The Rest Revolution E-Book

Amanda Miller Littlejohn

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 346

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Navigate the competitive work landscape, redefine your approach to ambition, and reclaim your rhythm beyond burnout

In a culture that values productivity as a sign of success, many professionals are on the verge of burnout, pushed—sometimes unconsciously and other times overtly—to keep working, keep producing, and keep reaching new heights at an unsustainable pace, often at the expense of their physical and mental wellbeing. In The Rest Revolution, executive and personal branding coach Amanda Miller Littlejohn shows readers how to restore themselves after burnout, and navigate the rigors of competitive work without sacrificing self.

Inspired by Littlejohn's experience as an executive coach to high achievers, The Rest Revolution explores topics such as:

• The modern causes of exhaustion
• How personal achievement, social conditioning, and systemic barriers pose threats to rest
• How high achievers can take their overworking tendencies off autopilot
• How to use self-discovery to create your personalized plan to combat burnout
• Balancing achievement with self-care and wellness
• How perfectionism and imposter syndrome create a fertile ground for exhaustion
• 5 Rules of Rest - how to reclaim your time, mind, ambition, and more
• How high achievers are breaking the burnout cycle with a rest framework derived from nature

Creative, prescriptive, and insightful with everything you need to reshape your approach to work and rest, The Rest Revolution is a deep dive into the causes of burnout, and an essential read for everyone looking to rise above workaholism while still achieving great heights in work, business, and life.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Introduction: My Burnout Story

My Silent Addiction

A Wake-up Call

A Dangerous Example

Dropping Like Flies Emotionally

The Match That Lit Our Collective Burnout

1 Roots of Machine Mindset

Self-Work as Worth and Validation

My Connection

A Psychological Perspective

Creating a Social Norm

Beginnings of Labor

Rise of Sociological Ideas

Systemic Threats

A Series of Misalignments

2 Overworking on Autopilot

Perfectionism

Groomed to Overachieve and Work Twice as Hard

Pushing Through Physical or Emotional Pain

Work, Labor, and Ability to Produce Equated with Worth

Imposter Syndrome: I Didn’t Truly Earn My Success

Ideas to Consider

Key Insights

3 Back-Burnering What Matters

I Don’t Have Time for the Activities That Energize Me and the Passions That Call Me

I Don’t Have Time for the Relationships That Energize Me

It’s Okay If My Work Is Not Fulfilling If It Pays the Bills

I Can’t Be My Authentic Self

I Don’t Know Who I Am, What I Want, or What Drives Me and I Can’t Afford to Stop and Reflect

