… is never going to be my plan again.
It’s been great to have a break, and re-entry is going pretty well, partly because I’m finally understanding that work/rest is not a zero-sum game. I know, I know (*shakes head*). But I’ve always been the kind of person who hunkers down, gets stubborn and just works harder, just works more, just gets it done. That turns out to be a great strategy for maintaining straight A’s in the midst of family crisis, or driving 800 miles in a stickshift car with one’s injured and bandaged left foot propped on a box, or nerving oneself up for yet another revision of the screenplay…. but it’s not such a great strategy for long-term everyday life.
And so although re-entry requires that I once again embrace concepts like schedule and priority and portion control (sigh), I’m making damn sure that it holds tight as well to go to the park and watch a movie and drink tea in the sun with a book for 20 minutes. In service of this, I have scheduled my workload — wait for it — one project at a time ( I know! Is that an amazing idea, or what?).
I keep trying to learn this lesson. Let’s see how it plays out this time around.
We learned that lesson the hard way. Genetic beriberi is really rare (or at least little understood and rarely tested for), so by the time we got diagnosed, our body was pretty f*cked (first symptoms at age 9, diagnosed at age 31). We had been working 60 hours a week anyway. DID is great like that – if you keep switching who’s front and letting everyone else rest, you can go for years on nothing. Turns out it’s a bad idea, though.
Taking time to breathe is a better choice in the long run.
Good luck with that. I’m still trying to figure out how that works. Oh, it seems possible until you run into one of those months where everything breaks at once and you need another set of fingers to stick in the leaks.
But the effort is worthwhile.
Well, it’s a process rather than a zero-sum game, you know? Some days are better than others. The thing is, we really do get to choose how to spend our time. Sometimes it’s the choice between Working Too Hard or not paying the rent/mortgage. I have spent a long time thinking of that kind of thing as “no choice.” But it is.
I don’t want to stop paying my mortgage :). But I do want to not be so scared of stuff that I think I have no choices.
I agree that everything we do is a choice. All too often (for me anyway), none of the choices are pleasant. But it does matter a great deal knowing I have a choice
A couple of weeks ago I started reading a book I had forgotten I had, it’s called, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Since I suck at time management, I thought it might be just what I needed. : ) In it the authors talk about how energy – not time – is our most precious resource and how to maximize one’s energy. “Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy…. The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not.” Ok, that’s not an earth shattering revelation, but some of the stuff in there is stuff I sorta knew but don’t really live.
They outline 4 principles for becoming fully engaged and building our energy capacity. They spent a lot of years working with athletes and make a lot of correlations there. Here’s Principle 2: “Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.”
Think about how a marathon runner looks compared to a sprinter. Humans function better as sprinters than as marathon runners.
They say that building energy capacity is like building a muscle. Some amount of stress is good, but only when it is followed by recovery time. Just like am athlete builds muscles. The trick is to balance stress and recovery.
The authors say that we need to take a break every 90-120 minutes. They base that on studies of our circadian rhythms and the daytime version of the – ultradian rhythms.
The long term costs of not resting/renewing properly include toxins building up in our bodies that wreak all kinds of havoc — beginning with negative mental symptoms like irritability and leading to physical symptoms like back pain, headaches, heart attacks, and general premature aging. This is nothing to mess around with. Never mind what it does to creativity and intimate connections.
They have case studies showing that people who take a break every 90 to 120 minutes to eat something, drink some water, and take a walk have a 30% increase in energy. I am going to start doing this.
Of course there’s more to maximizing our physical energy/bodies – eating well, exercising, doing what we love, but it’s all important. And it’s so easy to fall into the trap of not getting enough sleep and not taking short breaks as well as long breaks.
And that’s not even talking about mental energy. From the book: to perform at our best we must experience joy, challenge, adventure, and opportunity. Ok, I want to do all of that already. And it will make me more productive!
Anyway. I’ll shut up. I just wanted to say all this because I need to be reminded. We live in a world hostile to rest, and it’s bullshit.
See what you think of these quotes:
“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.” – Margaret Young
“You must be in the mode of joy, or of feeling good, in order to let in the things you’ve been asking for. You must first get happy. You cannot work hard enough to make the things that you want happen – it is only in your attitude of joy that they do.