There's a particular kind of bad day a lot of high performers know well: the one where you don't do the work, but you also don't rest. You tidy the house, you doom scroll, you tell yourself tomorrow will be different — and underneath it all sits a quiet, persistent shame for "wasting" the day.
In this episode, Aggelos and co-host Manuel Mendez sit down with exactly this scenario — drawn from a real client situation — and trace it back to its roots: not laziness, not a discipline problem, but an overburdened psyche caught between identity, accountability, and a nervous system that's stopped feeling safe enough to switch off.
What makes this conversation land differently is the dual lens. Aggelos brings the clinical frame — shame cycles, identity collapse, the body's role in emotional regulation — while also speaking from his own experience navigating exactly this pattern. The result is less a lecture and more two people thinking out loud about why "just do the work" so rarely works, and what does.
Tune in to hear about:
- The real reason "revenge bedtime" happens, and why it's less about willpower and more about which version of you didn't get a say today
- How to tell the difference between something you "should" do because you're an adult, and something you "should" do because of an identity you're holding onto
- Why taking a real break can feel worse before it feels better — and what's happening underneath that discomfort
- A reframe Aggelos uses with clients to stop emotions from feeling like facts
- The question almost nobody asks about their own self-sabotage — and why it changes everything, once you do
- Two very different definitions of happiness, and how one of them quietly explains why some days feel productive without trying
Full transcript
Aggelos: We are here to talk about productivity and what went wrong with it. I'm Aggelos. I'm a tech guy for the last 18 years and also a therapist and coach, working primarily with tech executives, founders and entrepreneurs on things related to burnout, emotional exhaustion, anxiety, stress. Yeah, that's pretty much about me. Manuel.
Manuel: Thank you for having me. So for those who don't know me, I'm Manuel Mendez. Over the last 10 years I've had an e-commerce agency. I've also worked as a consultant across different companies, mostly on the marketing side, but my biggest passion lies in self-development and the psychological implications of how we grow up — not just as professionals but as humans as well. So that's the connection that me and Aggelos have. I haven't practiced professional coaching myself, but I've used the tools from my journey to help a lot of people outside of my professional scope, and it's one of my passions. So I'm very excited to talk about this.
Aggelos: Manuel, I have a client who basically is a very good guy. And a few days ago he sent me an email and he was basically telling me that he feels very bad with himself because he should be working but he doesn't want to work. Instead he spent his whole day doing other activities — tidying up the house, cutting the grass — and then he was doom-scrolling, and he experiences a lot of shame ultimately for not being productive enough. I will just leave that on the table. This is a very common theme, at least across my clients. I'd love to hear your view on that. Have you encountered it with potentially people that you have coached in the past, or with yourself?
Manuel: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot to be dissected just in that situation. It reminds me of this concept called revenge bedtime. And you'll see — I'm sure you know this — how it is connected. For those who don't know, revenge bedtime is basically: you have an entire work day, the end of the day comes, and you know exactly what you should do. You should wind down, you should go to sleep, you should start getting ready for rest — but you do the opposite. You watch Netflix, you talk to someone until 2am, and then the next day you're like, why did I do that?
The reason it's called revenge bedtime is because we all have different parts within ourselves. It's not just one Aggelos — it's the professional Aggelos, it's the Aggelos that wants to chill, it's the Aggelos in the relationship. We have all these parts, and these parts kind of take over as we need them to. So when it comes to revenge, it's kind of like: I didn't have any fun today, so I'm gonna take revenge and take this entire block. That's almost like the kid part that wants to have fun, that wants to enjoy life, yet we've been doing this work that we don't want to do for the rest of the entire day.
The reason I'm introducing this concept is that what your client shared is a form of revenge towards the work that he needs to do. He's actively procrastinating, but we all want to do the work. If you ask anyone who has that sort of pattern, they will say: no, I actually want to do the work, but when it comes to it, I can't. And there are a lot of reasons for why that might be — usually it's an overburdened psyche. Usually it's that we're bringing this entire weight with us to do something. And I'm not talking about emotional baggage or anything like that — just the thought of work is enough to exhaust us.
