant drip, drip of work demands and cortisol-fuelled, screen-saturated days. It’s too much.
So these hardworking manager parts step in to help. If you would like to get to know your Striver, listen to my new meditation, Befriending Your Striving Parts: IFS Meditation. I hope it helps – and that you can calm these well-meaning but overly amped-up parts down soon, allowing you a little more ease, rest and relaxation in your life.
You deserve it.
Love,
Dan ❤️
Enjoying Dan’s blog? Please make a small donation to support his work – all donations received will go to help Dan offer low-cost therapy or free resources to those who need them. Thank you 🙏🏼