SAWANT: Stop bragging about your stress levels
Column: Sincerely Rue
We have all experienced those around us who show off the amount of work they have and complain about it. Perhaps these people even supplement the lament with a comparison to the amount of work we or others have.
And since we are being really honest here, we have probably done it ourselves, too, at one point or another.
But why do we feel the need to take some sort of twisted pride in the tremendous amount of work, and consequently the incredible amount of stress that we have compared to others? What makes telling our friends how stressed we are, how many papers we have due, how many hours of work we are clocking in for more attractive than inviting them on an evening walk in your downtime?
We are in constant states of stress and buried under piles of work, trying to make deadlines, trying to get to the right places at the right times, trying to ace interviews, trying to impress our mentors and family. But somewhere along the way, we begin to unknowingly focus on creating value for others and neglect to create value for ourselves.
The line between hard work and burnout is scuffed beyond recognition, its effects physically and emotionally detrimental, and we often will not realize its impacts until much later in life.
But we need to unlearn that behavior, and it starts with understanding our worth outside of school and work.
In our American society, we have been conditioned to link our self-worth to the stress we take on and the output we produce. Our educational and commercial institutions rewire our trains of thought into supply chains, and the work we churn out are end products we may never reap the benefits of.
I am not saying not to work hard. We must do so in our increasingly global and interconnected environment to keep up.
But the type of work ethic a lot of us engage in nowadays is not hard work anymore. It is one that produces more exhaustion than satisfaction. There is a difference between hard work and burnout, and it is easy to lose ourselves in our hustle and overdo it.
American work culture is sometimes rest-averse, thus damaging and it teaches us the harder you work, the better you are, the busier you are, the smarter you are. It teaches us that if you are taking a break, you are dumb, lazy or do not occupy yourself well enough.
Those unexplained headaches, that constant state of perpetual exhaustion or social burnout you feel, is not from one single all-nighter. It is a culmination of every single time you submit to a false structure of thought that somehow, the more work you do the more valuable you are to your school, your loved ones, your career or even to yourself. It piles up.
As a society, and especially as a generation as a whole, we must unlearn this new form of self-thought. We must learn to prioritize ourselves and our mental health and stop linking intelligence or a higher state of being to copious amounts of work and work anxiety.
I myself am in the process of unlearning. I am sure many of you can relate to giving your 110 percent in everything you do (even when it is not necessary), always making time for work but never seeming to make time for yourself and staking your sense of self-worth in the amount and the quality of the work you do for others. In this vicious frame of mind, I bet some of you, like me, make things like love, leisure and health into “rewards” for completing a task.
But when you make these things into rewards, they are never guaranteed to you. In our fast-paced world, there will always be something you have to do — it is the way of the world — it is one thing done and then on to the next and when that happens, you postpone these rewards. Instead, try treating these needs like the necessities they are, then it is easier to prioritize them.
We are not robots. We are not artificial intelligence machines. We are humans. We need love, leisure and health as they are parts of the human condition.
And the only way to unlearn a toxic version of self-worth is to relearn a genuine version of self-love.
Rujuta Sawant is a Rutgers Business School sophomore majoring in business analytics and information technology and minoring in political science. Her column, "Sincerely Rue," runs on alternate Mondays.
*Columns, cartoons and letters do not necessarily reflect the views of the Targum Publishing Company or its staff.
YOUR VOICE | The Daily Targum welcomes submissions from all readers. Due to space limitations in our print newspaper, letters to the editor must not exceed 500 words. Guest columns and commentaries must be between 700 and 850 words. All authors must include their name, phone number, class year and college affiliation or department to be considered for publication. Please submit via email to oped@dailytargum.com by 4 p.m. to be considered for the following day’s publication. Columns, cartoons and letters do not necessarily reflect the views of the Targum Publishing Company or its staff.
