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Cassie Therrien-Abell
Is Hustle Culture Actually Keeping You Out of Shape?
Lifestyle
Take this seriously: The "no days off" mentality doesn't just burn you out at work. It burns you out physically too. And the clients who learn this the hard way, usually after an injury, always say the same thing: they wish someone had told them sooner.
What does hustle culture have to do with fitness?
Hustle culture is the belief that every minute you're not working, not grinding, someone else is passing you by. Rise and grind. Sleep when you're dead. Always be on.
What that mindset does to your health should probably not be surprising at this point, but it still catches people off guard. Chronic hustle culture means chronically elevated cortisol, chronic sleep deprivation, chronic brain fog, and a body that's stuck in fight-or-flight with no recovery time built in.
It keeps you small. It doesn't help you succeed.
Doesn't working out more mean faster results?
This is a conversation I have constantly. I'll tell a client they can make great progress toward their health goals in six months working out three times a week. What a lot of them hear is: if I work out six or seven times a week, I'll get that same progress in two or three months.
If you just had that same thought, I want you to sit with it for a second.
More exercise is not a force multiplier. Past a certain threshold, it's a liability. Your body gets stronger during recovery, not during the workout itself. The workout is the stimulus. Recovery is where the adaptation actually happens. Cut out recovery and you cut out the results.
What actually happens when someone refuses to rest?
Real client scenario (anonymized)
She signs up and shows up to her first coaching call. I glance at her calendar and she's worked out seven days in a row. She's excited, motivated, feeling great. I'm not going to discourage that kind of energy, so I congratulate her and we move on.
Three weeks later she mentions her back is starting to bug her a little. I add some decompression exercises and suggest we scale back to three, maybe four days a week. She says she's fine and decides to add those exercises to her daily routine instead.
Three weeks after that she shows up sluggish, moving slowly. She says she's just tired, didn't sleep well the night before. I point out that maybe her body is asking for some real recovery time. She's not hearing it.
Four weeks later I get a text: she felt something pop during her workout. Torn hamstring. Two weeks of complete rest, then physical therapy.
A torn hamstring takes up to three months to heal with low risk of re-injury. For the average person, it takes at least six months to actually feel normal again. Every goal she had is now on pause. For half a year.
No days off got her six months off.
Isn't this just about fitness? Why does it matter beyond the gym?
Because the "no days off" mentality in the gym is the same one that makes people skip vacations, never truly unplug, never set personal boundaries at work, and never feel like they've done enough.
As women especially, we carry a particular version of this:
Be educated but don't be too loud about it.
Be strong but not too masculine.
Be beautiful but don't show it off.
Be successful but don't be too bossy.
Be nurturing but don't be a pushover.
Be a great mother but remember to have a career.
Devote yourself to self-care but why aren't you spending more time with your children?
It's a lot. And layering hustle culture on top of those contradictions is not a path to success in any area of life.
What does prioritizing rest actually do to your productivity?
It goes up. Consistently. Every time.
I work with a lot of high-performing women: CEOs, directors, people who are running entire companies or single-handedly holding together their families and communities. They're often terrified to prioritize rest and self-care because they think it'll cost them time. The math doesn't add up to them.
But without fail, once they actually do it, they start to notice they can do in one hour what previously took two or three. Because they can think clearly. Because they're not running on cortisol and caffeine and whatever momentum got them through the door that morning.
Efficiency always wins. And self-care is usually at the heart of efficiency.
What are some practical ways to protect recovery time when life is genuinely full?
Block it on your calendar the same way you'd block a meeting. Time you've protected in your calendar is harder to steal. Whether that's a workout, a vacation, or a 20-minute window at 2pm where no one can book you, put it there and protect it.
Build in small stress-relief windows throughout your day. Five minutes to breathe. Five minutes to sit outside. Five minutes of silence. All three of those things lower your heart rate, slow cortisol production, and give your body a chance to shift into rest and digest. Five minutes is not nothing.
And stop choosing to sacrifice your sleep so someone else can get richer. That's not a strategy. That's a slow burn.
Questions? We're here.
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