A Free Afternoon in the Lab, Spent Scrolling

I was in this laboratory in my full regalia, goggles, hood, the full lab coat, booties, double gloves, ’cause we were making this solution called piranha,

Which is a combination of hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid, and when it comes together, it heats up really fast, and you can use it to dissolve all sorts of organic matter.

The reason we would use this in this lab is because it would allow you to clean the surface of of these little silicon devices that we were building.

The technology that we were building that was in these little silicon devices would allow for us to potentially or theoretically detect small pulses of some thing, that was in the middle, in between basically like two electrodes

And I don’t know if I can talk about it or not.

But I’d rather not have a large Swiss bureaucratic, pharmaceutical company sue me

And so I’m in this mode, I’m getting this work done during the morning, and then in the afternoon, it was kind of up to me in order to determine how I would spend my afternoon.

And so I get some lunch, I eat, I come back to the lab, and I’m sitting there.

And I have all this resistance to getting started even though I was given effectively the freedom to spend that afternoon pursuing a personal project because I wanted to drop this little protein into this space to see how it would respond to the technology that we’re building and effectively if we could detect the light that this protein would emit, when it’s placed in this specific place in this, on this silicon device.

And so I have this rad opportunity.

I have this cool laboratory I’m in.

I have equipment to use, to test.

I have opportunity.

I’m young.

I’m curious about all these things.

And I spent that time scrolling the Instagram of an ex-girlfriend.

Actually, I don’t even know if she was an ex.

I think she was a girl in high school that I wanted to date, but I never like did.

And it’s obviously it’s a bit cringey for me to say this out loud.

This was years ago now.

But I vividly remember that memory after lunch where I’m scrolling through some not even ex’s Instagram and it leads to what?

It leads to me scrolling more, pushing back the start time I originally…

Like I was probably gonna start work at 1:00 PM. now it’s 2:00 PM. now it’s 3:00 PM.

Oh, it’s 3:30 PM.

Shoot, people are starting to be like, “Do you wanna go to happy hour after work?”

It’s like, “I don’t know. I feel so shitty about myself right now because I’ve just been scrolling for two and a half or three hours at this point when I should’ve been working when I had all this opportunity.

Yeah, I’ll go to a happy hour.”

And what happened during that period of my life is that this would go on for quite a while.

My lunchtime would rapidly devolve into me avoiding, whether it was through Instagram, whether it was through looking at surfline waves online, whether it was doing whatever it was to avoid the thing I actually should have been doing.

And there were a multitude of reasons why I felt so much resistance in that moment to get started on that project or any of the other projects, one of which was the fear of failure.

I didn’t want to pursue some new cool thing in this group and then fail and be seen as the guy who couldn’t get this thing to work, even if it was scientifically not gonna happen.

And second was I had this tendency to overcommit myself to so many things, consciously and subconsciously.

I would say yes to many things.

I wouldn’t say no to many things, and I would say yes to things that I probably couldn’t even conceivably do in the amount of time that I was expected to do them or I expected myself to do them in.

And then I would end up with a great level of uncertainty over what to actually take the next action on because I had so many things I could do, but not necessarily the right thing.

And so it felt like I had this huge weight on my shoulder of all these things, even though many of these responsibilities were completely optional

And the stress ended up being self-inflicted the problem with this is after weeks of this, you end up at the end of your year, like the end of summer, which is the end of September right now, and you end up in this place where you haven’t actually done that much

Because I had spent so much time not doing the thing I actually was supposed to be doing.

And then that weight on my shoulders would get even more heavy.

I can feel it right now when I’m talking because it would compound.

It would not only be, “Oh, I have so much to do.”

It would be like, “Wow, the end of the year is coming too. I’ll never get all these things done.”

And then what would I do as a response to that?

I would avoid more.

And this vicious loop, if you don’t stop it right now in the end of September, in the beginning of October, can easily get compounded with the stress of the holidays that are upcoming.

And the combination of the end of the year stress and the holiday stress with the weight of all these unfinished projects and tasks and responsibilities on, mounted on top of the fact that you actually avoided and have some shame or guilt over the way you spent your time.

This is the perfect mixture, the perfect concoction that you give yourself that will absolutely blow up the end of your year and result in January 1 requiring you to be a different person, to change your behavior, like your New Year’s resolutions are massive instead of New Year just being the continuation of a wonderful end of the year because you took action on the right things

And I bring up that example that is so visceral for me because it was one of many defining moments in my life where I had to decide, am I going to choose to learn how to handle the uncertainty of my lunches, the uncertainty that comes up from the many commitments or responsibilities I have, especially in a time period of my life where I don’t even have necessarily, contextually speaking, tons and tons of responsibility.

If I’m going to get to the place where I want to be able to lead teams or a company or a family or even myself, it has to start with these little moments.

And right now, at the end of September, is the perfect time to start to learn how to handle that uncertainty and the overcommitting and the overthinking and the scrolling, or the way that you react to those being the avoidant behaviors like the scrolling because the upcoming stresses are fairly predictable.

The holidays are stressful,But those stressors are quite predictable.

And so if we have the opportunity to use predictable stressors as a method of stress testing our capacity to handle certain stimulus, we have the perfect moment for youto collect awareness, to collect data, and then to iterate and practice and change those behaviors during the period of time that will dictate how you feel about this year for the rest of your life.

Because you’ll look back usually on the last couple months of your year and be like, “Oh, wow, that was a good year,” or, “That was a bad year,” based off of how it ended, right?

And also, it’s the perfect time to set yourself up for the next year, where when you enter into the new year, it’s with a feeling of lightness and pride and momentum, as opposed to a feeling that you need to stop and change everything and shed all this weight.

So right now is the perfect time to start to identify your own specific patterns, like that one I talked about of like the, the lunchtime scrolling urge because you feel uncertain about all the things that you should be doing, And by taking control over those behaviors now and changing them and starting to change them throughout the end of this year, you have a greater chance of guaranteeing a more calm, more present, more wonderful end of this year and a greater level of pride and momentum heading into the next one.

Peace.