Striving Harder

“Strive harder” can sound holy, but for many Muslim women it lands like a weight on an already overloaded nervous system. I’m unpacking what striving for the sake of Allah really means, starting from a clearer definition: intentional, disciplined effort to align your heart and behavior with divine guidance, not simply doing more visible acts. When we ignore emotional bandwidth and biological limits, devotion can quietly morph into chronic pressure, hidden burnout, and a constant sense of spiritual failure.

We talk about the invisible emotional labor that keeps families and workplaces functioning: regulating children’s emotions, anticipating a spouse’s moods, preventing conflict, managing the mental load of logistics, remembering everyone’s needs, and acting like emotional climate control. Modern productivity culture rarely counts that as “real work,” so it’s easy to assume it doesn’t count spiritually either. I challenge that assumption and invite you to start counting your unseen labor as part of your striving when it’s done for Allah with sincerity.

We also name the damage of spiritual comparison and internalized ableism: judging yourself against people with different support systems, different responsibilities, and different starting lines. Striving is contextual. It can look like extended worship for one person and like patience, service, healing, or protecting solitude for another. The question I want you to carry forward is simple: is the way you’re striving bringing you closer to Allah or closer to burnout?

If this reframing brings relief, share it with a friend who needs it, subscribe for more tools, and leave a review so more women can find this message.

I invite you to join The Ummi Collective. It is a weekly coaching program for Muslim mothers raising children on the autism spectrum.

Inside, you learn how to support your child’s development in a way that builds independence, confidence, and long-term success... without losing yourself in the process.

Apply for a Commitment Rate today

https://www.islamiclifecoachschool.com/offers/RRn2EBEC/chec

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Kamal Akar.

