Welcome to Am I The Only One with Meg Mansell, our new regular Capsule columnist. Meg is one of our favourite members of the Capsule community, bringing us smart, warm and thoughtful pieces on mental health, body positivity, motherhood and more. This month, Meg talks about the pressure of the mental load and why toxic productivity is stopping her from ever switching off.
I’ve recently learned that I’m not the only one who struggles to relax, even though about once a day it’s all I fantasise about.
Let me set the dream scene for you – a cold, air-conditioned room. Dim lighting, of course. My Kindle is fully charged with a good book loaded onto it. My phone is switched off and I’m wearing some sort of comfy loungewear with a face mask on, and room service on the way.
I find myself daydreaming about this scenario when I’m in the middle of an email to work, while my 3-year-old is yelling to show me something, dinner is on the stove and I know I’ve got about 4,000 things to sort before my 8.30pm bedtime – which is disgustingly early, but necessary for me to have any sort of success in getting up to my 4am alarm.
But I also know that if someone offered to transport me to this exact scenario right now, I would struggle to take advantage of it. Because, I know myself, and I know that after about 25 minutes, I would be itching to get to my phone to check my notes app, the feelings of guilt would creep in and of course, so would the ever-present thoughts of laziness with that never-ending mental list buzzing around in my head with all the things that I SHOULD be doing, except this. This being = self-care.
There’s an official name for it – Toxic Productivity and apparently we are suffering from it worse than ever.
I’ve been hyper fixating on what it is that causes this toxic productivity that I know I’m consumed by. I think I can pinpoint that it first started to quickly and quietly build when I became a parent for the first time, and it’s only getting worse with my second child on the way.
I have been told countless times in this pregnancy to give myself a break, but I have found lying down and doing nothing causes so much build-up of f.o.m.o (fear of missing out) with my family – and deep feelings of shame for feeling negligent – that it’s pointless.
What is ironic is that I’m sitting in a hospital bed while writing this and, instead of trying to sleep or rest, I thought I might as well use the down time to do some work. I know if it was one of my friends sitting in their hospital bed after a traumatic 24 hours – I would be telling them to REST. But I can’t seem to give myself the same grace.
I can imagine that entering into the day and age of technology with the constant buzz of accessible stimulation and distraction, let alone the 24/7 access to our work emails and messages, has made us unlearn how to unwind.
It’s not a problem that I struggle with alone, one 2021 survey by the Chartered Institute Personnel and Development found 70% of respondents had observed ‘leaveism’ – which means employees are working outside of their contracted hours for free due to feelings of guilt, job insecurity or because we are now always reachable with our computers in our pockets.
And another study conducted by the University of Melbourne found that mothers, in particular, shoulder 71% of all household tasks, including planning meals, organising activities and managing finances.
So, a question for my working Mums after reading those stats – are we ok? I recently spoke to my husband in tears about the weight of the mental load. Look, I’m very proud to say that I am one of the lucky ones who has a very hands-on partner with both our child and the household. But after he sat me down and asked me to list off all of the current items on my mental load that were flooding my mind, he was shocked.
Once I finally choked out a little “I think that’s all of it” mid sob, he counted everything up that I knew I had to sort, organise and remember to do. The list came to 37, and he said he was consciously aware of six of them. Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers on how to fix it. I’m actively trying to put boundaries in place with work hours and I now keep a shared notes app with my husband where I add everything that comes up on my never-ending list so we can both be aware and tick things off together which has helped (we use AnyList if you want to give it a go, great for groceries too).
I know I need to work harder on accepting that ‘rest’ does not mean ‘lazy’ – if you have any tips for this one, please send them through to me – it’s proving to be the hardest. Because this relentless pursuit of productivity only means that we will have consistent feelings of guilt after being given fleeting windows of opportunity to rest and will, without a doubt, result in chronic stress and burnout – if we aren’t all there already. And on that note, to prove a point. I’m going to finish this column, switch off my brain and give myself an hour of doing absolutely nothing. It’s a start.