I Don’t Have Time to Care for Myself – I Have to Work, or Care for Others

Key Insights

4 Repeatedly Skipping Winter

Repeatedly Skipping Winter

I Always Have to Be on Even When I Don’t Feel My Best

Access to Technology Means I Have to Show That I’m Being Productive

I Can’t Afford to Be Invisible

I Can’t Afford to Take My Foot off the Gas or Else I’ll Be Passed Over

I Can’t Afford to Disappear or Else I’ll Be Forgotten

The Mindset to Reject Rest

Nature as Our Guide

Every Living Thing Needs Rest

Why Skipping Winter Becomes Hard to Stop

Key Insights

5 Burnout Breaking Point

A Health Crisis

The Loss of a Loved One

A Career Aha Moment

Key Insights

6 Deprogramming, Recalibrating, and Front-Burnering

Decoupling Worth from Work

Reevaluating Ambition

Recalibrate with Rest

Deprogramming, Recalibration, and Front-Burnering

Honoring Her Needs

Finding New Methods

Key Insights

7 Origins of theModern Burnout Epidemic

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Henry Ford

George Washington Carver

The Beginnings of Purposescaping

8 Purposescaping

A Habit of Self-Reflection

Stop the Guessing Game

A Seasonal Framework

Overview

The Purposescaping Seasons

The Four Seasons

Winter Evaluation

Planting

Harvest

The Work of Winter Rest and Decisions

The Work of Spring Planting

The Work of Summer Growth

The Work of Fall Harvest

No Season Is Wasted

Optimal Growing Conditions

Myleik’s Journey

Graduating from a Season

Your Next Season

Why You Have Muscle Memory

Exercise: Using the Story Pyramid

Key Insights

9 Restore Self

Un-numb Yourself, Pause, and Honor Your Humanity and Pain

Accept That You Are Worthy

Why Inauthenticity Burns You Out

Why You Do Not Know Who You Are

Honor Your Individuality

Looking Inward

Know Yourself

Honor Your Intuition

Put Down the Mask of Inauthenticity

Beware of Pushback

Key Insights

10 Right-SizeYour Ambition

How Ambition Misalignment Contributes to Burnout

Getting Clear

The American Dream Is Changing

The Role of Purpose

How to Clarify Your Current Desires and Hungers

How to Update Your Goals and Plans According to Your Current Hungers

Aligning Your Ambition to Purposeful Work Is Energizing

How to Pivot Your Ambition If Necessary

Key Insights

11 Align Your Time

Personal Efficiency

Boundaries

Personalization

Energy Prioritization

Identify and Prioritize EGAs That Restore Personal Goals

How to Create a Personal Culture of Rest and Sabbatical

Key Insights

12 Restore andRealign Space

How Your Nervous System Is Impacted by Burnout

Be Intentional with Your Senses: The Power of Sound

Develop a Morning Routine

Practice Meditation

Engineer Your Environment

Reacquaint Yourself with Nature

Engage in Breathwork

Reduce Clutter

Key Insights

13 Restore Your Connections

Loneliness: How Your Social Bonds Impact Burnout

How Did We Get So Lonely?

How Social Gaps Leave Us Vulnerable to Loneliness

When Being Yourself Is “Doing Too Much”

Audit Your Existing Connections to See Where the Energy Lies

From Doer to Leader Comes Down to Support

Double Down on High-Quality EGAs

Make Connection a Priority

Build Rituals and Schedule Regular Time for Connection

Get Clear on Your Interests

Tap into Your School History

Find Younger People to Mentor and Learn From

Figure Out How You Can Serve

Create a New Community of Your Own

Create an Intentional Plan for Connection

A Network Success

Key Insights

14 What’s Working

How Workplaces Can Support Their Employees with Burnout

Limitations of the Organization

Strategies for Companies

How Workplaces Can Support Employees Dealing with Burnout

Key Insights

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Introduction: My Burnout Story

Begin Reading

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

End User License Agreement

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AMANDA MILLER LITTLEJOHN

THE Rest REVOLUTION

How to Reclaim Your Rhythm and Conquer Burnout When Overworking Has Become the Norm

Copyright © 2025 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial technologies or similar technologies.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available:

ISBN 9781394259106 (Cloth)

ISBN 9781394259113 (ePub)

ISBN 9781394259120 (ePDF)

Cover Design: WileyCover Images: © AndrewD/Adobe Stock, © malshak_off/Adobe StockAuthor Photo: © Danielle Finney

I dedicate this book to my mother, Mattie Pearl Sevier Miller.Thank you for planting the seed of this idea long beforeI got here, having the strength to keep going throughburnout, and modeling the art of restoration through the manyseasons of your life. Merci, Mama!

Preface

We are in the middle of a Rest Revolution.

The pandemic was a wake-up call for work. Americans finally recognized how utterly exhausted we all were, how our modern work habits were unsustainable, and how overworking had become our religion. We collectively saw the insanity in our days, where our priorities were in the wrong places, and where we needed to make corrections. We asked ourselves the tough questions, and some downgraded lifestyles to make more time and space to enjoy our hobbies, our loved ones, and our lives.

For a time, employers stepped up and affirmed worker calls to prioritize well-being by creating employee wellness programming and inclusion efforts that honored the whole person.

With many offices closed, remote work – formerly an outlier – became the only way most of us were working. And we all found out that it works. But as more and more employers move past the post-pandemic cocoons, we have found ourselves at an inflection point.

The pandemic offered many employees the rare opportunity to shift the paradigm of work. The window may be closing, but it is not closed yet. We can still push; we can still fight to maintain the progress we’ve worked so hard for.

It’s time for a rest revolution that shifts our approach to work, and this book is my reporting from the front lines.

Many have come to the realization that working twice as hard never yielded enough to make it worth the effort. Those who have prized their work ethic and their ability to power through in the past are reconsidering whether that’s something to be proud of. On the heels of a global pandemic, many are beginning to view their grandparents’ and parents’ relationship to hard work for what it was – a byproduct of the times, a result of social conditioning, and the residue of immigrant values and/or slavery mindset – instead of the gospel truth.