And then we just don't have the willpower to actually do the work that we need, which then creates a self-collapsing cycle of: I think of work, I feel exhausted, I don't do the work, I feel ashamed for not doing the work. Shame decreases my self-value. I'm starting to tie my self-value to my output — because what we do every day effectively tells us who we are, right? If I go to the gym every day, then I care about my body. If I don't work every day, but I want to and I should, then I have proof — mentally — to justify the shame, to say I'm a bad person. It actually leads you deeper and deeper into the hole.
Aggelos: You said something very interesting — "to justify the shame." When we say "I have to do the work," we basically imply that I have to incorporate some willpower to force myself to do something. In lots of cases when I speak with clients, when you have to use willpower in order to do something, that rings a little bell. The bell is whether you should do that thing at all.
And then the conversation typically comes into a crossroads. There are things you shouldn't be doing — ultimately because you genuinely don't like them, and for some reason you have enforced them on yourself, because you have an identity of a high achiever, an entrepreneur, someone with a set of things you're supposed to do. But then there's another set of things that you're supposed to do because, at the end of the day, you're an adult. So the separation is not always absolutely clear. And this, in my view, is what makes that exercise a little difficult — when you're trying to understand which part is shame and which part is accountability.
And then the conversation typically goes into doom scrolling, into procrastinating, as you said. The shame of not doing them makes you seek for comfort. Because you're seeking for comfort, you're letting yourself into the impulses and the addictions that we have on an everyday basis, which are mostly concentrated towards screens. So you might be doom scrolling — which is ultimately seeking for a dopamine hit. So you're seeking for a dopamine hit, that justifies in your mind the shame. But this is a pseudo-dilemma in reality. You shouldn't be doing potentially none of the two. What you should be doing is looking for ways to replace these tasks with others that don't give you this internal warfare.
Manuel: I love the fact that you went towards "it's not about brute-forcing it." A lot of people will try to be like: no, I need to do this — versus, well, why am I even doing this in the first place? Are there other healthy alternatives? And what you said about screens is very important — you find things that look comforting at the start, but they're actually just frying your dopamine system.
If I give you a delicious ice cream and then I give you broccoli the next time, you won't enjoy the broccoli. But if you're super hungry and you haven't eaten anything before the broccoli, you'll love it. And we do the same thing with tasks. If we're doing stuff that's hyper-stimulating, how can we expect to even want to do everything else? And then this is where it gets very tricky, because you started seeking comfort because your nervous system at one point was not regulated. That's why you started seeking comfort. And then you get into this, and then the shame just compounds. And before you know it, you have this complex, layered, psychosomatic problem in your hands that you don't even know where it started.
And it's also very important to note the identities you mentioned. This is so important — a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of founders, but also in social settings: when we aren't able to rise up to that identity, there starts to be an identity collapse, and we're trying to stick to it. Real freedom begins when you start letting go of these ideas about who you are, and really just doing the things that you want to do. Not in a childish way — you still have responsibilities. But for most seasoned professionals, there's a reason why that identity strives to be maintained. And then the question is: how can we harmonize between that and living a healthy life?
Aggelos: I was thinking of burnout, and what I wanted to interject is — ultimately, there's a misconception about burnout being the result of overworking. But it's the result of what you're saying: suppressing my wants for a prolonged amount of time and brute-forcing tasks that I don't want to do. That leads directly to burnout, which at the end of the day is not working too many hours — it's working without the necessary trade-off for a prolonged amount of time. That leads to my nervous system crashing at some point, and also reflecting into my body.
Manuel: Our psyche is a validation framework. Our subconscious will always try to validate in reality what we think about ourselves. Because if the subconscious feels like you're someone shameful, it will seek to produce behaviors that will justify to you that you're a shameful person. The more proof that we give to the subconscious that we are this type of person, the more we'll believe it. And going back to what you said about healthy tasks — there's something very special about little tasks repeated every day to prove to your brain that you want to be on this path, that you're competent enough to hold a promise to yourself. Because a lot of the shame cycle is when we break promises to ourselves.
Aggelos: What you mentioned is validated by studies, and I do that with clients too — when someone comes and they feel paralyzed, we always start from small things, literally menial everyday things, which give the feedback that you still have control. Because most of the people that reach out to me, at the very core, this is what they're missing — the feeling of control in their life, control of their emotions.
