By Dr. Rebecca Hubbard
Often, it’s an afterthought. You add all business tasks to your calendar before finding free time slots for personal care and spending time with friends and family. Of course, it seems like there is never enough time! Or maybe downtime and self-care are typically a reaction to recognizing burnout symptoms in team members or leaders in the business.
Business ownership and entrepreneurship provide freedom, responsibility, and opportunities. Every entrepreneurial journey includes a critical challenge that reveals itself immediately to those with unhealed hyper-productive tendencies. The conflict between the freedom of business ownership and the demands of hustle culture constantly pulls at entrepreneurs. Often, hustle culture dominates the business world. However, the strategic use of rest can promote business success and personal well-being and fulfillment.
Our society’s emphasis on productivity creates mental and physical exhaustion that produces illness and deep life dissatisfaction despite reaching business targets. Most people adopt this work-intensive lifestyle because they aim to achieve success through nonstop effort according to the traditional “American Dream.” In real life, this type of approach to work typically results in burnout, deteriorated relationships, health problems and personal regrets (Whyatt-Nichol, 2011). There is another way. You can include rest as a strategic component of your business. Rest is not the opposite of work, it is a critical part of the process. There is power in downtime.
