What diet culture can teach us about our working habits

Maybe you….

Know that you’ve had enough but go back for more, even though it’s making you sick.

Have impossibly high standards and feelings of guilt and despair.

Punish yourself for having normal human needs and fall into a cycle of extremities.

Have a warped view of yourself and ultimately believe you deserve this.

No, I’m not talking about your relationship with food - I’m talking about your relationship with work. 

In today’s society, most of us are familiar with the patterns of modern-day diet culture. Fad diets, food weaponization, indulge-punish cycles, and militant tracking are rampant behaviors and tools that are wildly unhealthy yet pervasive in blogs, magazines, and even advice from health experts.

The truth is - we see these exact same patterns in our working culture all of the time. Yet, as with diet culture, in the workplace these behaviors are often lauded as admirable. People who practice these unhealthy behaviors are held up as highly disciplined, and feel rewarded for the behavior that is in turn harming them.

Here are a few of the most commonly celebrated yet unhealthy working behaviors…

Efficiency Optimization 

At its best, the quest for maximum efficiency pushes us to constantly ask the question, “Is there a more efficient way to be doing this?” 

What typically ends up happening, however, is that already high achievers become fixated on squeezing every ounce of productivity out of every single second in the day. Feelings of guilt quickly settle in for those moments of “wasted” time and normal human needs like sleep, mental rest, and play, are tossed out as unnecessary. 

When the equation for efficiency optimization dismisses our humanity, or allows them only with a large dose of guilt, the behavior is no longer healthy. 

Binge Working

“I just need to block out a full day to power through this and get caught up.”

Do you really? In my experience, this is actually the solution to your to do list woes 5% of the time or less. More likely than not, it’s you setting yourself up for continued fatigue and guilt.

First of all, if your life is already busy, you likely don’t have a full day to reserve. Secondly, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. We work, but then we must rest, and when we “power through” a day, especially if that day was already reserve for rest, we end up running a real deficit in our energy supply. Finally, when there is no other option but to take a moment and recover - we feel guilty, because we didn’t schedule it in, and something else gets bumped. 

Binge working inevitably triggers an indulge-punish cycle that is most typically seen when someone takes a week long vacation, then spends the two weeks afterwards working double the amount of hours in order to “catch up.”

Over Responsibility 

In the workplace, everyone’s roles are heavily interconnected. If you really wanted to, you could likely paint 80% of the activities in your workplace as falling under your scope of responsibility.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

This one is a little more tricky because conscientiousness is a fantastic quality in any employee.  However, the best way to differentiate the two is that conscientiousness is a choice. Over responsibility is a compulsion that fogs up reality and replaces it with guilt. 

Again, just because you can feel responsible for something, doesn’t mean you should - especially if it means doing so at the expense of your own mental health.

All of us have good and bad habits in the workplace and in life. But, if your habits are turning into self-destructive patterns, it may be time to seek help. Know that you’re not alone, and while these patterns can be difficult to break, there are other ways to do business.