Grind Culture: Why We Crave Academic (Di)stress

“If I’m not exhausted, I must not be doing enough,” is a familiar motto students convince themselves into as they descend to latent burnout. Assignments stack on top of already-loaded extracurriculars; language, sports, and music classes blend into one as “musts” for basic survival; college preparation is a major concern for children who haven’t even hit their growth spurt. Everyone weeps of tantalising stress yet is only met with a groaned “same here.” How did this grow into the default for us? 

Understanding modern “grind culture”

Emerging from the early 2000s, corporate life became vastly remodelled after the strenuous work environments of dream companies like Google and Facebook (Wolfe, 2015). In hopes of reaching their level of prosperity, more international corporations started pushing this unrealistic “work hard, play hard” mantra, which often justifies unreasonable demands by encouraging equally-intense coping mechanisms. Strapped with a debilitating timetable and rehearsed self-importance, big-shot employees convince the rest of us that our adult lives should mimic theirs to qualify for success. 

In the age of reinvention, one prominent contributor prevails: the rise of social media. With a multitude of platforms to exchange ideas on, the employed soon joined online communities. Although may not be the initial intention, they began to promote worker ideals that value output rather than wellbeing. Employers viewed this as a golden chance to foster new generations of dedicated human machines and encouraged in accordance. These ideals were inevitably spread to educational settings, further amplified by studyfluencers who admire an extreme “hard way” approach (shown below). Everywhere, the glorification of an unbalanced work-life equates long hours to productivity. Users like me and you have surely scrolled past a misguided post that praises all the “over’s”: overexertion, over-juggling, overcompensating. 

Witnessing the worship of hustle culture, it’s no surprise that young pupils right now are naturally carried into an endless cycle of burnout. We work our youths away under the pretense of guaranteed lifetime gratification.

What is distress and what does it do? 

Exhaustion stems from stress; that much is common sense. Stress is categorised into two terms: eustress is colloquially understood as positive stress and distress is, well, the opposite. You might have experienced the former during a healthy competition, or the latter in an impossible school week of finals and a thousand assignments. For now, the scientific distinction between the two does not matter as much as the detrimental impacts. Chronic stress can manifest into serious disorders and go as far as to be fatal. What does that look like in numbers? In 2018, a study from the UK Mental Health Foundation discovered that in the entirety of those who has confronted distress at any point, i.e. every living being, 32% reported suicidal thoughts and a further three-quarters felt unable to cope. 

Needless to say, damage is not limited to mental wellbeing. The Yerkes-Dodson Law states that “performance improves as arousal rises, but only up to an optimal point” (Nickerson, 2025). Defined by an inverted-U model, the relationship between mental arousal and productivity reaches a turning point once it crosses into a specific level of pressure; a line that is so poorly-defined, so frequently ignored, that people trample on it — unaware of the potential they compromise in the long run. 

Looking at grind culture as a whole, some will still commend how society has benefited from its constant push. That is not wrong, but they fail to account for the human losses along the way, the losses which could have been prevented just by liberating oneself from outdated ideals. Believing that one person can do the labour of ten is a ruinous mindset which has induced many regrets. Learning your optimum point and maintaining it is crucial — and perhaps the best method — to realistically survive.

References

Mental Health Foundation. “Stress: statistics.” Mental Health Foundation, May 2018, https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/statistics/stress-statistics.

Nickerson, Charlotte. “Yerkes-Dodson Law of Arousal and Performance.” Simply Psychology, 14 August 2025, https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law.html.

Wolfe, Michael. “Why do people quit their jobs at dream companies like Facebook or Google.” 6 July 2015, https://fortune.com/2015/07/06/why-do-people-quit-their-jobs-at-dream-companies-like-facebook-or-google/.