I am not an expert on rest. Somewhat by default, my identity as a Black woman reared in the South makes me an expert on overworking. My identity as a woman and having been socialized as such makes me a bit of an expert on perfectionism. And my identity as a mother who is rearing three children makes me an expert on exhaustion, overachieving, and ineffective multitasking.

My point here is that I am not a doctor or a mental health expert. And, unless you consider yourself one of the seven million medical professionals roaming this planet, neither are you. We likely have similar journeys, and you will likely relate to some of the experiences I’ve had, and the experiences that the folks I’ll be sharing with you in this book have had as well.

I have spoken to a number of experts to get the scientific point of view. But I want to set your expectations and let you know I am not qualified to advise you on your physical and mental health.

Now that I’ve gotten that disclaimer out of the way, I will say what I am an expert in. I am an expert pattern-seer and formula finder. I am a highly sensitive person, so I notice subtle changes around me, such as when I realized there were fewer birds singing in the forest than the previous week. I shared this observance with my kids – where are all the birds going?

Due to my sensitivity and through my own personal journey and my journaling, I often find myself capturing a sense of what we are all going through but may not have the words to articulate. I have been journaling consistently for the majority of my life, so that daily practice, combined with my keen observation skills, and knack for spotting subtle changes in my environment, does make me the expert to write this book.

Like many of you, I began to notice a recurring story in my social media feeds, and even in my conversations with fellow moms, both during and immediately after the pandemic. Suddenly, everyone was taking a break, taking a sabbatical, stepping away from social media, giving up things they had previously felt compelled to make room for. The pandemic showed so many of us where we just didn’t have the room. At first it seemed like a fluke. It began with people giving up social media, then giving up their job, then quelling their ambition, and even lowering their earning goals. It seemed to be a similar pattern that was playing out for me as well.

After having my third child during the pandemic, I had very limited social support – my mom didn’t even come to meet the baby until she was six months old. (By comparison, my mother was in the hospital waiting room and was the first person to hold both of my other babies after my husband and me.)

But after having my third child, I had a personal reckoning. What was I working so hard for, what did it all mean, and what messages was I passing down to my children? Burnout is real and I experienced it firsthand. Before that, I had yet to meet my limit, but now here I was.

Introduction: My Burnout Story

My Silent Addiction

My name is Amanda, and I’m an addict.

For the past 30 years, I’ve been struggling with a dangerous and silent addiction to overworking. And for 20 years, I don’t think I even knew that’s what it was.

I didn’t recognize it because this addiction helped me to get things that made me feel good about myself. This addiction helped me attract attention and make my parents, spouse, and ultimately my children proud.

Overworking, overperforming, and overachieving served me well for a long time. That is, until I had a newborn baby, and also found myself at home with traumatized remote-schooling teens, evading a deadly virus, and managing a business that was bursting at the seams, all during a global pandemic.

My chronic overworking – coupled with sleep-deprived new mom moments – reached a point of burnout so severe that I cycled in and out of depression, became prone to infections, and my body began breaking down. But hey, the bank account was overflowing and clients were getting great results.

And honestly, despite my health challenges and physical exhaustion, I probably would have kept overworking had my teenagers not been present to witness and hold a mirror up to my insanity.

A Wake-up Call

By mid-pandemic, I had a new infant, two teens, and a business that was overflowing. Between working from home and schooling from home, there was always something happening in the house and it seemed like things were always falling through the cracks.

One very early Monday morning, I remember trying without success to shake off the grogginess when I rose to get some work done while the rest of the house slept. It was 3 a.m., and I had a full day of Zoom meetings before me and no other time to prepare. But by 6 a.m. I was mentally slogging through my work and feeling warm. By the time I’d thought to take my temperature I was burning up. I retrieved the steaming thermometer I’d tucked under my tongue and read the big red digital numbers: 101.5.

“Great,” I thought. Behind on a few of my deliverables and already overdue for nursing my one-month-old daughter, I had no time to be sick.

The day before I’d noticed shooting pains piercing my right breast and I’d attempted to schedule a telemedicine appointment. When I finally got through and saw the doctor pop up on my iPhone screen, my fever had reached 103.5 and I was listless, lying in a pool of my own sweat.