When Strive Harder Becomes Burnout

The Productivity Trap In Spirituality

Sustainable Striving Over Comparison

Emotional Labor As Real Work

Personalizing Devotion By Capacity

Closing Dua And Farewell

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Inshallah today we're going to be talking about striving for the sake of Allah. In your acts of worship as a Muslim woman or otherwise. Meaning also in the acts of worldly gains. Let's start with defining striving first. Because as always, you have to have some grounds to build on. Striving means using your energy with intention and discipline to move closer to Allah and to live according to the divine guidance. Striving is just not simply doing more religious acts. It's the overall effort to bring your heart and behavior into alignment with righteousness. In Surah An Kibut 29 Ayah 69, it says And those who strive for us, we will surely guide them to our ways, and indeed Allah is with the doers of good. May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala make us of those who strive in his path. So now let's expand it to your life as a Muslim woman and what it means to strive harder and what it has unfortunately culturally become that takes a toll on your mental health. What striving has become is a command to create hidden burnout. While striving harder is done in the name of elevating your spirituality, all of your external acts, but in the lived reality of many women, it becomes a command layered into an already very exhausted narrow system. So for this we have to put things into context, which is you are already doing invisible emotional labor. It is invisible because of patriarchal standards, not because it's unimportant. It is very important. I can safely say that this type of work is the most important that a human being can do. So women are simultaneous caretakers and emotional regulators of entire families and managers of invisible household logistics and absorb everyone else's stress to keep them regulated. So when the message of just strive harder lands on that type of a nervous system which is already working at capacity, it does not produce spiritual elevation. It produces more and more exhaustion. This happens because you're ignoring the biological limits of your nervous system. You are already doing a lot in the name of striving without having it given that name visibly, because your actions are not fitting the traditional definition of striving. So without knowing the biological limits of your nervous system, what is meant to be devotion becomes a slow motion self-destruction. Most religious conversations about striving assume a neutral starting point, a nervous system that is healed and calm. What is being assumed that everyone begins their spiritual journey with the same emotional bandwidth, and this assumption is false. A lot of Muslim women are performing constant emotional labor that goes completely unrecognized. If you are regulating your children's emotions, if you're anticipating your husband's moods to keep him calm, if you're maintaining family relationships, you're managing the mental load of running a household and you're carrying all of these responsibilities without being recognized for them. And I don't mean recognized in regards to validation. I mean recognized as being recognized that this is work that you're actually doing. This is not passivity. You are actively involved in spending energy and time and attention, which takes huge resources on your part as a human being. It is a complex interpersonal regulation that occurs all day long around you. You are striving very hard in preserving harmony of your family. So when spiritual advice ignores this reality, women are judged as spiritually weaker when in fact they're already expending enormous psychological energy simply keeping the ecosystem of their families or their workplaces functioning. And yes, this invisible emotional labor also happens in workplaces, where even in the corporate world women are usually assigned the role of peacekeepers. So this invisible labor that mostly consists of mental tasks, of holding ground during emotional crisis, of anticipating needs, of attuning to everyone, helping everyone else maintain their psychological safety, being the translator between two humans that are not able to understand each other, but you understand what they're saying, and you're carrying that mental load of communication. All of the tasks and the chores that are being done in preventing conflict so that you can anticipate a problem so it doesn't happen. And of course this is gonna count as invisible labor because how are you gonna account for something that didn't transpire? Like a conflict that you were able to prevent. So overall, acting as the emotional climate control is intense labor. And this also includes meal planning, grocery inventories, keeping track of everyone's appointments and their nutritional needs and their preferences, household logistics, coordinating children's lives and drop-offs and pickups and play dates, also being the maintainer of extended family relationships, remembering birthdays, buying their presents, planning parties, understanding and fulfilling everyone's love languages. And I mean I can go on and on and on. Now mind you, I'm only mentioning this mostly as it relates to households, but again, women take this invisible labor on in workplaces as well, where they're working for money and they're also working without money in this capacity because they're carrying the mental load of the extra logistics and not getting paid for it. So this leads me to talk about and recognize the productivity trap in a woman's spirituality. In a world where your worth is measured by productivity and labor, what I just mentioned does not count as productivity. Then everything a woman does doesn't count towards her spirituality, which is a real, real shame. Because a woman is already striving when she's doing all of these things for the sake of Allah. What I'm recommending in this podcast is that you start counting it towards your striving, in which case you might start to notice that you are already striving hard, very, very hard. So if you don't clean these definitions up in your mind and you don't elevate your mindset around this, what happens is if you hear all of your life that you need to strive harder, you're going to interpret it as sacrifice more and more of yourself. In the meanwhile, you're already