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Oh, hi. Are you having a very Chinese year?
In January 2026, around the time of the Lunar New Year, a lot of people were. The phrase soared, dragon-like, across Instagram, X, and Twitter. Essentially it meant you were either really into the disruptive, propulsive Year of the Firehorse energy (meanwhile, 2025’s animal was the very chill wood snake) or enthusiastic about Lunar New Year Traditions: ritual cleaning to banish bad luck, giving red envelopes with money, and fireworks.
Personally, I’ve always loved envelopes with money (red is great. So is any other color. DM me for my home address), and if I were picking and choosing, my “very Chinese year” would also include a lot of dumplings. What it would NOT include are the numbers 9-9-6 anywhere near my work life.
For those of you to whom this number is new: 9-9-6 is shorthand for the Chinese work schedule in which employees are expected to toil from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., 6 days a week, Monday through Saturday. It’s becoming not just trendy, but standard in Silicon Valley and startup culture as companies seek to win the AI arms race.
As dire as this sort of Chinese Year might sound, having a very Japanese work year might be even tougher. Somehow, the same people who brought us Zen Buddhism also invented the term karoshi—burnout-induced death from overwork. All I’ll say is that new words are invented only after we’ve witnessed enough instances of a phenomenon to need them.
And yet, there’s plenty of research out there that proves working this way is actually the enemy of invention. Caitlin Collins, an organizational psychologist and program strategy director at Betterworks, says that…
“Research consistently shows that extreme schedules don’t fuel productivity. They erode it. Sustained overwork leads to burnout, cognitive failure and disengagement, which undermine creativity and focus.”
A British study from 2019 also proved that employees who work more than 11-hour days are 67% more likely to have a heart attack. The last number I'll leave you with is 54: the hours per week you'd have to work to put you at an officially heightened risk of dying from karoshi. In the grand scheme of overwork, 54 doesn't sound that extreme—just 14 hours more than a standard week. That's the terrifying part.
This specific intensity level of work might be having a mainstream resurgence, but for a lot of people from Hong Kong to Wall Street, it never really went away. People have been on the edge of burnout, suffering through too-long days, and clocking into jobs they hate because their lives depend on it.
We can't singlehandedly dismantle the system, but we can change how we move through it. And that's exactly what today's guest, Guy Winch, has spent his career helping people do.
I love Guy’s work, and he’s been on Simplify before. When I heard about Mind Over Grind, I thought that nothing could be more relevant to these very strange times we’re experiencing than a book that shepherds people through the absurdity of needing to clock in and produce while there’s war, political unrest, inflation, food uncertainty, freak tornados, ICE snatching people up from sidewalks, and TSA lines that move slower than the queue for Berghain on a Saturday night.
During the interview, Guy and I talked a lot about stress—it’s the bedrock of all of our work woes. Guy explains:
“Our ability to manage stress is based on a bell curve. When there's too little of it, we don't do that well in terms of our performance because the stakes aren't very high. And then there's this Goldilocks zone of stress management where the stress is just enough to keep us fully attentive and bring all our capacities to the fore. That's when we do our best work. Beyond that, when stress goes up and up and accumulates beyond that, is when we start to mismanage stress, when we start to self-sabotage, and when we start to unconsciously make the stress worse.”
This is something Guy knows about, viscerally. In the new book, he shares very candidly about his own workhorse tendencies and the methods he’s employed to keep himself (and his clients) in kinder pastures. It’s brimming with neuroscience, a non-annoying number of case studies, and the kind of heart, wit, and humility you’d expect from a seasoned therapist with a writer’s sensibility.
This episode will help you identify your Goldilocks zone and spend more time in it. You’ll also get my favorite thing: a practical tool for facing an extreme workload without crashing out. We discuss burnout and the slow, deliberate, identity-shifting work that it actually takes to recover from it. Finally, we round out the conversation by talking about why Netflix and doomscrolling might not be helping you feel more rested, and what you can do instead.
No matter what you do for work—even (especially?!) if you love your job or you are your own boss—you will find a piece of Guy’s wisdom that you can take and use today. It’s first aid for those of you in a 9-9-6 job and preventative medicine for anybody who works.
Please listen and share with your high-achieving entrepreneur friends, and remind yourself not to let the Firehorse carry you away in 2026.
Love and dumplings to all,
Caitlin
P.S. Please share with a friend you think will enjoy this episode. It’s the best way you can help Simplify stick around! Also, let me know what you thought by replying here or writing to me and Ben at [email protected].
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