How To Fight Back Against Hustle Culture, High Cortisol and Burnout
6/19/202644 min
You’ll want to send this episode to your friends who are perpetually exhausted, overcommitted, or anyone whose version of "rest" is actually just deep scrolling on the couch while their mind continues to run at 100 miles an hour.
Did you know that sleep doesn't automatically equal recovery? Or have you noticed that after a supposedly lazy weekend, you sometimes wake up on Monday morning feeling more depleted than you did on Friday night?
In this episode of But Are You Happy?, host Ashani Dante sits down with clinical psychologist, speaker, and mental health consultant Shuktika Bose to explore why modern rest no longer feels restorative. We go beyond the superficial self-care trends to uncover the psychological gap between simply stopping your body and actually switching off your brain.
Together, they discuss why your nervous system keeps draining your battery like 40 background apps running on a phone, even when you are physically lying still. They break down the seven distinct types of rest, revealing why sleeping won't fix your exhaustion if you're actually lacking sensory, mental, or emotional downtime. Shuktika exposes the "earned rest" trap, examining how our culture has conditioned us to view a break as a reward for good behavior rather than a basic biological requirement. Finally, they confront the uncomfortable nature of stillness itself, and why stopping our frantic schedules can feel deeply threatening by forcing us to face the messy emotions we've been running from.
The conversation also explores the heavy mental load carried by women juggling unpaid labor, challenging the toxic assumptions of hustle culture and offering small, realistic micro-habits—like the 90-second transition ritual—to help your body safely complete the stress cycle and find genuine peace.
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CREDITS:
Guest: Shuktika Bose
Host: Ashani Dante
Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman
Group Executive Producer: Naima Brown
Audio and Video Producer: Marlena Cacciotti
Social Media Producer: Olivia Colman
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsShaktika Bose· Guest0:00
Ishani, did anyone ever teach you how to rest?
Ashani Dante· Host0:03
Definitely not.
Shaktika Bose· Guest0:04
That's the thing. In this society we're in, we're taught how to be productive. There are a million and one vi- videos about how to be in the top 1% of high performers, et cetera, but who teaches you how to rest? Who teaches you what downtime really looks like and how it tailors to who you are as a person? We're kind of all just blindly going about things, hoping that it'll work out.
Ashani Dante· Host0:27
Hi, I'm Ishani Dante. Welcome to But Are You Happy? These days, proper rest can feel hard to come by. A lot of people are experiencing burnout, and not just because of demanding jobs. Burnout can come from caring responsibilities, studying, parenting, or simply just trying to keep up with everyday life. A lot of us are just tired. In this episode, we're talking about rest with Shaktika Bose, a clinical psychologist who focuses on making psychology practical and accessible, with a particular emphasis on burnout, boundaries, and wellbeing, because rest isn't just sleep. Sleep is one part of physical rest, but physical rest can also include things like walking or stretching. There's also emotional rest, creative rest, and social rest, and understanding the different kinds of rest we need can help us feel better day to day. In this episode, we unpack the seven different types of rest,