The Productivity Trap Just Has a Prettier Mask Now

For the past two weeks I’d been struggling - with balancing life, work. Feeling like I couldn’t get everything done. So I started bringing more structure to my days again. Setting alarms. Planning when to go to the gym, when to work, which days for which tasks.

And then my brother said something that finally hit. He said: ‘you’re doing the busyness thing like mum. but with spirituality, soul nourishing things.’

I laughed so hard. And then I wanted to cry. Because he was absolutely right.

It’s chasing productivity - doing more - just in a prettier mask.

Here’s what it looked like from the inside:

I was physically burnt out but couldn’t understand how - because I was taking care of myself. I’d dropped back into low, heavy, depressive thoughts I hadn’t felt in a really long time. I had migraines. My sleep was broken. I was constantly running out of time even though I was endlessly planning my time. I was bloated, run down, couldn’t even do life admin or get my groceries done, was reading obsessively to escape my own head.

And the spiritual symptoms? Those were the ones that really scared me.

I couldn’t drop into meditation anymore. My intuition went completely quiet - like a signal that just... cut out. And the thing that broke my heart most: I was getting bored doing nothing. I used to be someone who could sit in a cafe all day and feel completely full. Suddenly stillness felt boring?

That’s when I knew something was off.

Here’s what had happened.

Before all of this, I’d been living in genuine flow. No alarm clock. Moving through my mornings slowly. Working in the afternoons when my body felt ready. Running because I wanted to, not because it was in the schedule. Sitting in cafes. Writing. Being off socials. Doing things mindfully rather than efficiently.

And it was working - I felt good, I felt clear, my energy was magnetic.

But then business frustration kicked in after seeing a social media post of someone doing really well with their business. That quiet, creeping feeling of I’m not doing enough, I’m not growing fast enough, I need to be more structured. And I did what every recovering good girl and high achiever does: I tried to control my way to safety.

Alarms. Time blocking my days. Specific tasks for specific mornings. Gym at this time, flow and deep work at that time, meditation, journaling, oracle cards, learning bahasa, healing sessions (all with time constraints).

It felt productive. It looked responsible. It was dressed up in the language of honouring my energy - but it was the opposite. It was fear wearing a wellness costume.

And neuroscience actually backs this up - when we chronically override our body’s natural rhythms with external structure and urgency, we keep our nervous system in a low-grade stress response. Cortisol stays elevated. Creativity drops. Intuition - which lives in the quieter, parasympathetic state - goes offline. We’re literally neurologically less capable of the things we’re trying so hard to force.

So the more I scheduled, the less I could access. The more I pushed, the further I got from myself.

So how do you actually pull yourself out?

Honestly? You don’t push your way out. You remember your way back.

I sat with this question: what did my days look like when I was actually flowing?

And I wrote it out - not as a new schedule to implement, but as a felt sense to return to. No alarm. Slower mornings. Working when it felt right, not when the calendar said to. Writing because creativity was flowing out of me. Sitting somewhere and just... being there. Moving my body intentionally and for fun, not output. Getting off my phone.

The antidote to spiritual burnout isn’t more practices. It’s less performing of them.

If you’re reading this and something is resonating - if you’re exhausted but confused why, if your intuition feels quiet, if stillness has started to feel uncomfortable - I want to ask you:

Are you actually resting? Or are you optimising your rest?

Are you actually in flow? Or have you built a very beautiful, very exhausting system around what flow is supposed to look like?

Because hustle culture didn’t disappear when we became more conscious. It just adapted to the new version of us.

And the moment we catch it - bring awareness to it and change our behaviour - is the moment we can actually choose something different.

This week, I took the alarms off. I’m writing this from a cafe. I didn’t plan to come here. It just felt right.

That’s the whole thing, really.