Grindset Is Back. Here Is What the Latest Research Says
- Grindset did not disappear after the “quiet quitting” backlash. Return to office mandates and the rise of “founder mode” culture in 2024 and 2025 signal it is cycling back, in a new form.
- Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found fewer than 6 in 10 millennials rate their mental wellbeing as good, and over a third report feeling stressed or anxious most or all of the time.
- Gallup’s research puts leader burnout at roughly 25% experiencing it often or always, meaning the people setting the pace for a grindset culture are frequently burning out themselves.
- The alternative is not working less. It is working with deliberate recovery built in, a pattern the research consistently links to better output than sustained overdrive.
Grindset, a relentless drive to work hard, constantly and excessively, once looked like the golden path to success. Then it did not. Then, in 2024 and 2025, some of it quietly came back. Understanding why matters more than picking a side in the debate.
Grindset Never Fully Left. It Cycled Back.
Around 2022 and 2023, hustle culture faced a real and visible backlash. “Quiet quitting,” “lazy girl jobs,” and “bare minimum Mondays” climbed social platforms as young workers pushed back against burnout being treated as a badge of honour. A 2022 Prudential survey found 70% of American workers had prioritised, or were considering prioritising, their personal life over their career, with 20% willing to take a pay cut for better balance.
That backlash was real, but it was not the end of the story. Through 2024 and 2025, return to office mandates spread across major employers, and “founder mode,” a term describing an intensely hands on, always available leadership style, gained real traction in start up and tech circles. Some commentators now describe this as hustle culture 2.0, arriving under new branding rather than actually disappearing. Economic pressure, layoffs, and anxiety about AI displacing roles are widely cited as the reasons people feel compelled to prove their value through visible overwork again, even while burnout rates remain high.
Defining Grindset
Grindset is not simply working hard. It is working constantly. It is a mindset fixated on achieving goals at all costs, marked by an inability to switch off or step back. Never enough, always more, regardless of the toll.
It shows up across culture in familiar ways: the tireless workaholic portrayed as the hero in film and television, “crunch” culture worn as a badge of honour in start ups, hashtags like #hustle and #grind across social platforms, and a long shelf of motivational literature arguing that rest is for the weak. Grant Cardone’s The 10X Rule, Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It!, and similar titles have sold millions of copies on some version of this promise. None of that makes the promise accurate.
What Current Data Actually Shows About the Cost
Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found fewer than 6 in 10 millennials rate their mental wellbeing as good or very good, and over a third report feeling stressed or anxious all or most of the time, with their job frequently cited as the major source. This is not a generational quirk. It is a direct signal about the environment grindset culture creates.
The pattern extends up the org chart. Gallup’s workplace research finds roughly a quarter of leaders report experiencing burnout often or always, and nearly two thirds say they experience it at least sometimes. A leader modelling grindset behaviour is frequently doing so from inside their own burnout, not from a position of sustainable strength, which is exactly how the pattern replicates down through a team.
The paradox holds up under scrutiny too. Extended overwork without sufficient recovery reliably degrades decision making, memory, and creativity, producing a cycle of diminishing returns where more hours worked does not translate into better output. Working constantly is not the same as working effectively, and the research gap between those two things has only become clearer as more recent data has come in.
Common Characteristics of Grindset
Workaholism, perfectionism, chronic stress, and an avoidance of leisure are the clearest hallmarks. A few others worth naming specifically: an inability to switch off, leading to constant checking of messages and normalised late night or weekend work. Depersonalisation, a cynical detachment from colleagues and clients under sustained stress. And, less discussed but real, reliance on substances to turn productivity on and stress off, a pattern that became particularly visible with off label stimulant use in some tech and finance circles.
Who Is Most at Risk
Ambitious professionals in competitive fields like finance, law, or tech, where long hours are normalised. Entrepreneurs and start up founders, who often feel every hour not spent working is a lost opportunity. High achievers and perfectionists, who fear that slowing down equals failure. People under genuine financial pressure, working multiple jobs out of necessity rather than ambition. Anyone in a culture, organisational or societal, that equates busyness with status. And, perhaps counterintuitively, people with a previous burnout history, who can fall back into old patterns without new coping strategies in place.
Balancing Grindset With Kindset
The alternative is not working less for its own sake. Call it Kindset: a deliberate shift toward self-compassion, care for others, and a genuinely multidimensional view of success. Kindset is not soft. It involves fiercely focusing on what actually matters, being purposeful, and practising real self-discipline about recovery, not just about output.
Before your next planning cycle, ask:
- Is our leadership team modelling grindset from a place of genuine strength, or from inside their own burnout?
- Are we quietly rewarding visible overwork, even while our stated values say otherwise?
- Where could deliberate recovery actually be built into the way our teams work, not just talked about?
Grindset promises that more hours equal more success. The data keeps showing the opposite past a certain point. Kindset is not the soft option. It is the one the research actually supports.
Resilient Mindset: What the Research Actually Supports
- Large recent meta-analyses of growth mindset interventions find weak average effects (d = 0.09 to 0.14), a real check on the idea that believing you can improve is, by itself, enough to change outcomes.
- Twin studies suggest some traits linked to mindset, including pessimism and anxiety, carry a meaningful genetic component, which is a reason to build skills deliberately rather than rely on willpower alone.
- In Singapore, 40% of workers report facing constant stress and over a third sit at high mental health risk, according to a 2024 to 2025 workplace mental health barometer, making practical resilience skills a workplace necessity, not a self-help extra.
