december 8, 2020
I have written so many versions of this essay that encompass many different aspects - defining burnout, how to effectively adjust my time so that I am actually happy and not placing certain expectations on myself, how to balance discipline and intuition without sliding into complacency. What all these thoughts go in and around is trying to justify to myself what I need - which is something between a real break and just having more realistic expectations for myself
I feel like I need to justify this choice to myself because I'm afraid of becoming complacent with this nice job that pays a lot and living at home and not feeding myself, while wanting to do more. I never want to become the person who wants to achieve something and sits there wanting it, without putting in the hard work - and I am afraid primarily because I have been this person. I constantly see all the things I want that I can't do. Obviously, I want to do way more things than 24 hours a day allows, but my expectations do not adjust for the fact that to do things well, you can only pick a few to do.
This unrealistic want to do more has also ground up against the fact that I'm pretty exhausted, making even baseline function difficult. The past year and a half has been brutal emotionally and physical health wise. I've never adjusted my expectations even though I've done all the research that anxiety and bad gut health and bad sleep health make just existing taxing.
This has led to a constant cycle of disappointment, where I'm struggling to function at baseline but my expectations are that I should be performing at peak. The last 9 months have been a vicious cycle of setting unrealistic expectations, exhausting myself physically more, disappointing myself, and adding to the emotional exhaustion.
The metaphor that has helped me wrap my head around this:
Say you run a marathon at 10 min mile
But you just ran a huge sprint session
Just because you normally run a marathon at a 10 min mile doesn't mean you can keep that pace after the sprint session. A full recovery is necessary.
And in reflecting, I've really just tried to keep running the marathon at a continually slower pace - going from 10 min to 11 min to 12 min pace - instead of just stopping and allowing a full recovery.
So I've decided to try to take life in more time boxed experiments that are a few months long, to really let things settle and pick up their own momentum, and turn into habits before judging the outcomes. My previous pattern has been closer to sitting in this weekly or daily indecision around - should I rest or should I work or do side projects today? - and letting myself get exhausted by not knowing what is the most valuable use. 2-3 months feels like a time box that gives a pattern a real chance, without waiting endlessly for some magical feeling/outcome.
My first experiment is just to stop and make recovery my top priority - figuring out how to improve my sleep and adjust my eating to new physical demands. From there, in the new year, we'll figure out how to balance work, other explorations, and how to adjust intuition to longer term wants, goals, and energy - and that's not just about professional goals but things that make life valuable to me. I just need to trust that as long as I'm continually re-evaluating and actually changing my actions and habits against that evaluation that I'm not at risk of true complacency. I still feel guilty about needing this "break". I hate what I've conditioned myself to feel.
To reply you need to sign in.