Lots of people really don't know what they want to do. When we try to break that cycle of shame that causes procrastination, we have to, for a little bit, just stay still. We have to wash out first from that loop. If we don't wash out our brain from that loop — which can be reached by going for a little trip for a few days, with no screens, not doing anything, not having any expectations, literally giving yourself a break with no shame, no judgment — you rediscover what it is that you truly want to do. It feels like you have a little tune playing on a radio, but then you have seven more radios around that prevent you from listening to that tune, your own tune.
Manuel: Absolutely. I especially like the radio part. A lot of people live their lives — you go to school, then your parents tell you what to do, university, then you get into a job. And before you know it, you're just abiding by certain rules. And I think we also live in a society and a generation where people don't really know what they want, because exactly like you said, they never took a break.
But I will say something there that's very interesting. I would argue that the break itself is to feel shame, and to feel all the emotions that you're just bottling in. A lot of people in somatic psychology will talk about just feeling the emotion. And a lot of the reasons why we seek comfort is because we're extremely uncomfortable with certain emotions. We are in this constant cycle of distraction. And the more that we distract ourselves, the less capacity we have to actually contain or feel that emotion.
When people go and hike the Himalayas, or go for a nature retreat for ten days — they come back as different people. Because for the first time in their lives, they had the space to process all of this. And maybe the first three or four days are awful. But by the sixth day they're like, oh, I'm starting to feel better. And then they come back and make completely different decisions — because you've been governed by emotions that you were trying to suppress all this time, and once you actually have space for them, that's where the magic happens. That's where you truly shift.
Aggelos: I haven't found a way to do this acceptance that you mentioned. What I have found a way to do is recognize it, and be aware of it, and look at it, and not necessarily believe it — not believe my emotions. I don't mean that they're necessarily a lie, but they come like echoes from the past — from a past that doesn't exist at the moment.
And ultimately, all this internal battle for productivity is a battle between my natural urges to do something that I consider shameful — which echoes a version of ourselves that we hate, that we learned to hate because of school, because of parents, because of all the things you already mentioned. But this version of ourselves isn't here at the moment — it lives exactly where you point. To your chest. And how I see this is: by recognizing that it lives inside you, every time you feel like that, you can still be like, oh okay, it's him again — it's that boy that feels shame. It's not me now. It's an echo from the past. I don't have to take that at face value.
Manuel: I have a bit of a different perspective, but what I will say is I'm a big believer of what works for each individual. I agree that emotions should not dictate your life. If I don't feel motivated, then I won't work — well, you'll never work, because you'll never feel motivated. So I think that approach — almost this Buddhist, third-person view of the emotion, the emotion is not me, I am feeling sad but I still have control of what I want to do — I think that's very powerful.
And this is very interesting in language — different translations actually have different meanings. In English, we'll say "I am sad." In Portuguese, the direct translation is "I am feeling sad" — which means sadness is outside of me. So a lot of times the way that we use language to describe these things actually describes how we embody these feelings.
What I wanted to touch on — and I'm a big fan of Adlerian psychology: Alfred Adler spoke more about "I am because it serves me in the present." A question that most people don't ask, which I absolutely love, is: how does this serve me? How does feeling shame serve me? And if you're actually very honest with yourself, you might find that you're afraid of success. You're afraid of truly being successful, of what that means. Or, the other way, you're afraid of: if you fail, what does that mean for you?
We have a lot of people who are incredibly gifted, very intellectual people. And guess what very intellectual people are very good at — preventing pain. So how will you prevent pain? You will have the behaviors that allow you to never actually do the thing that you want to do. Even if in your mind you're like, yes, I want to build a fifty-million-dollar company — but you live in a body and a mind that's optimized for living, ensuring that you keep on living. It's going to do the thing that has the least risk. And a lot of these times, the emotions, the behaviors that we do, serve us in very particular, deep ways — but we just never ask that question.
Aggelos: I don't see how the Freudian approach and the Adlerian approach can't coexist here. The Adlerian leans more towards "what can I do about it now" — more towards the CBT or coaching side. But if you truly want, in my opinion, to have more long-term control of these emotions, you have to truly understand where they're coming from. And that doesn't mean you have to talk endlessly about your childhood.