This particular episode was precipitated by having a baby just a month earlier and recovering from a difficult cesarean surgery while still working. And because I had a newborn, my sleep schedule was out of whack, so I was up at all hours of the night trying to squeeze in work whenever I had a chance. Weakened by the trauma of surgery and sleep deprivation, my body decided to shut the whole thing down.

Halfway on the other side, I thought my experience had been largely my own. I had soldiered through a painful breast infection that sadly ended my nursing journey prematurely. No matter how groggy and disoriented, I nevertheless kept showing up on Zoom. I hadn’t considered how that episode had impacted my kids, until they spoke up about it.

My son Logan, then in the ninth grade, told me that watching me fall sick from overworking made him anxious. “Your body was giving you clear signs you need to rest and you were just ignoring them,” he said. “It was like watching you spiral downhill.”

Connor, an eighth grader at the time, had tended to me between virtual classes on Zoom when my fever was at its height. He later told me it frightened him to see me that way.

I felt a mix of emotions upon hearing that from my kids. I was embarrassed, ashamed, disappointed. I prided myself on putting them first, healing my wounds so as not to pass them on and learning new tools to give them what I thought would amount to a great start in life. Had I just negated all of that by pulling back the curtain to who I really was and how I really operated when they were usually blissfully unaware at school?

My slip was hanging, as my grandmother used to say.

A Dangerous Example

To hear that my behavior was not only setting a dangerous model for my children but was scaring them was a wake-up call. It was one thing to put myself in danger, and another thing entirely to scare the kids. (I know – put your own mask on first.) Plus, I didn’t want my kids to interpret my behavior as the acceptable way to do things. I knew I had to do something different.

But as it turns out, the pandemic put a lot of parents’ and kids’ unsustainable approaches to work front and center.

Kristian Owens, a therapist who treats children in the DC area, said that at the height of the pandemic she saw not only kids who were struggling, but parents who were chronically exhausted, emotionally distant, and downright disconnected.

Owens told me that burnout doesn’t impact only adults. When parents are burned out, that prevents them from being emotionally present for their children, and when the kids pick up on this distance, it can lead to a host of mental and emotional problems.

The pandemic only turbocharged these issues. Owens’s small practice swelled during the pandemic as frantic parents sought mental health services for their children. “Their children were being impacted from the isolation, from being away from their friends and having to do virtual school, but also because parents were not being emotionally present because they were also burned out.”

With so many school-age kids home during some part of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was unfortunately not uncommon for kids to witness parental burnout. “If you’re working in a work environment that is stressful and then you’re coming home and you’re having to parent, it’s like, I don’t have it to give, I’m so exhausted from my day,” Owens explained. “And then I’m coming home and, especially as a mom with all the hats we wear, I can’t be emotionally present because I’m not even emotionally present for myself.”

One morning over coffee, I got the wake-up call I didn’t know I needed. I was planning to take a sabbatical from work and was telling my teenaged son about my plans. He was happy to hear that I was finally intentionally taking a break. Reflecting on this season of overworking, he expressed his experience of watching me spiral out while virtual schooling from home.

“Did you see yourself earlier this year?” he asked me. “You were staying up all night. You were limping around in pain. You were irritated and seemed sad. You were always busy and never had time to talk.”

Hearing his account was eye-opening, and a bit painful, but I asked him to go on.

“It was hard to be around you,” he said finally. “It made me sad.”

Ouch.

While my sons were able to describe their emotional experience of watching me struggle, that’s rare for most kids. Instead of telling you how they feel, most kids simply act out. But whether they talk to you like my sons did or resort to temper tantrums, according to Owens kids are still picking up on more than we realize. And instead of speaking up they may try to get our attention by acting out at home or school.

Jalan Burton, MD, is a pediatrician with a mobile practice (she was also my pediatrician who made home visits to my baby during the pandemic). Instead of having patients come to an office to see her, she travels to her patients’ homes, and in 2020 and 2021, she got an eyeful. She saw more depression, anxiety, and irritability with parents. She ordinarily administers initial depression screenings for mothers of newborns in the baby’s first few months of life, but given the symptoms she was observing during routine visits, she had to increase her frequency.

