Episode 8: The Myth that Productivity = Worth: what being forced to rest teaches about internalized capitalism.

In this episode, Kari challenges the deeply ingrained belief that our worth is tied to productivity, a mindset rooted in internalized capitalism, where value is measured by hustle, output, and efficiency. She shares a personal story about a physical breaking point that forced her to face her chronic illness and reevaluate the drive to constantly “push through.”

Kari explores how this mindset leads to guilt around rest, toxic work cultures, and burnout, both for individuals and within systems that reward overwork. She dismantles the idea that “rest is laziness,” redefining it as a regulation strategy, essential maintenance for the mind and body, not something to be earned.

Kari also calls out how this affects therapists and their clients: when helpers model exhaustion, they perpetuate the very systems that harm them. She urges both therapists and listeners to embrace rest as rebellion, a way to reclaim worth beyond output and to model balance, peace, and humanity.

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to both sides of the couch. I'm Carrie, a therapist who also happens to be a human navigating chronic illness, which means I see life from both sides. This is where I share honest stories, lessons, and little reminders that you don't have to have it all figured out to keep showing up. Let's get into today's episode. Today we're on episode eight. The myth that productivity equals worth. What being forced to rest teaches us about internalized capitalism. Today, we're unpacking why that belief is so pervasive. What happens when your body says no, and how rest becomes its own kind of rebellion. So I'm gonna start with briefly defining internalized capitalism. This is the belief that your value depends on output, hustle, and productivity. Without those things, you have no value with them. The more you do, the more value that you have. This is dangerous. So I'm gonna start with a personal story. Years ago, struggling on my journey with chronic illness, I was. Unaware of what was happening to my body. And I was just pushing through this illness in all aspects of my life. Continuing to work as much as I could, pushing myself physically with exercise, saying yes to all this stuff. Really just going as if my body wasn't struggling at all. And there's one day that sticks out in my mind. I was walking my dog like I do every single morning and. We were about half a mile away from the house, and all of a sudden I just felt like I was about to faint. You know that cold feeling you get in your body and then the pressure pushed down on your shoulders. My vision was black, but I was still conscious and I just immediately sat down in someone's yard and I leaned on my dog, and then I remember wrapping her leash around me. Super tight. Like across my body and around my arm and my hand because I thought, oh my gosh, I'm gonna pass out and she's gonna run away and get hit by a car. But I never fully passed out. I was able to get my vision back and eventually stood up and stumbled the half a mile back to my house and then immediately laid down and hydrated. That was really the sign my body was finally like, no. And I had to face reality. That's when I, really took the lead on figuring out what was going on with me and advocating for myself with my healthcare providers. And for a long time, I mean, a long time, I really struggled to say any diagnosis I had out loud. And it took me a very long time to even say to myself, I have a chronic illness. Me as a person, I, I really dislike rest. I don't like to bed rot. I just don't enjoy it. I'm no, nothing against anybody who does. I love that for you. If you do, I'm, I'm really not judgy. I just don't like it. It just, it, it causes me pain in my body to sit still like that. I, it might trigger a migraine if I'm sitting on my phone or leaning on my head in certain positions puts pressure on my head too. I really genuinely just enjoy doing. I enjoy all aspects of doing, but there's definitely a part of me that will tell myself I should be doing more that like guilt train of, oh, you did all this, but you still should be doing more. You, you should add this here. You should have done this for longer. You forgot to add this in, a lot of internal pressure. And then I do have guilt if I'm resting, especially when others aren't. If we're doing a chore and I suddenly need to sit down and rest, and other people are still like working on that chore, it's like the comparison game starts of well, they're not resting, so I shouldn't, yeah, I've shared this before, when I was new as a private practice therapist, the shift I had from the hustle of community mental health and working for like bigger mental health companies, I just jumped in seeing nine clients with no breaks and I had to back off and learn like, oh, you have to schedule rest and breaks in your day. There's, there's a million reasons why, but like shifting from that was a big lesson for me. Again, like I said earlier, I'm just gonna say it again. Internalized capitalism is the belief that your value is determined by how productive, efficient, or useful you are. And this can be really harmful. I see this a lot with clients and their workplaces. They have a lot of pressure that they feel from their coworkers or their managers. Or even like the company sending out like, we gotta meet quotas, we gotta do this, we gotta do that. There's always some like metric that you have to be monitoring and meeting in. I think all jobs pretty much. And then at work, people are celebrated. They're recognized for working more than expected. That's the only way you see people getting praised at work is oh, they worked. Six hours past their shift. They came in on a weekend, they came in on a holiday and they're celebrating this as if it's a really good thing. And also I've heard of companies tying your ratings when you get your yearly review, you can only get a good review if you've worked more hours. Then you were hired too, so it's like, oh, you're a salaried