Dr. Jameca CooperForensic Psychology Consultant, Emergence Psychological Services · Board Certified Counseling Psychologist and Forensic Psychology Consultant

Being 'busy' can be a barrier. break free from the hustle trap #selfcare #mentalhealth #selflove

23 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:01

In this short monologue, Dr. Jameca Cooper critiques the core promise of hustle culture—the idea that staying constantly busy and multitasking is beneficial. She explains that perpetual busyness keeps the brain in a survival‑mode state, leading to heightened stress, more errors, reduced focus, poorer decision‑making, and impaired memory. Crucially, she notes that chronic multitasking can diminish the efficiency of gray‑matter regions, effectively altering brain structure and function. The speaker frames self‑care as caring for the brain, urging viewers to limit multitasking to essential moments and to let go of unnecessary “busy‑ness” in order to protect mental health and cognitive performance.

Chapters

One big lie about hustle culture. The lie is how moving, moving, moving and keeping busy keeps you in this constant state of survival mode. Multitasking, we all do it. Some people do it way too much. But what you don't know is it has a negative effect on your brain and your functioning. Not only are you going to have more errors and decreased distractibility, but you're also gonna likely increase your stress overall. You're going to make it very hard to make rational, good decisions. And most importantly, you're going to affect your memory, and you're going to lead to something called gray matter in your brain not being as efficient. That's huge. So not only are you going to have more stress, but you're going to actually impact the structure and the function of your brain. So self-care is taking care of yourself and taking care of your brain. Only multitask if you need to. Otherwise, let some of that mess go.