I had coffee with a friend last week. She’s a project manager, mid-thirties, two kids. She told me she’d been averaging five hours of sleep for three weeks because of a work deadline. Then she laughed about it and said, “But that’s just how it is, right?”

No. That’s not just how it is. That’s how we’ve decided it should be, and the decision is making us sick.

The Cult of Busy

Australia has a complicated relationship with work. We like to think of ourselves as laid-back — the land of long weekends and “she’ll be right.” But the data tells a different story.

According to the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work, Australians worked an average of 6.1 hours of unpaid overtime per week in 2025. That’s over 300 hours a year of free labour. We’re not laid-back. We’re exhausted and pretending we’re fine.

Hustle culture — the belief that constant productivity is a virtue — has crept into the Australian workplace culture in a way that feels distinctly imported. We’ve absorbed the American startup ethos of “grind and rise” without the American illusion that it’ll make us billionaires. We just do it because everyone else seems to, and stopping feels like falling behind.

Social media has made this worse. The entrepreneur posting from their laptop at 4am. The parent who somehow manages a spotless home, a thriving career, and artisanal school lunches. It’s aspirational content that functions as propaganda for overwork.

What Burnout Actually Looks Like

Burnout isn’t just being tired. The World Health Organisation classifies it as an occupational phenomenon characterised by emotional exhaustion, cynicism or detachment, and a reduced sense of professional effectiveness.

Most people don’t recognise burnout until they’re deep in it. The early signs are subtle — a shorter fuse, trouble concentrating, getting sick more often, dreading Monday on a Friday afternoon. By the time it hits full force, it often looks like depression. Chronic stress and sleep deprivation fundamentally alter brain chemistry. You can’t positive-think your way out of a cortisol problem.

Safe Work Australia estimated that work-related mental health conditions cost the economy over $6 billion annually. And yet the dominant response from most workplaces is still “here’s a mindfulness app” rather than “let’s look at your actual workload.”

Why We Keep Doing It

The honest answer is fear. Fear of being seen as lazy. Fear of missing a promotion. Fear of being the one who “can’t handle it.” In industries like law, finance, medicine, and tech, there’s an implicit understanding that long hours are the price of admission. Questioning that can feel career-limiting.

There’s also an identity piece. When your self-worth is tied to your productivity, slowing down feels like losing yourself. I’ve worked with clients who panic when they have a free afternoon because they don’t know who they are when they’re not doing something. That’s not discipline. That’s a wound wearing a blazer.

What Needs to Change

I want to be careful here because I don’t want to put the burden of systemic change on individuals. If your workplace has unrealistic expectations, no amount of meditation will fix that. But there are things worth considering at both the personal and structural level.

At a personal level:

Stop wearing exhaustion as a badge. When someone asks how you are, try answering honestly instead of defaulting to “busy!” — which has become the socially acceptable way of saying “I’m drowning but I need you to think I’m coping.”

Set a hard boundary around sleep. Non-negotiable, seven to eight hours, as many nights as possible. Sleep is not a luxury. It’s infrastructure.

Practice genuine rest. Not “productive rest” like listening to a business podcast on your walk. Actual rest. Staring out a window. Doing absolutely nothing and not feeling guilty about it.

At a structural level:

Workplaces need to stop celebrating overwork. No more praising the person who sent an email at midnight. No more “employee of the month” going to whoever worked the most overtime. These signals tell everyone else that boundaries aren’t welcome.

The right to disconnect legislation that came into effect in 2024 was a start, but enforcement remains weak. If your employer is routinely contacting you outside of hours and expecting responses, that’s a cultural problem that policy alone won’t solve.

Leaders need to model sustainable work habits. If the boss is online at 10pm every night, the team learns that’s the expectation, regardless of what the policy says.

The Wellness Industry’s Blind Spot

I’ll implicate my own field here. The wellness industry has been complicit in hustle culture by framing self-care as another form of optimisation. Meditate to be more productive. Exercise to perform better at work. Eat clean to have more energy for your side hustle.

That’s not wellness. That’s maintenance for a machine. Real wellness sometimes looks like doing less. Saying no. Letting things be imperfect. Choosing rest over achievement without needing to justify it.

My friend who’s sleeping five hours a night doesn’t need a better morning routine. She needs a workload that doesn’t require her to sacrifice her health.

Until we’re willing to name that, all the wellness content in the world is just a prettier bandaid on a structural wound.

Jess Morley is a Brisbane-based wellness writer and yoga instructor. She writes about evidence-based wellbeing at SoulShine.