As I sit on the couch in my living room with my Kindle in my lap reading for pleasure, I feel a pang of guilt. The reason: I’m not doing my homework. The Kindle sits open while I debate internally on my choice to take a break and read. 

I try to tell myself I deserve a break after studying for hours as justification for not jumping straight into a pile of homework. But in the back of my mind, a little voice says, “No breaks, how can I sit and relax while there’s all that work to do? 

In the end, I close my Kindle and turn to the remaining assignments waiting for me, preparing for the next few long hours of work. 

According to Lewis Nathaniel’s piece on medium.com, ”grind culture,” also known as hustle culture, is a culture of striving for achievement where that achievement is measured in the large number of hours worked. 

That has a familiar ring for most Saratoga High School students. They take a multitude of AP and honors classes, stacking hours of homework on top of multiple extracurricular activities. 

With grind culture, the validation and feeling of success comes from the quantity of work done. When walking down the halls or hanging around in a classroom during normal school, it is almost impossible not to hear people comparing and stating how many hours they studied and did homework for the night before. Even with my friends at lunch, we often discussed the long hours we spent studying yesterday as we pulled out our binders to get another session in. 

This culture is not good for many students’ mental health. Thrive Global says grind culture and the sheer amount of work it encourages causes people immense stress and creates a mentality that stress is a badge of honor. 

The workloads for our classes and activities can be a lot, requiring hours of effort and practice that feeds into the type of validation the culture provides. Continuously putting in that amount of work day after day for a whole semester or a whole year can make students’ stress increase and make them feel tired and overworked. 

Toward the end of each semester when the work hours increase for finals, classes require more time to study and prepare for the upcoming tests. In the weeks leading up to finals and during finals, I have found myself feeling burned out and overworked so much it feels impossible to study anymore. 

And yet I have kept studying and working because I felt I had not put in enough hours to feel satisfied in how much I prepared for the finals. Every time I took a break and stopped studying for another activity, I felt guilty and restless I was not still working. 

This restlessness and guilt is another side effect of grind culture. The importance this mindset puts on continuously working for hours on end can make taking a break, even for 5 minutes, feel wrong. It highlights the toxicity of this culture and how it puts taking care of your body and health on the back burner.

To avoid falling into the trap of feeling guilty about not working, I have started focusing on the actual work I am doing rather than the amount of time I spend doing it. This helps me move away from the mindset of success being tied to how long I did homework for and I can instead focus on making sure I do the work well and base my success on how much I actually learned.

I also divide up all the homework I am given from my classes so I only have three to four assignments per day. This helps me train myself into doing the needed work but also taking necessary breaks for self care. After a few weeks of this, I was able to sit and read after finishing homework without feeling guilty about not doing anything.

Grind culture can create a toxic and unhealthy mindset for most teens. Instead, we should all learn to feel proud of the amount of work and quality of work we already do and prioritize taking care of ourselves. That way, we don’t become burned out and unhappy in only the second decade of our lives.