employee, but you don't get to meet expectations unless you're working 60 hour work weeks, even though you're only getting paid for 40. There's definitely this really unhealthy culture in certain workplaces that promote this more, but even in healthy workplaces, like in mental health. Healthier workplaces. There's still that push of oh, this person did all their notes on time. They didn't need extra time to complete it. You know, that manipulation game that maybe some managers unknowingly play, but they're playing it. I see it with my clients who work when they're sick. We saw a lot of this during the pandemic of people going to work, even though they possibly had COVID or knew they had COVID. I know actually a lot of hospitals and doctor's offices, we're told, you still have to come to work. If you have COVID, just wear a mask and don't tell your patients that you're sick. I see my clients on that guilt train too. The guilt over resting and the quote I hear a lot from my clients and people is, I'm lazy and I hate that. Oh, it, it just really gets on my nerves because I wanna define lazy. The definition of lazy is being unwilling to work or use energy unwilling. Okay, but hold on, hear the definition of rest. Rest is defined as ceasing, work or movement. In order to relax, refresh oneself, or recover strength. So be really honest with yourself. Are you unwilling to work or use energy? Are you stopping it in order to refresh yourself or recover strength? You're not unwilling. There aren't many people that are unwilling, right? Most of us, we're taking the break because we need it, not because we just don't want to do something. It's really dangerous when you tie in your self-worth with tasks, especially if you're chronically ill or you get an injury. Because that dangerous slope of, now I physically can't do this, so now I don't have any self-worth. If you are defining your worth on any one thing and that one thing goes away, what do you have left? That's dangerous. That leads to depression and really scary thoughts. So I don't like anyone having only one thing tied to their self-worth. Or things that are not a given, you're gonna be able to do always in forever, right? We can't always do a physically demanding job. We're gonna get sick, maybe have an injury and you can't do it anymore. I mean, we've seen it with athletes where they get an injury and they can no longer play professionally and then. They don't know what to do with themselves. So I think more common now for student athletes in college is they're encouraging them to major in something that they can do if they lose the ability to play their sport. So the mental health cost with this, we talked about burnout before. This can definitely be a contributor to burnout. Doing way too much, tying your self worth to all these tasks. Eventually you're gonna be exhausted.'cause you didn't take that break to recover. You disconnect from your identity. Like you start not knowing who you are without. You don't even know who you are without those things. That's the only way you've defined who you are. Perfectionism, of course. And nobody's perfect. So that's a super unhealthy trait to have because you're always gonna feel like a failure. And then also resentment towards rest. I would put myself there. There's definitely resentment towards resting. I hate it because when my body won't allow me to do something, it doesn't matter if I've already rested for an entire 24 hours, I have to continue resting, and I hate that. I hate being stuck sitting and not being able to do anything. There's definitely ways I can reframe that and I'll get to that later, but I want you to remember this. Reframing rest to think of it as a regulation strategy, not a reward. So rest isn't something you get just because you did a lot of things. Rest is something you get to take care of yourself, to regulate your body, to prevent burnout, to take care of yourself. So telling yourself things like, I can't relax unless everything's done. It's. Not always, but a path that leads to anxiety disorders and possibly even OCD disorders, having to have everything completed in a certain way or you don't feel good, you can't rest. You start to worry, you get anxious I'm running out of time, or it's bedtime now, and you're like, I didn't get all the things done. I wanted to get. There's gonna be cost to that. There's gonna be consequences. From that line of thinking, your brain is gonna spiral and you're never gonna get everything done. Usually as a human nature, we schedule way too many things. You make a to-do list and you're lucky to get half of it done. We're humans. We can't do all these things with only so many hours in the day. So the negative consequences from always not getting those things done and worrying about it, or not feeling like you can rest because you didn't get it done really adds to mental health struggles. I think it's really dangerous to put yourself last. You will always eat the cost of that. You'll always eat the cost of that. Putting yourself first doesn't necessarily equate to consequences for other people, but putting yourself last will always. Correlate to consequences for yourself, but I wanna normalize it. It's not your fault. It's not my fault. We've been raised in a system that rewards exhaustion, and I think of it like, just like how we're working on shifting out of a patriarchal society. We're shifting from idolizing workaholics to looking up to those that take care of themselves. And I want you to think about that. More so in your daily life, how can I look up to someone at work who prioritizes balance and self care as opposed to the CEO who works 24 7 and never really takes a vacation, even when they're traveling with their family, you get emails from them, rest teaches you a lot. I think it reveals your identity outside of work or output. When you are yourself as a person without productivity defining you, you define, you create yourself identified values, morals, and goals. If you're not using an external source to define those for you, they only come from yourself and your beliefs. So instead of work