at the border of a complete nervous breakdown and you're barely holding yourself together. But you want to strive harder because you don't think what you're already doing counts. And this leads to learning a lot of lessons around guilt trap that you have around rest. Because the most damaging psychological pattern that you might carry as a woman is the inherent belief that self-prioritization, any kind of rejuvenation or recovery is selfish. If you rest, to you it will feel like laziness, and if that's the case, you're striving from a male predominant viewpoint of spirituality, which is not inherently wrong or right in its own merit. It just doesn't apply to you. If you don't heal around this level of spirituality, which is very appropriate for women, and that continues to happen long enough, then your nervous system is gonna start associating worship with constant pressure and guilt rather than peace and tranquility, which is what it's supposed to be majority of the time. And this is very, very tragic. This is why I ask you not to strive harder blindly, but to evaluate your life of what you're already doing that is considered hard work. After listening to this podcast, I want you to start counting your acts of invisible labor towards your striving. Up until now you might have judged your spirituality by visible outputs, as in how many pages you have memorized and how extended your prayers have been. But you cannot possibly match this output of worship with someone with much fewer responsibilities than you. And when you can't perform spirituality at that level, and you secretly start to believe that your spirituality is inferior because so much of your striving is going unseen, then striving harder is gonna turn into a rat race for you. Maybe striving for you is the invisible labor of healing yourself, trauma recovery. Continuing on your journey of the Skiathanops, start expanding your definition of striving. You have to start seeing that so much of your daily life already contains countless acts of worship and sacrifice that are immensely spiritually significant. It is okay if they remain culturally invisible. Me, you all of us are working towards making them more visible, but other people's acknowledgements of your striving has nothing to do if you're striving harder or not. And this is very lucky for us because this matter is between you and Allah. Culturally invisible striving, Alhamdulillah still remains striving to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, because the command is to strive. It's not to make your striving look exactly the same as other people or what they approve of. And I especially want you to remember this because there is a structural advantage that some people have that you might not have access to because not everyone has the support system that you personally are creating for the people around you. Not everyone is starting their spiritual race at the same starting line. A lot of people have logistical advantages that allow them to perform the visible acts of prayer more easily. And believe it or not, you are the one who's putting that structure in place that gives them a clean home to return to, a home with a prepared meal, all of the pre-planning that you've done, and all of the forecasting on meeting the needs of everyone. Because you're just so good at anticipating all of the needs that other people have that it creates a scaffolding in place where the rest of them can strive harder while you're striving to put the structure into place that is going completely unnoticed. Their spiritual output might look like that it's more because it's being supported by individuals like you who are performing the invisible labor. So anyone who comes to a home when the home is clean, meals are prepared, children are taken care of, and the environment is right for them to rest and recover their cognitive and emotional functions, then they can pursue extended studies, they can pursue memorization and prolonged worship routines, and no shade if this is what you've chosen, meaning you provide this level of comfort and service to other human beings, but then also don't undermine your spirituality just because it's not being seen as typical worship. So what I'm trying to do is reframe for you what striving means. It is not a fixed formula. It does not mean memorizing pages and pages and leaving the home in search of spiritual education. It does not mean constant nightly worship. It might mean all of that, but it doesn't have to if you cannot accommodate all of that. You are welcome to mean that the extended worship is striving for you if it is available to you, and you already have a structure in place for yourself where you can do it sustainably without burning out. It can also mean remembrance of Allah while doing your daily tasks. The value of striving lies in the sincerity and the sustainability as a form of devotion, and if a type of devotion is destroying your personal well being, then simply stay away from it, because you will lose your religion while trying to keep up with the Joneses. Again, a big biological truth that the main spiritual discourse overlooks is that an overwhelmed nervous system goes through burnout in the name of striving just because it cannot access higher and higher states of constant reflection and presence. Because a woman who's taking care of others, a business, family, pets, this state of dedication might not simply be available to you without the brain shifting into survival mode. And then on top of this, associated with all of this is a false heroism of exhaustion. Because if you consider your spirituality as the same as being exhausted all of the time, your striving is going to become very self punitive, and it's going to take you further away from Allah rather than closer to Him. Allow yourself the striving that you are already doing and also allow yourself the devotion that replenishes you, the one that makes you grounded and peaceful and more connected to others and Allah, the striving that takes you towards tranquility and peace, and out of chronic stress. Best striving is the one that's sustainable, even though when it's going through cycles of exertion and sustainable practices and it respects the realities of your life, your circumstances, your emotional capacity and your responsibilities. So one way you can start to ask the question is rather than if am I striving enough? Ask yourself is the way I'm