What are the psychological effects of 996 culture?

There is a particular glamour to relentless work. For a while it looks like discipline, like courage, like the purest proof that a founder belongs in the arena. In some corners of tech, this glamour gathers around the 996 rhythm, where people work from nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week. From the outside, such commitment can appear efficient and even heroic. From the inside, it quietly rewires the way a leader thinks, chooses, and relates to others. The real story of 996 is psychological. It is a slow remodeling of identity, attention, honesty, and connection. Once those foundations shift, companies do not simply get tired. They get confused.

The first change happens in identity. Under a 996 regime, the role of founder or operator becomes less a craft and more a number. Hours start to stand in for worth. Pride attaches to endurance. Rest acquires a flavor of failure. The problem is not only personal. Teams read the leader’s identity before they read any plan. When a leader compresses a whole life into a keyboard, people begin to believe that exhaustion is a requirement rather than a signal. Some will try to imitate it. Others will disengage while continuing to appear loyal. Presence stays high while performance drops. That mismatch tricks leaders into doubling down on time rather than reexamining design. What feels like strength is often only a louder version of strain.

The second change occurs in attention. Long hours narrow it. With less recovery, the mind gets pulled toward the loudest, closest fire. Strategy turns into a queue of emergencies. Leaders make quick decisions that feel decisive but often raise burn and reduce optionality. The effect is cumulative. Each tired decision erodes the ability to perceive second order consequences, which in turn produces more fires. In that cycle, force begins to replace curiosity. Teams add features to solve anxiety rather than to solve real user needs. Hiring speeds up without becoming smarter. Calendars fill, but conviction thins out. It is possible to be very busy while losing the central thread of the product and the company. 996 makes that possibility likely.

Honesty is the next casualty. Fatigue creates a distorted optimism that leads to overpromising. Leaders commit to dates they cannot defend. They reassure partners while staring at backlogs that cannot obey the calendar. Once promises slip, trust becomes expensive. People start managing the leader rather than the work. They withhold unsettling truths because the leader looks breakable. They offer comfort rather than clarity because comfort is safer to deliver. In that atmosphere, the organization becomes a performance. The company’s outer story keeps moving while the inner story fragments. Few startup risks are more dangerous than losing the capacity to tell the truth calmly inside the team.

Emotions do not disappear in a 996 culture. They go underground and reappear as fuel. Irritation becomes a management tool because it can produce a quick burst of compliance. In the short term, frustration looks like focus. Over time, it erodes psychological safety. People learn to minimize risk in conversations with leadership. They show only what seems finished. They avoid experiments that might fail in public. When curiosity collapses, the small compounding advantages that make young companies powerful begin to vanish. A team that cannot surface new information faster than the competition gives up the only moat that does not cost money.

Loneliness grows in such conditions. The moving finish line of a startup makes it easy to postpone rest and relationships. Leaders tell themselves that they will reconnect after the next release or the next milestone. The finish line continues to move. Friends become appointments that get rescheduled. Family becomes a set of promises to be honored later. Work expands to fill every mental corridor. Inside that narrowing life, perspective shrinks. Without perspective, every bug feels existential. Every investor call becomes a referendum on identity. Anxiety bleeds into one to ones. It bleeds into product choices that should be made with quiet math and not with adrenaline. When connection shrinks, problems that require cooperation start to look like threats that require control.

It is tempting to explain 996 as a cultural artifact that belongs elsewhere and to imagine that importing it into places like Southeast Asia or the Gulf requires only enthusiasm and food delivery. What gets missed in that view is the infrastructure that actually makes long hours survivable. Real infrastructure is not a gym in the basement. It is a culture where people can speak up without fear. It is a cadence that uses the calendar like an instrument rather than a punishment. It is a hiring philosophy that protects capacity. It is a leadership rhythm that models recovery with the same seriousness as it models review. Without such scaffolding, 996 becomes a costume for pain. It makes a loud badge and quiet results.

Why does this pattern remain so attractive even when leaders know the cost. Because it offers a simple equation. More hours appear to equal more progress. In the earliest weeks of a product, that correlation can look real. The prototype emerges. The demo wins a meeting. Adrenaline pays out. Then the curve bends. The marginal hour stops generating marginal clarity. Leaders keep paying the same price for less outcome. The nervous system does not like this news. It prefers the old equation because the old equation feels like action, and action feels like safety. This is the juncture where psychology must replace mythology. Leaders require a new story that their bodies can believe, or else the old story will quietly take the wheel.

Reframing begins with an honest audit of what hours are buying. Most teams discover a calendar filled with meetings that exist because a process is not trusted yet. They also discover that their best people are doing their best thinking after the day is supposed to be over. An essay is not the place to itemize a complete operating system. Still, a few principles travel well between contexts. Build rules that you can obey on a bad week, not a perfect week. Choose a finish time that founders keep. Treat heroic hours as a rotation with consent and payback time that is guarded as fiercely as deadlines. Give the team a language for energy so that people can report it without sounding weak. Teach managers to defend tradeoffs rather than rewarding martyrdom. Put rest on the budget rather than elevating it as a private luxury.

None of this is glamorous. The glamour was the problem. The most durable companies are not built on spectacle. They are built on rhythms that keep the whole unit thinking clearly together for a long time. A practical example helps. Replace two standing meetings whose main purpose is visibility with written updates that include an escalation path. Then pick one day a week where the leadership team must leave on time. No exceptions. The first move returns attention to what matters. The second move teaches the nervous system a different truth about safety. Both small moves echo outward. People notice. Culture is mostly the story that people tell about what leaders do when it is costly to do it.

There is a hard conversation to have with the founder who believes that an unusually high tolerance for pain is the moat. Pain tolerance can be an asset in a crisis. It is not a business model. The moat is the team’s ability to engage problems with clarity and patience for a long time. The moat is a reputation for being hard on problems and soft on people. The moat is the calm with which a company tells the truth when something breaks, and the speed with which it repairs without blaming. A 996 identity attacks each of those moats. It makes leaders loud inside and messy outside. It makes help look like threat. It swaps design for endurance and calls the trade maturity.

Regional leaders recognize the extra temptation to copy a mythology from another ecosystem and to imagine that copying the suffering is the same as copying the result. It is not. Results follow from design. Design follows from attention. Attention follows from energy. Energy follows from rhythm. A founder who wants durability chooses rhythm on purpose. That choice does not look dramatic on social media. It does not provide the adrenaline that a second midnight sprint can provide. What it provides is compounding. Clarity compounds. Trust compounds. The quality of decision making compounds. Over time, the market notices.

For the leader who is deep inside the grind and who reads all this as a luxury that belongs to people with bigger teams and longer runways, there is an accessible doorway. Do not attempt a revolution by Monday. Choose one boundary that you can keep this week. End one thing cleanly. Honor one finish time. Offer one honest sentence about your energy at your next standup. These are not soft gestures. They are proofs. They teach your own nervous system that safety can come from design and not only from force. They also teach your team that the culture belongs to everyone and not just to the loudest fear in the room.

The psychological effects of 996 culture are subtle at the beginning and obvious at the end. They turn a craft into a countdown. They transform strategy into a sequence of emergencies. They make truth expensive inside a growing company. They isolate leaders from the perspective they need most. None of these outcomes are inevitable. They are the product of choices that can be unmade and of stories that can be rewritten. Leadership, at its best, is the steady practice of rewriting those stories in public. It is the discipline to end the day when ending the day serves the work. It is the humility to design a culture that people can survive, not only admire. When a leader chooses that path, the company stops looking like a performance and starts feeling like a place where people can do the best work of their lives for longer than a season. That is not softness. That is stewardship.