“I found I was having to do it more often because parents were so burned out,” she explained. When parents weren’t following up with mental health professionals despite indicating depression, anxiety, and irritability during those screenings, she began asking if they wanted her to reach out to a therapist on their behalf to get the ball rolling. “Every single person I said that to took me up on the offer,” she said.

Dropping Like Flies Emotionally

Owens found that during the pandemic, schools were still expecting kids to show up like we weren’t in a global pandemic and experiencing this collective trauma. As she put it, “Kids were like dropping like flies emotionally.”

And while parental ambition is somewhat to blame, in her opinion, our society pushes everyone to overwork. “We have been indoctrinated by a society that perpetuates grind, grind, grind, so it makes sense that’s what we’ve been teaching our kids,” she said.

And that grind comes at a cost. For me, it came at the cost of my physical and mental health. But it can be even more damaging for young people who aren’t emotionally equipped to deal with the fallout.

In the Washington, DC, area where I live, ambitions run high. But apparently so do the negative effects. “I see so many kids who are getting straight A’s, they go to the top schools in this area, and they’re so emotionally unhealthy,” Owens told me. Many of her teen patients struggle with depression and make it to the end of high school with great grades, only to stall out early in college because they’re already burnt out from having to maintain so much academically.

The Match That Lit Our Collective Burnout

The pandemic didn’t cause the fire of burnout, but it certainly lit a match.

According to McKinsey, burnout is defined as “the feeling of depletion, cynicism, and emotional distance that results from a lack of impact or autonomy at work.” That likely sounds familiar to you if you consider yourself ambitious, a high achiever, a go-getter, or any number of monikers that suggest upward mobility.

But high achiever or not, the pandemic fostered widespread burnout for several reasons. With lives on the line, the pandemic created an increased workload and pressure for many people, especially in the healthcare fields. Essential workers faced overwhelming patient loads and long hours when the pandemic was at its height. This constant strain led to exhaustion and a feeling of never being able to catch up.

Remote work became the norm for many, and the lines between professional and personal life became hazy. Those work-life boundaries got very blurry. People found themselves constantly available, working longer hours, and struggling to disconnect. On top of this, quarantining created social isolation and widespread loneliness. Most people were forced to create new routines.

It was such an uncertain time and we were in constant fear for our lives, especially prior to the introduction of a vaccine. I remember staying glued to the news waiting for Dr. Fauci’s latest guidance. I had never watched so much news before, and as many others experienced, the constant barrage of news about the pandemic, coupled with the fear of getting sick or losing loved ones, fueled anxiety and stress.

These factors combined to create a perfect storm for widespread burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic. But as with my own lifetime of overworking, our collective problems started long before 2020.

1Roots of Machine Mindset

During the late 1800s, immigrants and African Americans – many newly freed slaves – sought work in the rising industrial America. As the railroad industry evolved, the need grew for laborers to build new transportation infrastructure – particularly on the railroads that were connecting the coastal cities with the rest of the country.

As legend has it – and some would say the story is rooted in real history – an African American man by the name of John Henry earned a reputation as the strongest and fastest steel driver working on the railroads. Steel drivers were responsible for manually hammering a drill through the hard rock of a mountain bed so that explosives could later be placed in the holes. This enabled incremental parts of the mountain to be blasted away, making room for train tracks and tunnels.

John Henry was hired in West Virginia to help work on Great Bend – a 6,450-foot-long tunnel through Big Bend Mountain. Imagine drilling and blasting your way through a mountain – this was slow, tedious, and exhausting work.

Two years in, C&O Canal executives brought in the newly invented steam-powered drill to help speed up the process. The steam drill was reportedly able to drill faster than any man, and for John Henry, whose reputation was built on his speed and power, the challenge was on.

John Henry went to work against the steam drill, hammering into the mountain rock. At one point, he’s said to have held a 10-pound hammer in each hand as he pounded his manual drill into the mountain while the steam drill did the same. It’s said that John Henry drilled a 14-foot hole into the rock, besting the machine, which only drilled 9 feet. Victorious, he completed the race and dropped dead from overexertion.

John Henry maintained his reputation as the strongest, fastest man working on the railroad, but it came at the price of his very life.

Self-Work as Worth and Validation

Although the story of John Henry sits in the realm of legend, it’s nevertheless a powerful illustration of our modern beliefs about work and can provide clues to how those beliefs evolved.