- A resilient mindset is best understood as a practised skill set, not a belief you adopt. Resilience Institute’s own Bounce, Grow, Connect, Flow model and the Zip Explosion, Breathe Out, Review, Act sequence give that skill set a concrete, repeatable structure.
A resilient mindset sounds like something you could simply decide to have. Read enough about it and the temptation is to treat it like a switch: flip it, and setbacks stop landing so hard. The research does not support that shortcut, and it is worth being honest about why, because the honest version is actually more useful than the inspirational one.
What a Resilient Mindset Actually Means
Start with mindset itself. Carol Dweck’s fixed mindset holds that ability is set in stone: “I am simply not built for this, so there is no point trying.” Her growth mindset, building on Martin Seligman’s earlier work on learned optimism, holds that ability develops with effort and the right support. The evidence on which belief leads to a more fulfilling life favours the growth position.
But beliefs are not fully a matter of choice. Twin studies suggest that traits such as pessimism, anxiety, and risk aversion carry a meaningful genetic component. That does not mean mindset is fixed for life. It means awareness and deliberate practice matter more than willpower, because you are working with real inherited tendencies, not a blank slate.
Resilience itself is a separate question from mindset, and it is worth defining on its own terms. Our research at Resilience Institute treats resilience as a learnable, integrated set of skills built around four movements: bounce, grow, connect, and flow. A person takes on a hard task, absorbs the inevitable setback, and learns to bounce forward quickly. Through repeated bounces, they grow physical, emotional, and mental capacity. Those skills connect within a team or a specific challenge, and when they align well enough, the person reaches flow. That is a resilient mind in practice, not a mindset someone announces.
The Research Has Gotten More Rigorous, and More Humbling
Growth mindset became one of the most cited ideas in organisational psychology, and it has also become one of the most scrutinised. A 2025 structured review covering more than 51,000 students found an average effect of d = 0.09 for growth mindset interventions on achievement, rising to d = 0.14 for the highest fidelity programmes. Earlier large meta-analyses reached similarly modest numbers. The honest reading of this evidence is not that growth mindset is wrong. It is that simply telling people their abilities can grow, without pairing that message with structured practice, produces a small effect at best.
This matters directly for how organisations should approach resilience training. A one-hour talk on believing in yourself is closer to the weak end of that evidence. A programme that pairs the belief with repeated, coached practice, the kind built into the bounce, grow, connect, flow model, is a different intervention entirely, and it is the one the research on skill-building, rather than belief-messaging, actually supports.
Check Your Own Beliefs
Before building a skill, it helps to notice the beliefs already running underneath your reactions at work. Read each pair and notice which one you lean toward by default.
- “There is no point trying to improve at this” versus “I can learn to do this with the right effort and support”
- “Setbacks mean I have failed” versus “Setbacks are information I can act on”
- “People are generally out for themselves” versus “People generally respond well to being trusted”
- “I should handle pressure alone” versus “Asking for support is a competence, not a weakness”
None of these is universally correct in every situation. A flexible, resilient mind is not the one that picks a fixed answer and defends it. It is the one that can hold both options and choose deliberately based on what the moment actually needs.
The Real Debate: Protect People, or Challenge Them?
This is where most organisational resilience conversations get stuck. One camp argues people need protection from adversity: psychological safety first, pressure minimised, support unconditional. The other argues adversity is the mechanism of growth itself, citing evidence that serious hardship can produce genuine post-traumatic growth and stronger community bonds, not just damage.
Pushed to an extreme, either position causes real harm. Over-protection can leave people frail, anxious, and unpractised at handling real pressure when it inevitably arrives. Over-challenge without support can leave people isolated, exploited, and burned out. The useful question is not which camp is right. It is when safety should be the priority and when challenge, with real accountability, is the better call for this specific person and this specific moment. That judgment is itself a resilience skill, and it improves with practice like any other.
How to Build a Flexible, Resilient Mind
The goal, in a single sentence, is to construct a conscious, deliberate alignment of your physical, emotional, mental, and social resources to engage effectively with whatever situation is actually in front of you.
When pressure hits, the body defaults to fight, flight, or freeze, and none of those states support clear thinking. Resilience Institute’s own sequence for this moment is Zip Explosion, Breathe Out, Review, Act. You catch the reactive impulse before it fires (zip the explosion), physically discharge the activation with a controlled exhale (breathe out), assess the situation with a clearer head (review), and then commit to a deliberate response (act). Elite performance settings use versions of the same principle under different names, but the mechanism is consistent: name the reactive state, create a pause, then choose rather than react.
Singapore’s Own Data Makes This a Workplace Priority
This is not an abstract self-development topic in Singapore. A 2024 to 2025 workplace mental health barometer found 40% of workers here face constant stress, more than a third sit at high mental health risk, and 39% say their mental health is already hurting their productivity, rising to almost half among Gen Z and Millennial employees. The Tripartite Advisory on Mental Well-being at Workplaces, jointly issued by MOM, SNEF, and NTUC, now sets practical expectations for employers on exactly this issue, and the national MINDLINE 1771 helpline launched in 2025 as a direct response to the scale of the problem. A resilient mind is not a nice-to-have skill for a Singapore workforce operating under these numbers. It is closer to basic infrastructure.
Before your next resilience or wellbeing session, ask:
- Are we teaching a belief, or building a repeatable skill people can practise under real pressure?
- Do our people have a concrete sequence to use in the moment, or just a slogan to remember afterward?
- Where in our culture are we over-protecting people, and where are we over-challenging them without support?
A resilient mindset is not something you decide to have. It is something you build, one deliberate pause and one practised response at a time, and the research is now clear enough to say so directly.