A life built from safety and intention - not urgency and self-punishment.
Looking back on my life, the word that stands out the most is “more.”
Be more popular. Be more outgoing. Study more. Do more extracurriculars. Workout more. Try harder. Lose more weight. Make more money. Accept more responsibility. Strive for more in your career.
At the same time, “less” felt like an insult. Almost a curse word.
Nobody wanted to be the person who did less. No one wanted to be the person who accepted less.
But the older I’ve gotten, and the more time I’ve spent in my own skin (which, by the way, has taken over four decades just to begin exploring), the more I’ve realized that we’ve gotten “more” and “less” completely wrong.
Maybe becoming more of who we were meant to be requires rejecting the relentless pull of “more.” Maybe doing less doesn’t mean being less at all. Maybe it’s finally how we come home to ourselves.
Maybe it means stepping out of the hustle. Maybe it’s an intentional unhustling of your life.
When I first started talking about living an unhustled life, I noticed something interesting. People didn’t agree with my idea – but they often misunderstood it.
An unhustled life is assumed to mean laziness. A lack of ambition. Opting out of responsibility altogether. People took it to mean giving up. Like lowering standards. Like deciding that you just “don’t care anymore.’
And that could not be further from the truth.
For me, unhustling my life does not mean doing less of everything. It’s about doing fewer things out of urgency, fear, or self-punishment – and more things from a place of safety, intention, and self-trust.
It’s choosing to stop treating my body, my nervous system, and my worth like problems that always need fixing.
It’s not an absence of effort. It’s an absence of force.
In my everyday life, unhustling has looked very ordinary – but it has been deeply meaningful.
I still move my body, but I am learning how to not use exercise as punishment, penance, or proof of worth. I am learning how not to “earn” the worth of my days through exercise or pay off choices from the night before. Some days, that looks like a strength workout. Some days, it looks like walking slowly on my treadmill while I watch Emily in Paris.
I stopped trying to optimize every food choice or drink choice and began asking myself one simple question: Does this support my nervous system right now? That shift has led me to intentional drinks, warm meals, and fewer choices driven by guilt or by the need to control.
I stopped (or am learning to stop) viewing rest as something I earn after being productive enough. It’s something I build into my days and I allow myself because my body functions better when it is rested and feels safe.
I have begun saying no – not dramatically. Not defensively. Without over-explaining and without apology. But if it’s been a hard week at work and I receive an invitation for a Friday night (a night that I tend to be more exhausted and at my physical limits), I let myself say no without doubting myself.
The biggest change I have been working on, however, is my internal self-talk. I’m learning to notice when my thoughts sound like urgency or panic instead of wisdom. I’m learning when I am at the helm of my thoughts, or when my inner anxiety (who I have lovingly named Concernicus) is at the helm. I am learning that my thoughts can be driven by habit and by fear – and that I do not have to obey them automatically.
I don’t think that doing less has made my life smaller. If anything, it has made my life quieter. Clearer. More honest.
I’m not becoming less – I think I am becoming more myself, without the constant background noise telling me to “try harder” and to “be better.” Without that constant hum of “I’m not enough; I need to be more.”
I do want to say this clearly, because I know it matters. Living an unhustled life does not mean automatically quitting your job, dropping your entire life, and moving to the forest to live amongst the wood nymphs. For many people – for most people, I would imagine – unhustling can happen entirely within the life they already have – with boundaries, rest, pacing, and learning to listen to their nervous system.
At the same time, I am actively choosing to leave my job – and to leave a career field that I have done for 23 years. And I want to be honest about why.
My decision to leave education isn’t coming from a fully formed plan for next year. It’s coming from the exact opposite. I don’t know yet know what is next or what to expect. But right now, I do not have the mental capacity or the nervous system capacity to both survive my current work life and thoughtfully identify who I want to be when I grow up.
I realized that I was asking myself to do something that felt impossible – stay afloat in a system that encourages drowning, while also imagining and building something new. My nervous system was very clearly – very loudly – telling me that this was not sustainable.
Choosing to step away from my career is not me opting out of effort or responsibility. It’s me choosing to create enough space to think clearly, rest honestly, and listen without urgency. Because (if I’m being honest) 23 years in education has pressed that there is not enough time to think clearly, too much to do to rest honestly, and so much background noise that listening without hearing a ticking timebomb has become impossible.
So for me, in this phase of my life, unhustling looks like walking away. Not because everybody needs to leave thier job to heal or to recalibrate. But because this is the boundary that my body is asking for.
An unhustled life is not mimicking somebody else’s choice. It's about making the choices that support your capacity, your mental health, your safety, and your truth – whatever those might be and wherever you are in your journey.
An unhustled life isn’t a destination. It’s a daily practice. One choice at a time. One pause at a time.
And maybe – just maybe – it starts by questioning the idea that doing less makes us less.
What if creating this space is the very thing that allows us to become who we were meant to be?
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