telling you they value whatever metric you need to reach. You're telling yourself, I value enjoying time with my family, whatever it is for you, right? My morals aren't, make as many sales as possible and not think of the customer and what it's gonna cost them, but only selling things to people who need them type of thing. And your goals won't be. To get a promotion at work, right? I have to do all these things in order to get this promotion because promotion equals productivity equals better, and that that defines who I am. The goals would be things that you genuinely want, not that external sources are telling you you should want or that you should achieve. So maybe what you want is to have more time to engage in your hobby instead of never having the energy to do it. And you leave work on time so you can go engage in this hobby and actually have a part of your work day that you did something just for you and not for other people, or not to make money or not to get a to-do list done. When you do this, it redefines success. You feel more balanced. Success is feeling balanced. Success is enjoying time with your family, your friends, your loved ones. Success is experiencing joy. It's not productivity when you look at things from that line. I definitely think there's some small shifts that have been helpful to me so far. Definitely reframing things like rest is maintenance. It's things that have to be done for me to continue moving on. It's like I have to put gas in my car. I have to change the oil. That's the maintenance for my car. The maintenance for me is rest. I have to rest, I have to take breaks. That's what keeps me going. It's not laziness. I'm not unwilling to do these things by any means. I just need to rest in order to be able to do those things. And definitely gentler self-talk in general, like being kinder to myself, yeah, you have a to-do list and these items are important, but nothing bad's gonna happen if I don't do any of them today. Anything I get done is good progress, not perfection. Look at all you did today instead of look at what you didn't do today. And finding rest as productive in a way of like, oh wow, you really prioritize rest today. And that was important for you. I think it's important too to do intentional things while you're resting. At least for me, resting isn't just sitting down and staring into the void.'cause then I'm gonna feel like I'm doing absolutely nothing. Which, if I'm a person that enjoys doing, genuinely enjoys doing, doing nothing isn't gonna meet that need for me. So it's something that I can do that involves rest. In the mornings, I definitely have a slow morning. It takes my body a while to be able to get up and going. So I enjoy, I have an espresso machine and I like the process from weighing the beans, grinding the beans. Pulling the shot, steaming the milk, like it takes a long time, but it forces me to go slowly in the morning and then I get that latte and I really enjoy it and savor it slowly. And then when it's done, that's kind of my sign of like, all you did your rest, you get to get up and go. I think too, I really like. Heart rate variability. It's a form of, uh, biofeedback. My HeartMath device. I do that when I'm resting, but in reality, I'm just deep breathing. I'm taking breaths and regulating my nervous system. I also like creative rest too. Is there something creative you like to do? I took up watercolor painting recently. And that really pushes you to rest.'cause you have to wait for each layer of color to dry before you can add another color to the page. But there's lots of little creative things, you know, do you like making music? Do you like adult coloring books, puzzles, lots of things like that, that you can still rest while you're doing something. Reminder rest is not the absence of productivity. It's what makes sustainable productivity possible. So I'm gonna leave my listeners with a challenge. I want you to notice how often you are apologizing to others or yourself for needing rest, or the need to feel like you have to justify your downtime or not allowing yourself rest or downtime. I think when I look at this as a therapist, I definitely see. How internalized capitalism harms both the therapist and the clients, it harms the therapist.'cause we're pushing ourselves to work too much and not taking breaks in between clients because we're just sitting, right? We're not doing physically demanding jobs, but it's so mentally demanding and your brain needs rest just as much as your body needs rest. And it harms the clients one because they're getting a therapist that's. Burned out. But also I think as therapists, we model a lot for our clients. So if we're modeling that productivity equals self-worth and rest isn't important for ourselves, how can we expect our clients to engage and rest and not defining themselves by how much they do if we're doing it ourselves? So it's part modeling, but part also not being a crappy therapist for your clients.'cause you're doing too much. Rest isn't earned for anybody. It's required. This isn't something you have to earn. It's something that everybody should be doing. Maybe ask yourself too, what would I still be worth if I stopped doing blank? That's a good way to kind of start that internalized value discussion. And then think of it too as an act of resistance towards capitalism. Right? Rest is resistance. So at work, when you feel like you're, you're getting those pushy messages of do more meet this me metric, you can rest as an act of resistance, right? Do something restful or nourishing without justification and model that maybe for those around you too. You are not your productivity. You are a person that deserves rest, peace, and gentleness even when you're doing nothing. I hope you take this to heart. Take some rest. Right now Thanks for joining me on both sides of the couch. If something you heard today resonated, share this episode with someone who might need it. And if you'd like to support the show or find more of my work, check the links in the show notes. Until next time, take care of yourself on both sides of the couch.