Whether you believe this folktale is purely fictional or inspired by true events, as a symbol John Henry provides a powerful illustration of how American esteem and identity has been linked to work. To me, it speaks to the natural human reaction and desire to hold on to the past when innovation potentially threatens one’s livelihood. It’s the natural human reaction, but ultimately, instead of pitting yourself against something with which you cannot compete, just find a different way to make your mark.

John Henry’s identity was so tied to being the fastest and strongest in his field that a new technology that would have likely made his job easier instead wound up threatening his sense of self.

This is understandable. He spent his adult life – newly freed from slavery, no less – becoming the best and fastest in his field. And here comes this machine that doesn’t require breaks, doesn’t need to eat, and in fact doesn’t do much of anything, and yet can outwork someone who has spent much of their adult life – and built their entire reputation and identity – around being able to do this thing this way, this fast, this well. Here’s a machine that made someone’s achievements obsolete in an instant.

Even so, John Henry surmised that if he could just work harder, he could outwork becoming obsolete.

From our present-day vantage point, I think we’d all agree that is the wrong approach. To ignore the changes in a system, or in the environment, or yourself – and do what you’ve always done, just harder, longer, faster, more, more, more – simply doesn’t work.

Like John Henry, we’re human beings, not machines, yet we’re approaching the demands of work as if we are. Machines like the steam drill may not need to eat, sleep, or restore themselves, but human beings do.

In many workplaces, fast-paced environments are designed with the expectation that human beings will produce machine-level outputs: better, cheaper, faster, more.

Ultimately, once you understand that, you must ask yourself this: are you willing to die for this arbitrary outcome? Are you going to operate as a machine, or will you reclaim your humanity?

From machine to being – that is the future of work. That is a challenge worthy of our time and attention. How can you resolve to remember your humanity, and honor it while doing the work you do?

My Connection

I can relate wholeheartedly to the validation and identity John Henry derived from overworking.

For me, the problem began as early as elementary school when I realized that a beautiful string of A’s made my parents beam. As their marriage fell apart and they hurled hurtful words at each other, I think I was subconsciously willing to do anything I could to break the tension. If that meant straight A’s, Junior Honor Society inductions, AP classes, and National Merit Scholarships, so be it.

And perfect grades were just the beginning. As any good achiever knows, as you advance in the workplace, there are many chances to make your mark if you’re looking for opportunities to do so. High standards, talent, and opportunity became a dangerous mix for me as I pushed myself to attain more and more.

Even more complicated was that my stamina to work harder than others were willing to and my ability to suss out an opportunity to achieve proved to be more than a career asset. It proved to be the basis of a powerful framework that has helped hundreds of others quickly determine where they are already getting traction, and where they can exploit that for even more traction in the field of their choosing.

I’m proud of that – really, really proud of that. But I have come to realize that, like John Henry’s winning nail spike, it was not without a price.

A Psychological Perspective

Dr. Reisha Moxley is a psychologist who works primarily with high-achieving professionals. She says the root of overworking can be traced in this country to work’s status as many people’s primary source of validation.

“If you are dissatisfied and/or longing for deeper connection elsewhere, work can serve as a distraction and provide needed dopamine hits when they are scarce in our nonwork lives,” she told me.

Ouch. I’m definitely guilty of using work to avoid things I’d rather not deal with.

But Moxley says an individual’s identity, esteem, and sense of worth can all easily get tangled up in their work because boundaries get hazy. Especially if the individual is getting validation, however complicated, from their work identity, that work identity can eclipse everything.

“It may be the only place they are consistently rewarded (pay, promotions, benefits) in their lives,” Moxley said.

Creating a Social Norm

While concerns on the individual level can influence a person’s desire to overwork, modern day ideas about work helped to get us here.

The roots of overwork can undeniably be traced further back, but I want to go back about 150 years to the height of the American Industrial Revolution. The rise of industrial America was a period after the Civil War that transformed American society, including mindsets and attitudes about work.

During this period of rapid change, Americans began replacing manual labor – like John Henry’s man-powered hammer and drill – with machine labor that sped up production. The wider availability of water power, steam power, and later electricity helped to speed up processes and production. Workers moved from farms to factories as our agriculture-driven economy gave way to manufacturing. Our society became more connected as railways, canals, and the like created faster ways to move goods and people.

All of these changes – in machine innovation, power, and transportation – meant that demand for labor increased significantly. So did the promise of economic opportunity.

