In this hustle culture era, resting or slowing down feels like ditching. However, it’s the need of the hour, considering the mental and emotional breakdowns happening every now and then amongst the most successful professionals. In an interview with HT Lifestyle, Dr Chandni Tugnait, renowned psychotherapist, life coach, healer, and founder and director of Gateway of Healing, explains why we struggle to pause.
Dr Chandni highlighted that there’s a contradiction that is present in modern workplaces , where people are running on empty, surviving on minimal sleep and maximum caffeine, and yet, instead of pausing, they keep accelerating. The truth is simpler and harder to admit: the system rewards presence over performance, and visibility over actual output. There used to be a door you walked through, at least, between the office and home. That door gave your brain a moment to exhale. Now your laptop sits three feet from your bed, glowing , and your notifications don’t know it’s Sunday. People check emails during dinner and answer calls on vacation. The line didn’t just blur; it disappeared. People compare sleep scores like trophies. ‘I only got four hours’ has become a strange kind of bragging, a way of proving you matter enough to be that busy. Admitting you’re tired doesn’t feel honest anymore; it feels like admitting you’re replaceable. “None of this changes through willpower or a better to-do list app. It changes only when organisations stop rewarding the performance of exhaustion and start actually measuring what work gets done,” highlighted Dr Chandni.
Because burnout gets treated as a personal failure to optimise better, not as a signal that something is breaking apart, this happens.
