This National Work and Family Month, psychotherapist and author Israa Nasir invites us to rethink what it means to “do it all.”
As founder of the digital mental health brand WellGuide and author of Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Time and Emotional Energy in a World That Always Demands More, Nasir helps people see the hidden cost of our culture’s obsession with constant achievement.
Nasir describes toxic productivity as “a mindset where we believe that we have to optimize every waking moment toward a predefined outcome.” The problem, she says, is that “you get to that outcome, and the goalpost shifts, and so nothing you do ever feels good enough.”
When belonging gets weaponized
Nasir traces the roots of toxic productivity to something deeply human: our need to belong. “We start believing that the more we achieve, the more acceptable we become,” she says. “We start to barter achievement for acceptance—but acceptance at its core is love and belonging. This drive for belonging gets weaponized by our hustle culture.”
The result, she explains, is that our identities become “intertwined into achievement,” whether at work, in parenting, or even in wellness. “We bring it into our own self-care,” she says, “and it actually defeats the purpose of wellness, because if you’re stressed about it all the time, it’s counter-intuitive.”
Step one: Get off autopilot
The first step out of toxic productivity, Nasir says, is awareness. She calls the opposite of awareness “autopilot”—a state where we’re “disconnected from how you are feeling and operating on what is demanded from you.” The good news, she emphasizes, is that “you don’t have to blow up your whole life to make this change. It’s really in the small, incremental shifts that you make.”
Her advice begins with a simple, tactical practice: an energy audit. “Sit down for 20 minutes, reflect on the last three weeks, pull up your calendar, write down everything you did,” she suggests. Then ask three questions:
- Did I actually have to do it?
- Did I feel good about it?
- What would have happened if I didn’t do it?
The goal is to spot where your time and energy are leaking and start making different choices.
Step two: Apply the “Chanel Rule”
After awareness comes pruning. Nasir recommends what she calls the Chanel Rule, named after Coco Chanel’s advice to take off one accessory before leaving your home.
“Remove one commitment from your standing week,” she says. “At work, that can look like doing a meeting audit. How many times do we go to meetings that we don’t have to be in?”
Look for recurring obligations that no longer serve you, whether at work or at home, and take one off the list.
Step three: Reclaim unstructured time
The final step is to build non-optimized time into your life, especially with family.
“See if you can have unstructured time where you’re not all doing something,” Nasir advises. “Parents now are constantly doing something. To model that to your kids is like training the next generation to realize that unstructured time is a cornerstone of your wellness.”
Unstructured time, she adds, isn’t wasted time. It’s what allows us to feel grounded, creative, and connected again.
A message for every stage of life
Nasir has been surprised by how widely her message resonates. Older people have told her they’re using the book to rethink their later years. “They didn’t want to redo the same errors of their whole careers,” she says.
And for younger generations, her work offers language for something many already sense. “Gen Z and early millennials have taken to it well,” she adds. “It’s given them a framework to say, ‘Hey, I’m not lazy. My ambition doesn’t have to be painful.’”
The takeaway
This isn’t about abandoning ambition, it’s about sustainable productivity. “I’m very ambitious,” Nasir says, “but I don’t believe anymore that ambition has to come at the cost of your happiness or health.”
So this month, consider this your inspiration to start small: do an energy audit, remove one unnecessary commitment, and create one pocket of unstructured time.
Israa Nasir