currently striving bringing me closer to Allah or bringing me closer to burnout? Because if you've learned anything here, it is that striving is contextual. It is aligning with your devotion to a life that you're given instead of replicating somebody else's routine. Since human beings are not living with identical operating systems and they're not running on same programs, striving must exist inside your reality of your personal life. Emotional labor being one of the most misunderstood forms of human work is real neurological effort. It involves regulating your own emotions while simultaneously stabilizing everyone else's. It involves remembering interpersonal details, managing conflict, constantly processing complex social information. The effort required to maintain groundedness under these conditions is rarely recognized as striving. Yet it is one of the most demanding forms of striving that exists. Modern societies measure value through economic productivity. If an activity produces goods, generates money, increases measurable output, those are all considered labor. If it maintains relationships, nurtures emotions, protects psychological health, all of that is dismissed as just part of life. And this bias is what creates a dangerous illusion. Illusion that emotional labor is not real work. In reality, emotional labor is what allows productive systems to function at all. A person who is emotionally supported and feels relationally secure is far more capable of performing visible achievements. Emotional labor is the infrastructure beneath productivity. When this infrastructure collapses, everything built on top begins to fall also. The danger of invisibility of this labor leads to internalized ableism by Muslim women and spiritual comparison. What that means is when you compare your striving to people that have more structural advantages than you, you are internalizing a form of spiritual ableism. You assume that if you cannot match someone else's level of output, it means that you are less disciplined or less sincere in your faith. And this is such a poisonous belief system that women carry, and it is far more common than you think. I happen to believe that thought for the longest time, and this comparison creates a belief system that punishes you for having limits. It assumes that everyone should perform devotion with the same capacity regardless of their emotional or relational burdens. True spiritual insight recognizes that effort must be measured relative to a person's context, not against some universal abstract ideal. Which is why both solitude and serving in community are different forms of striving. Different nervous systems require different environments for restoration. For some women, striving may involve seeking community so they can share emotional burdens and feel supported. For others, striving may mean protecting solitude because their daily lives are saturated with social demands. Neither approach is superior. Both are strategies for maintaining equilibrium for your nervous system in a way that supports you being able to strive in the path of Allah. Internalized ableism is when you don't believe your efforts to be efforts and you want to perform at a higher level that you think others are able to perform at. I want you to become the radical validator of your striving as a woman. When you are performing an immense emotional labor, you are already striving. You're striving through patience, through restraint, through leadership, through caregiving, through maintaining stability, because otherwise all of those environments would easily become overwhelming if it wasn't for your labor. And when someone with fewer of these responsibilities lectures you about striving harder, they may unknowingly be overlooking the enormous effort that you're already exerting. The value of striving is not determined by how visible it is or how easily it can be measured. The value of striving lies in the effort of your heart, the discipline of your mind, and the sincerity of your action. This is the definition that we started with. So then start asking, what form of striving allows my heart to remain steady? What allows it to remain anchored and connected while honoring the responsibilities that I already carry? Your nervous system capacity determines the shape of your striving. Your mind and your body will let you know what your striving looks like, and your job is to continue to optimize it. InshaAllah we all have the bandwidth to do more and more, and inshaAllah you have the physical energy and the logistical support to wake up for Kayamul every night, to attend classes regularly, to memorize large portions of Quran. And if that is the case, Alhamdulillah, and it is most likely that your life already contains structures and systems in place that support this rhythm. When your nervous system is well supported, it becomes easier to perform the forms of striving that otherwise are widely recognized and celebrated. But this capacity is not universal. Your striving may not look like long nights of uninterrupted prayer. It may look like maintaining kindness with colleagues when sheer exhaustion would make irritation much easier. So your striving must be personalized. Allow your striving to evolve. As your life changes, as your responsibilities shift, as your capacities grow, as you put in systems and structures in place to support your striving, continue to create and evolve through different forms of worship that may expand. And through all of that, the command of striving still applies to you. The call to strive remains central to spiritual life. Growth requires effort, no doubt about that, but it must be directed wisely. It should challenge you without breaking you. When striving is aligned with your capacity, it produces upliftment, and you feel closer to Allah, and every sincere effort is fully recognized by Allah. With that I pray to Allah, Ya Allah, you know the effort in my heart and the labor that no one else might see. Accept my every moment that I strive towards you, whether it's in prayer or patience, service or solitude, give me wisdom to strive in ways that bring me closer to you without harming my body and mind. Protect me from comparison and burnout. Let my striving be sincere and sustainable, and make every hidden act done for your sake heavy on my scale on the day of judgment. Amin Yar Bulal Amin. Please keep me in your draas, I will talk to you guys next time.