Literally, one of the questions that I love asking in conversations with clients is: this exact thing that you're feeling at the moment — first, what is it whispering to you? What is it motivating you to do? And can you show me exactly where in your body it's placed? So they show me — most of the time they show me here. I'm like, okay, just take a deep breath, and try to remember the earliest time you felt that sensation in your body. And we very quickly go back to a very specific moment. They very quickly realize that they're carrying something from the past. So if we don't dissect that thing from the past to understand it, it's kind of hard to help them in the present.
When you're feeling that emotion, you lean towards "I am sad," not "I feel sadness." Or, even better — there is an emotion of sadness that is telling me to run away, telling me to doom scroll. When we do this separation, something I like doing with clients, which at first confuses a lot of people, is I ask: what is the emotion telling you? What is it motivating you to do? "It is telling me to run, to escape." Okay. And then, what are you debating back to that? "I'm debating that you shouldn't." So that debate is anxiety. This is anxiety — the debate between the one voice, which is you, and the other voice, which is also you.
Now I want you to be a third you, and watch you debating with you. Just watch those two versions of yourself speaking. Who is right? Who is wrong? Let's discuss them a little bit. The only thing that we can control, when it comes to emotions, is not believing these emotions — watching them, observing them. And I don't know about you, but every time I observe my emotions, they just come down.
Manuel: I think the process of observing emotions is also giving space to them. What emotions don't like is being ignored. An emotion that goes ignored just gets louder and louder until it shows. If I push you once — you're like, okay. I push you twice — the anger starts building up. If I push you a hundred times, you're going to burst out. And it's the same thing with emotions — they just burst out if you don't have space for them, and observing is a great way.
What I would add — I'd love to extract yourself to the third perspective and really see both emotions. And also: what do you think each emotion is trying to do for you? The guy that's telling me to doom scroll just wants me to feel comfortable. The guy who's telling me to work just wants to ensure my safety in the future. So they both want the best for you — it's just that they're conflicting on the timing. And then when you realize that emotions are basically signaling that they actually want the best for you — versus, here I feel sad again, I feel sad for feeling sad — you can really just observe it.
Talking about happiness — and I'd love to hear your opinion on this as well. My definition of happiness changed across the years. I guess for a lot of my early life, I thought that being happy was that feeling of joy, really giddy — and I think most people chase that. Especially with the marketing of every single product being "happy, healthy people with a smile." We confuse happiness with soothing. You're not meant to feel joyful all the time.
My definition of happiness — and this is going to sound weird for people who haven't gone through this process — is being empty. And when I mean empty, it's not that feeling of depression-empty — it's that emotions come and go and they don't stick to your body, and you are at peace. And you're able to process emotions without letting them dictate the narrative of your life. And yes, you will feel happy and joyful way more — because if you're not blocking emotions, you're also not blocking happiness. You can't choose to block sadness and let happiness come in. It doesn't work that way. It was Carl Jung who said: the depth of our grief is the same depth of our happiness.
Aggelos: I'll keep it short, because that can be a totally different episode. I agree with you a hundred percent that there's a lot of marketing around the concept of happiness, which ultimately feeds the self-development industry — because we're always chasing a condition, a state that we cannot reach, so we keep feeding the industry. The second misconception about happiness is that we tend to confuse it with soothing. "I want to doom scroll, that's what will make me happy at the moment." No — that will soothe you at the moment. Happiness is not a state, and cannot be achieved as a continuous state — it's a collection of moments.
For example — this is proven, there have been experiments on this — if I give you a five-dollar raise in your salary, you'll be happy. But if you then hear that I got a six-dollar raise, you'll instantly be less happy. So it's a very subjective state. But ultimately it boils down to one critical concept: flow. The more state of flow I'm achieving during my day, the happier I identify as.
A state of flow is when I'm very concentrated on one thing — let's call it one-pointedness. When I'm focused on only one thing, when the time passes by and I didn't even realize it. So the more flow I have in my daily life, the more I identify as happy. So the critical question — as to how, at least in my opinion, we can achieve more productivity — is search for flow, search for one-pointedness. And if certain tasks don't help you reach flow, question yourself: why don't I experience flow with that? Why did I used to experience flow with this, and what happened?
In lots of cases, not experiencing flow with certain activities is an accumulation of negative experiences that landed you in specific perceptions about those experiences. Let's close it here. Thank you very much.