Beginnings of Labor

America quickly earned a reputation for being a land of opportunity – a place where, unless you were African American, you had the chance to make something of yourself. In Europe, for example, upward mobility was (and often still is) fairly uncommon. Whatever social class or “caste” you were born into is where you stayed.

But in America, you weren’t confined to your caste or station of birth.

As steam power, water power, and new machinery improved production, they created a demand for labor. More labor and machinery created a surplus of products to sell, and this surplus created a demand for new ways to transport goods and move people around.

Building a new society and the transportation to connect us – roads, railroads, tunnels, canals, bridges – created opportunity. But it came at a human cost.

Around this time, poor immigrants from Europe came to the United States looking for economic opportunity, and to escape religious persecution. Most became city dwellers because they didn’t have the resources to move around and had to settle in the cities in which the ships landed. They often worked very low-wage roles and settled for dangerous work.

For instance, 1,000 of 50,000 workers died during the construction of the Erie Canal that ran between the Hudson River in New York and Lake Erie. At least 764 workers died within five years of completing the 3-mile Hawks Nest Tunnel through a West Virginia mountain, primarily from breathing silica dust, though some estimates put the death toll over 2,000.

But the promise of a better life – and the idea that by working hard one can create a whole new life in America – was difficult to resist. Hard work was the key to survival, and it held the promise of upward mobility. For the sons and daughters of European immigrants, it’s easy to see how hard work could become a value passed down through the generations.

For African Americans after emancipation, work for pay was a revolution. Before then many Blacks had toiled in unpaid servitude in the South – bought and sold as if they were machines, and often discarded when they were no longer of economic use.

Many Black Americans like myself can trace the overworking mindset back to these newly freed slaves who had been bought and sold for their labor. Their identities and value in society therefore were directly linked to the work they produced.

Rise of Sociological Ideas

Around the same time, Frederick Taylor, a mechanical engineer, watched as steam and water power revolutionized the American labor force. As work moved from farms to factories and transformed workforces from family units to buildings full of strangers, new dilemmas emerged. Taylor wondered, How will we organize all of this work and manage all of these people?

An easy way, Taylor decided, was to streamline, systemize, and standardize work. Through his powerful “time and motion studies,” he observed and timed tasks to analyze work efficiency before advising companies on how to increase productivity. He would determine how workers could spend the least amount of time completing their tasks in the fewest movements.

Using his background as a mechanical engineer, he came up with the most efficient pathway to complete tasks through detailed time and motion studies. For example, he experimented with shovels of different weights and sizes and found that a shovel weighing around 21 pounds was perfect for moving material without tiring out the worker. This simple change led to huge productivity boosts, especially in tasks like coal shoveling.

Another experiment of Taylor’s involved bricklaying. He watched bricklayers closely and analyzed every single movement they made. By tweaking their movements and tools, he came up with a new method that cut out unnecessary steps. His optimized process included positioning the bricks and mortar at waist height, so workers didn’t have to bend down as much, and standardizing how bricks were picked up and laid. This new technique allowed bricklayers to go from laying about 1,000 bricks a day to over 2,700.

Taylor’s innovations in shovel design and bricklaying are just two examples of how his time and motion studies transformed industrial efficiency and set the stage for modern practices in manufacturing and labor management. His work led to productivity increases of 200–400%.

But he did it by essentially engineering new ways for humans to produce and operate uniformly, efficiently, and reliably – much like machines.

Taylor’s experiments with worker efficiency established the field of study that would later become known as “Taylorism” or “scientific management.” Sold on the increased production made possible by his efficiencies, companies adopted his methods, further cementing machine-level expectations from humans.

Systemic Threats

Around the same time Taylor was conducting his time and motion studies, German sociologist Max Weber was pondering how moving from small family-run farms and shops would impact how organizations assigned tasks, evaluated performance, and rewarded talent.

Dubbed the father of bureaucracy, Weber advocated for formal rules and policies that would protect workers from favoritism stemming from family ties and alliances based on shared race, religious affiliation, or nationality. This favoritism, which he called particularism, could set up different groups of workers to be judged by differing yardsticks.

As it turns out, this particularism or “similarity bias” in today’s language can be an exhausting phenomenon to navigate at work – that is, when it’s not working in your favor.