Lessons - Why Emotional Mastery Beats Time Management | Israa Nasir - Mental Health Educator

In this lessons episode, explore why productivity is less about time and more about emotions, and how over-optimization can leave you feeling disconnected. Learn how to reflect on your recent choices to uncover what drives your actions, why the urge to stay busy often hides deeper emotional needs, and how real success begins with paying attention to how you feel. What I wanted to start this was with a line in your book where you say that productivity isn't about managing time, but rather how you manage your emotions. So this is a very interesting sort of novel cake on productivity. So talk to me about that line and then what you mean by that. I think that one of the things that I found very absent in the productivity literature when I was doing research is for my own self, originally that's how this book came to be. I was trying to figure myself out. The thing that I kept coming up against is I can do all of the things, but it's not changing how I feel. And then I would see that with my clients as well, you know, as a therapist, I do a lot of work and behavior change, and that's something you come up, you know, people say often in therapies, like, okay, will I change my habits? I'm doing all the things, but it's not changing how I feel. And that kind of pinged me into looking into the literature between like the connection between our relationships and motivate, I mean, our emotions and our motivation. So I got really into like social motivation theory, social learning theory, emotional needs, core needs. I started reading about that. And that's where I really came to this conclusion myself, which was that, you know, our emotions drive all of our behavior. Whether it's positive or negative behavior, our emotions are the foundation of how we show up in the world. So it only makes sense that when we are trying to be hyper productive, that we are trying to manage some emotion, whether we are pursuing a positive emotion through the productivity, or we're trying to avoid a negative emotion through using productivity as a coping skill. So that's kind of where I landed, even in my own experience, is, you know, I know that I was using hyper productivity and optimization and being chronically busy to avoid a set of difficult emotions. I think that really hits because even when you say it, the immediate reaction is, yeah, most likely that is what I'm doing when I'm trying to over optimize or get an extra five or 10% out of my day, even though I'm already putting it an hours. But that's very hard for people to unpack because I think that if we talk about productivity, people don't usually tie it to emotion, probably until it's too late, probably until that productivity and that that hustle culture has basically ruined their life to a degree. So somebody listening to this, they want to unpack even where that comes from or how they can start looking inside to figure out what drives their day today. Where do they start looking? What are some of the questions that even like you asked yourself when you understood that you were over optimizing or trying to be too productive? So I didn't think that I was over optimizing what I realized is that I was disconnected. I think that's a really good, I don't want to use the word good, but it is a good red flag to look out for. It's one that you can't ignore is, are you feeling engaged in your life? Because no one's going to sit there and think, oh, I'm really hyper optimized, right? It's just not the way we think about things. And anyway, hyper optimized is a very rewarded, glorified thing. So you're not going to question it like that. What you want to tap into is how do you feel after you do certain things or how do you feel before you do them? So for anybody who was a little curious about, hey, where do I sit on this spectrum? I wonder what my relationship to productivity is, is what she's saying relevant to me? If you want to do that kind of examination, what I would say, and this is what I did, is kind of look back to the last three weeks of your life and look at everything that you did, everything you committed yourself to, the things you took on, everything you said yes to, and then do a little bit of like an energy emotion audit. Just reflect back and think about, okay, did I like the feeling I was having going into this? Was I dreading this interaction? Was I kind of so tired? I was a dragging myself to this thing. How did I feel afterwards? And you know, the two main questions you eventually want to get to are, do I have to do all the things that I'm doing? And why do I do the things that I do? And you have to really kind of follow the why in that question because the knee jerk reaction is, well, I have to do this because nobody else can do it. I have to do this because of course I have to do it. It's my job. It's my role. It's who I am. That's what I do in my friends group. We have to continue to follow that. Like, okay, why do I have to be the person that does it? Why can't somebody else do it? You know, and just continue to follow this why until you get to the core and you realize that everything you're committing yourself to is feeding some emotional need of yours. When did you start to go down this rabbit hole? I mean, the book is called toxic productivity. So what was the the inflection point in your life that helped you understand that productivity can even be toxic because we're worse, we even jumped into this and we went so deep into the emotional component and productivity, but I think that even to back it up a little bit, like you mentioned, productivity is actually glorified. So I think we even have to start by making the argument, why is some productivity even toxic? But was it something that triggered in your life? Was it something that triggered with one of your clients? Was it sort of like this repeating that you saw again and again and again in your work? What was the light bulb moment that put you on this path and you and made you sort of realize like, oh, this is something that we should probably talk about and figure out because this is not a great direction for high performers, high achievers, type A people to go through their entire life optimizing and being, you know, continually more productive. There was like an inflection phase. It wasn't like one moment, but there was a phase and what was happening at that time is there was a big gap between how people viewed my life and how I viewed my life. So, you know, in my 20s, I come from a very high achieving family, right? You have to do well and we're immigrant. So like you have to do well. And so I had done a lot of stuff in my 20s to set up, you know, to meet the checklist of things like study and this and extracurricular and try to start my own like digital health startup. It was just like this checklist, right? So in my early 30s, I was starting to get like the the outcome of all of that work. So I was I was meeting the the deadlines or I was getting the goals that I had set out to achieve, right? But on the outside, it really looked like I had all of it figured out. People would often say to me, oh my gosh, like you do so much, your life looks so like you must be so happy now that you've done this thing, you got this thing. And oh, I remember you were working on this like two years ago, like now you have it, right? You do all of these things, you do all these things. But like there was such a big gap between how people saw my life and how I saw my life. And it was continuous. Like everywhere I went, people would say these things to me, but on the inside, like I just didn't feel it. I just didn't feel it. And it felt really weird. Like the first couple of times people said it, I was like, okay, whatever, like they they see my life a certain way, you know, you see a certain section of someone's life. But I think like with enough people saying it, I kind of got a little worried about myself. I started thinking that, no, maybe I have a high functioning depression because why don't I feel good about my life? Why do other people feel like I should feel good about my life, right? And so I did a little bit of like self discovery. I did like self assessment on depression and I didn't meet the criteria for it. And so I was like, well, if it's not that, then there is something. So now I've ruled out the big thing. So that's kind of when I really went into this, this exploration of what's going on. And one of the, one of the things, one of the most common things people were telling me about me is that I was really busy all the time. So I started there. You know, sometimes it's worth listening to what people around you are saying. We don't necessarily need to be influenced by other people's opinions. But I think it's worth examining if there's a certain thing that repeatedly comes up over and over again. And so I was like, am I too busy? Because to me, I was being normal. Like this is just, this is just being ambitious. This is just normal. And so that's kind of that's where it began. So what did you, what did you, by the way, this resonates so deeply? This everything you're saying, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's exactly how my life is right now. So maybe there's a lot that I can learn from this. So what did you discover about yourself when you started to do this, this introspection? I discovered that I was over committing. I was saying yes to too many things. And the reason was I didn't want to feel like I was missing out. I didn't want to feel like I was missing opportunities. I had this like very powerful scarcity mindset just across the board. Professionally in my personal relationship, in my, even in my marriage, in my friendships, like I had this like scarcity mindset that was driving me. And I was very afraid that I was going to miss out on something. I'm going to lose out an opportunity. I'm not doing the thing the right way so that there was this fear of not being on the path. And that was really driving me to just constantly over commit. And that's like this beginning of this, right? Like that's, that sets a foundation for you to constantly be on. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.