Sick in Bed and Still Feeling Behind

My New Year’s kiss a couple years ago was with a bottle of NyQuil.

What’s up?

My name is Flint Mitchell from iAlign.

I went from a life of stagnation, procrastination, and overthinking to a life of clear, consistent, decisive action and freedom

The reason I bring up this story is because ambitious engineers like yourself have a tendency to feel like you should continue to be doing everything in the world when you are sick

In that moment, it was the beginning of Januaryand I was extremely sick.

Which was disappointing because it was New Year’s and I wanted to go celebrate with my friends

I remember being sick, incapacitated on my bed, but my mind still told me that I should be being productive.

Which is crazy because it’s a combination of it being New Year’s Day and me being sick, and my mind was still saying, “

You’re behind.

Don’t rest.

Go do things.” Stay busy

And then because I didn’t have energy to do anything, where does my mind go next?

It starts saying, “God,I can’t believe I’m this lazy. This is why I’m behind. if I stayed productive like other people, I wouldn’t be this behind.

I wouldn’t feel this way going into the new year.”

So because I didn’t have the energy to keep working, let alone it being effectively a holiday My mind started to attack myself when I was down.

And it is a massive trap, especially for ambitious people, because in the moments where we are low and we need our internal state to support us for our minds to be our best advocate they instead become our greatest saboteur

So just answer this simple question for me.

Do you feel like you have a tendency to try to continue to push yourself even when your body and your mind are clearly fatigued?

Do you continue to try to be productive even if you know you’re not going to be productive when you are exhausted?

This mindset is what led me to periods of weeks or months of extremely high cortisol and extremely high stress, not just when I was sick, but also when I was in anxious periods or stress periods when I was actually behind And I was having insomnia and I couldn’t sleep.

In those moments when I was extremely fatigued or extremely tired because of whatever thing, whether it was being sick or stress or anxiety or negative emotions or a combination of the two, the holiday stress, whatever it was, regardless of what it was, when my mind’s response to this was to tear me down, it did nothing for me but increase the amount of time that I actually spent in those states of being.

In fact, it made them worse

Like the sheer magnitude of the amount of cortisol that I personally pumped into my system by not being my own best supporter It’s, it’s, it’s horrible, but it’s, it’s true and it’s remarkable.

Simply because I, one, wouldn’t decompress, and two, because I would attack myself for thinking that I needed to decompress or for eventually trying to put some effort in but not being able to.

Why?

Because I was fucking exhausted

It’s funny because we think of resilience as our ability to will ourselves through difficult moments.

But the reality is resilience is more so our capacity to prepare for the low moments so that when they happen, we have a greater level of resilience, right?

A greater level of preparation, which is our to handle that experience.

There’s also the ability to will yourself through certain moments.

But you only have so much of that will, if you’re at a zero, you might will yourself to keep taking action.

But are are you going to will yourself into your best action, like your most productive, your most effective action?

Probably not

With that, let’s look at exactly where we are right now.

It is September.

We’re about to go into the holidays.

What happens during the holidays?

We have more stress.

Why?

For plenty of reasons.

We feel lonely or awkward at the Halloween party because our costume wasn’t very good, or the person we wanted to be there wasn’t there Or we’re at Thanksgiving and and family stress is coming up.

Or Christmas is coming around, and there’s the financial stress of gifts or just the financial stress in general.

Your bonus wasn’t as big as you wanted it to be.

Or the end of the year stress of having to face the reality that you didn’t achieve many of the goals that you set out for yourself or to the standard of the work that you wanted or you didn’t get the promotion.

All these things are about to come into play, and they’re predictable stressors.

So the baseline level of noise or chaos in our emotional world for the next couple months is just a little bit higher, if not significantly higher

Meaning that it will take some amount of the preparation that we just normally have away from us because the amount of preparation we’ll do will offset some of this new stress, but not all of it.

And therefore anything spontaneous that stacks on top of it will add to the stress stack.

And if we aren’t prepared for it, then the balance will shift into the stresses favor, and we will not be as resilient as we would like.

And what happens then?

We aren’t prepared, and so we end up exhausted, fatigued because we didn’t take our health seriously.

We end up distracted and scrolling and avoidant because we didn’t take our mental health seriously.

We end up isolated and mean sometimes because we’re frustrated and we didn’t take our social health seriously or our boundaries seriously or our standards of the people around us seriously.

And at the end of all of it, what we really end up with is wasted time.

Because what happens is we lose ourselves, or at least I would lose myself, for example, in that moment.

I would lose weeks or months of my time because I wouldn’t allow myself the sufficient amount of decompression and preparation to handle the inevitable stressors of the holidays and of the end of the year in addition to just the normal stressors of life.

And so I would get overwhelmed and then I would become less effective and then maybe I would get sick or something else would come up on top and then I would become exhausted and then I wouldn’t support myself.

