In a meta study involving 177 studies and more than 22,000 people, researchers found that being anxious reliably predicts worse performance on various measures, including working memory, which is the part of your mind that does the processing, the reasoning, and the problem solving. That gap is about a third of a standard deviation, which translate to the average anxious person performing at roughly the 37th percentile of everyone else,. In other words, anxiety moves someone from the middle of a team to the bottom third of it. Anxious you and your productivity are paying a price whether or not you have noticed.
The worst weeks in my life were never the ones where I worked too few hours and not even necessarily the most number of hours, but the ones where I worked anxious hours.
Busyness is a lie
The trouble starts at a societal and cultural level. We are trained at school and then rewarded for at work: every hour should contain accomplishments, and any hour that does not is a small failure on our part. The desire to be busy works well enough for a while, but it does not switch off when the real work runs out. And so we have learnt to fill the gap with things that feel like work.
You refresh email, check your feed, and read the news. But none of it moves anything forward, and each refresh or reload hands you a fresh thing to worry about, along with a fresh comparison that makes you feel behind. These days we also enter prompts to a chatbot and hope its stochastic outputs are favorable this time. And somehow all of this activity registers as productivity because it is visible and stimulating, and since in most knowledge jobs nobody has ever defined what being productive looks like, looking busy becomes the proxy for being useful, both to your colleagues and to yourself.
All of this actually affects us biologically at the same time. We had evolved dopamine to push us toward the next food source or safety, but it has no off switch. So even though our survival needs are easily met in modern life, dopamine keeps pushing us anyway. So while each small action provides a reward which satisfies briefly, the body quickly resets and looks for more. That constant sense of not being where you should be becomes low grade anxiety.
As a result, our body’s dopamine mechanism is fighting against being present with what is in front of you. So there is a choice we have to consciously make if we don’t want to let dopamine-induced activities run amok. By the way, all of this also explains the emptiness of a day that might be full of activities and urgent, and yet somehow we don’t feel at ease.
The social treadmill
Social media, news, and games give us quick bursts of dopamine. On the other hand, reading, walking, cooking, and talking to another person don’t hit as hard. But the sum of what you do all day sets your baseline level of stimulation your mind treats as normal.
Once you see it that way, a few things stop making sense, or make a lot of sense in a manner of speaking. Scrolling feeds after work is not restful because it stimulates you to the baseline exactly where it was all day. You have effectively swapped one high stimulation source for another, and now the restlessness you feel ten minutes into a walk without headphones is not boredom but rather withdrawal. This is why you can’t enjoy the walk.
Social platforms make matters worse. They run on variable reinforcement, which is the same mechanism that makes slot machines work: sometimes the pull pays and sometimes it doesn’t, and the unpredictability makes you check far more compulsively than a guaranteed reward ever would. B.F. Skinner found this with rats and levers in the 1950s, and the same pattern now runs in your pocket. Nobody was intentionally malicious, but the inventor of infinite scroll now regrets his invention.
Do more of these
Here’s a list of actions to do more of: end your days well, move your body, sit with your own mind, and eat healthy.
End your days well. Pick your productivity hours, be fully ambitious inside them, and stop when it’s time. A deadline does more for focus than any technique, and the boundary makes the rest of the day restorative instead of merely unsupervised. If you don’t, the failure mode is obvious but unfortunately common: you stop working without ever disengaging, and the unfinished tasks follow you to dinner and bedtime. So build a shutdown ritual. Check for anything genuinely urgent and make sure every loose task has a date attached to it, agree mentally to look at it when you are back at work, and then say out loud that you are done. It sounds silly and it works, because the point is to give your brain a signal to move on.
I believe that one ritual we lose when we work from home is the commute from the office to home, so if you work from home, it might be good to have some form of transition from your “work area” to your “home area”. It might be as simple as a sign on the door that you can flip that signals the difference between working and not.
On movement, because the science on this is clear. The guideline from WHO is 150 minutes a week of moderate activity, or 75 minutes if you push hard enough such that talking gets difficult. If that sounds like too much, a 2025 meta analysis in The Lancet Public Health pooled 57 studies and found that 7,000 steps a day, measured against a sedentary 2,000, was associated with roughly half the risk of dying early, a quarter less cardiovascular disease, and substantially less dementia and depression. And the gains turn out to start well before you reach 7,000 steps. In any case, you should find an activity first that you enjoy and not worry about the duration, because the workout you look forward to is the one you will still be doing in a year. My long trail run is fifteen miles and takes about four hours, which is indefensible as time management, and yet is the best decision in my week.
On meditation, I have sat with the breath for close to thirty years, so take my enthusiasm with the appropriate discount, but even if you are not interested in meditation per se, you can do breath exercises. A Stanford trial found that five minutes a day of exhale-weighted breathing lifted mood and lowered anxiety more than mindfulness meditation did, and the long exhale activates the parasympathetic side of your nervous system, calming you down.
On people, it turns out that chronic loneliness measurably damages your health, raising the risk of heart disease by 29% and stroke by 32%, with a mortality effect that the US Surgeon General puts on par with smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Despite what some might have hoped, online contact does not close the gap. A review of more than a thousand studies comparing face to face and “screen mediated communication” found that both engagement and impact drop when the interaction is just a video call. So if you lean introverted like me, the answer might be fewer and deeper interactions rather than more of them. It is most likely not less interactions, because introverts' happiness turns out to depend on social connections at least as much as anyone else's.
On food, about 95% of your body’s serotonin is actually made in your gut rather than your brain. While the gut serotonin does not actually cross into the brain, what you eat still shapes the chemical and microbial environment of your body and, eventually, brain. The loop that matters: chronic stress raises cortisol, cortisol drives up appetite and unsettles blood sugar, and then your body starts asking for the fastest energy it can find, which is sugar. This is why you have a sudden craving for junk food when you are stressed. Eating healthy is part of being calm.
Do work you actually care about
Burnout actually has three parts: exhaustion, cynicism, and the sense that nothing you do matters. The research points at six ways a person and a job can be mismatched. While five of them are about conditions: too much work, too little control, no recognition, bad relationships, unfair treatment, those are fixable with boundaries, a different manager, or a conversation. However, the sixth is the gap between what the work asks of you and what you actually believe is worth doing.
So if you are working on things that don’t make sense to you, the uncomfortable truth is that you should change the work. Sometimes that means changing jobs, but far more often it means reprioritizing your work so that you work more on the parts of the job you would do for free, and less or none of the work that you don’t find meaningful.
As they say, keep calm and carry a towel
Calmness is not a reward that arrives once the work is finished, just as joy is not waiting at the end of a productive year. It turns out that both are available in the ordinary hours, but what blocks them is mostly stuff you can remove: social media, invented deadlines, meetings you agreed to out of guilt, the work you do not believe in, etc.
Stay calm and keep going.
As always, a fantastic article. In my late 20's I was working a job I hated, with a long commute, drinking too much coffee (and beer...), and listening to angsty alt-rock. Fast forward to 40: 2 mindful, relaxing cups of coffee a day, a lot of instrumental music, a job I love and am thriving in (management even!), 2 lovely kiddos and a lovely husband - and the more relaxed I am the more all of those areas thrive. The more chill I am with work the more I get promoted and my work gets recognized. The more chill of a Mom I am the more my girls thrive, ditto with my marriage. It's wild to look back at the trajectory and see the exact correlation. What do I do? Minimal screens, read 3 books/month, cook, walk 12k (ish) steps a day, lift 4/week, garden, play with my kids, long talks at night with my husband. It all makes such a difference.
Thank you!