Reclaiming My Time and Energy Beyond Hustle Culture

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Something that I learned many seasons ago was how to set boundaries with myself at work. I work a corporate job, and as a result, I am very much entrenched in hustle culture, a culture fixated on over-productivity, output, and performance. In the past, and even now, I often see colleagues in the 9–5 world working well beyond expected hours, sometimes until 9 p.m. or even 11 p.m.

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The Moment I knew Something Had to Change

When I first started working this corporate 9-5 job I was a recent university graduate. At that point, I was well burned out from the countless hours I had put into studying for my undergrad, and my body and mind had no fuel or drive left to work excessively long hours—especially knowing I would only be paid for eight hours a day. I could sense that there was a boundary that I needed to set with myself first before expressing it to others. I could really feel that working more hours than what was expected for the job would be a source of frustration.

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Setting Boundaries from Inner Knowing and Truth

So, very early on, I set the boundary with myself. I decided I would:

• Work no later than 5:30 p.m. on a regular basis

• Only in very rare circumstances stay later

Initially, when I set this boundary, I felt guilty for leaving the office at 5 to 5:30 p.m. Sometimes I wonder what my colleagues were thinking when I left earlier than them. Sometimes I would feel a sense of shame for leaving at 5 to 5:30 p.m.

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Unpacking the Guilt of Leaving Work at 5:30p.m.

As time moved on in my corporate job, I felt less guilty about ending my workday at 5 to 5:30 p.m., but I knew that the culture and society we live in shaped how we feel and behave. In Western society, there is a dominant cultural narrative that the masculine is superior to the feminine. When I speak of the masculine and the feminine, I am not referring to gender, but to qualities that are perceived as superior or inferior in people—qualities that form the basis of beliefs upheld within a patriarchal structure, which exists in Western society. Within this structure, qualities such as productivity, achievement, linear growth, and output are placed above qualities like receptivity, intuition, and cyclical rhythms. As a result, we live in a culture that:

• Glorifies productivity, constant achievement, and external validation

• Rewards overextension

• Equates doing with worthiness

We have been conditioned to prove our value through performance, whether in our careers, families, or personal lives. This constant striving pulls us out of our natural rhythms and into a state of hyper-productivity.

Patriarchy conditions us to equate constant doing with worthiness, and hustle culture rewards overextension. All of these forces together contributed to why I initially felt guilty for honoring my own boundary of leaving at 5 to 5:30 p.m., even though that was the expectation set by the job itself. As a result, I felt a sense of shame when I wasn’t in a state of hyper-productivity.

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Coming Home to My Body and My Truth

But as time went on in my corporate 9–5 job, I slowly started to learn to listen to my inner voice and authority and, thus, rely less on others’ validation or approval of my decisions. I learned that the sense of guilt didn’t mean I was doing anything wrong by leaving my job at 5 p.m.; rather, it was an invitation to come back home to my body and my essential truth:

that I am a human with a body that has cyclical rhythms of sleeping, eating, and resting, and that I am worthy and deserving of honouring and replenishing my body.

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An Invitation to Reconnect With Your Aliveness

If you are ready to step out of the cycle of exhaustion, guilt, and endless doing and instead reclaim a sense of aliveness, joy, and deep connection with yourself, I invite you to join me for a discovery session. This is a gentle and powerful space where we can explore together whether my signature coaching offer, Coming Home to the Body: Reclaiming Aliveness Beyond Productivity and Achievement, feels supportive for where you are on your path.