Instead I would attack myself and I’d feel worse about myself and in that state it’s basically impossible to be your best self.

It’s impossible to be as productive or effective as you would like to be

And then we get distracted, and we start avoiding, and we start scrolling or watching YouTube late into the night.

And then our health routines are gone, and then everything basically just pauses or worse, maybe blows up against us in that we don’t get our work done and we are seen as less competent.

But it isn’t because we’re less competent, It’s because we didn’t have sufficient preparation and also sufficient capacity to speak positively to ourself in the moments where we most need it

But time keeps passing, right?

The holidays end, and then January 4th or 5th or whenever you go back to work, it takes two full weeks just to figure out where the fuck you were.

Once all the stress passes, because it does, because everything passes, eventually your energy comes back, and then You’re just left with this chaotic mind or whiteboard or or priority list or to-do list that has 7,000 things crossing every which way, and you have no fucking clue what to do.

By the time you know it, it’s the end of January before you’re even being productive again.

Because at the start of November or the start of October, we started to fall off track andour ability to do the things that we want to do just started dropping rapidly over the course of October, November, December.

We lose months of our genuine best work output and also months of our joy.

Because in this stressed state, even when we have the positive moments, you probably know this experience where you go to a family event and you’re surrounded by loved ones, and it is wonderful and positive, but under the surface, you feel stressed,

That’s what this is.

It’s that underlying layer of effectively chronic stress that arises and stays there for months on end because we don’t allow ourselves to decompress truly or to prepare ourselves for those moments or to speak positively and kindly to ourselves when we are in that moment.

When I finally allowed myself to just say, “Flint, you’re exhausted. You’re stressed. You’re anxious. You’re tired. You need to stop, and you need to take care of yourself.” Only in that moment did I allow myself to be like, “Okay, yeah, I gotta take a moment.” And it might have taken a day or two or sometimes three to really regulate myself and get back on track.

But to get back to baseline that fast or even a little bit slower, but then to keep operating is so much better in my perspective than to just explode and blink and just lose weeks or months of your life.

Especially when that losing of that time is spent just stagnating, watching stupid movies or TV or scrolling TikTok or Instagram or looking at your exes on Instagram or watching YouTube videos you don’t care about, binging bullshit, becoming frustrated because your eyes are strained

Like I get it.

Maybe you don’t even get it as bad as I do.

Like I have had some pretty low moments because of this deficit that I used to have

And the thesis here, the point, is that your lowest moments are the ones where your own voice decides the outcome Right?

All these external factors may come into play, But the sole factor, the sole thing that you have control over that will decide how you continue to act, whether it’s in a way that makes you proud or in a way that does not

Is the voice in your head and whether it is compassionate or not

But if that is precisely the moment that you choose to turn on yourself like I used to do

Because you call it having standards for yourself, holding yourself accountable The issue is you’re using shame-based accountability.

You are shaming yourself into action.

But when you’re at a low, shaming yourself to try harder

Will eventually lead you further off track and further into compulsive or avoidant behaviors.

It might work for 15 minutes or an hour or 90 minutes, and you might think that that’s proof that it’s a good way of going about accountability.

But in the long run, it will shame you so far down into a hole that that 90 minutes turns into 60, and the next time it’s 30, and then all of a sudden your mind is so stressed and so chaotic and so noisy that for some reason every seven seconds you keep picking up your phone.

And you can’t stop yourself, and you’re watching yourself basically from a third person watching yourself do it.

You keep distracting yourself, and your mind becomes so frazzled.

That is the place where shame-based accountability leads you

And by the time the real pressure arrives in December When the Q4 deadlines are showing up And you have to come to terms with the actual revenue of your business or the actual progress that you made on that project or that product or that service

But you can’t even stomach to look at it because

You’re already halfway drowning underwater, being pushed down under the surface by a hand, and you know whose hand that is?

It’s yours.

You’re pushing yourself underwater and you enter a predictably stressful period of time, the holidays, with nothing left to give.

And what happens?

You break.

There’s nothing wrong with you for that.

It’s not a character flaw.

It’s not an incompetency.

It’s just a lack of preparation and a lack of the correct form of accountability.

And the moment that I learned how to do that, the moment that when I was in the lows, the voices in my head were loving to me and were like, ” Flint, you got this. And if you’re too tired, if you don’t, it’s okay. We’ll figure out another way to do this, but you need to take care of yourself.” The moment that my voices started shifting to that, anything became possible because I didn’t have to avoid not only the external stressors going on in my life, but the internal voices in my head as well.

Because If you have to avoid everything, There’s just gonna be no choice but to go to avoidant behaviors like scrolling your phone.

So if you find yourself scrolling your phone, that is the moment where you think, ” Oh, I must be stressed.” Not, “God, I can’t believe I did it again

Anyways, I’m Flint Mitchell from iAlign.

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Peace.