Why your big ambitions lead to your horrible sleep

There I am again, lying in bed with my laptop on my stomach, watching a Veritasium video on YouTube.

(If you’re not in the know, Veritasium is this science YouTube channel where this guy Derek explains interesting concepts in 20-40 minute long videos.)

As an engineer and a scientist (and social media/youtube addict when I was younger), his videos always connected with me (because I’m a nerd, if that wasn’t obvious)

They gave me a good combination of an interesting topic that made me feel like I was learning something,

While at the same time being able to distract me from the things I was avoiding in my life through good visual graphics and stories

You might call it educational brainrot

I don’t want to be unfair to him, his channel is great.

When engaged in a healthy way, it definitely isn’t “brainrot”

The issue here is that while I did enjoy the science nature off his videos, I wasn’t really engaging with them, I was just numbing

Lying with my neck cranked at a weird angle,

Watching a video on a science topic that, while interesting, probably wasn’t interesting enough to be keeping me up at 2am in the morning with a bright screen 8 inches from my eyes,

Especially when I had responsibilities in the morning and told myself I was going to be getting up at 5:30AM for the 700th time in a row…

(I would, in fact, not wake up at 5:30AM the next day),

This is not the image of peak performance, to say the least,

Especially when watching that video inevitably ended up with me clicking on other videos in the YouTube suggestions once my brain was officially fried enough to not even pretend to focus on an interesting topic.

That quickly spiraled into some video on fitness and some health gurus hot take whatever the new fad was,

Maybe why eating raw beef is good idea to consume (I’m not a doctor but sounds like a fucking dumb idea to me)

Or new ways of doing the bench press (there are very few ways you can actually do a bench press, but apparently several million ways you can talk about it in a short video as if they’re new)

Which inevitably led to some ridiculous videos on telling pick up lines to girls in public

This appears to have been replaced in the modern day with the era of the pubic influencer interviewer who asks ragebait questions to unsuspecting (and unfortunate) drunk patrons of the local dive

So now it’s like 3AM and not only am I tired and my eyes hurt, but I’m annoyed as shit now too,

Because it’s basically impossible to engage with this kind of content and not feel annoyed.

Want to know why?

It’s designed to annoy you.

The point of content online is to evoke emotion in order to engage you, and because most of the content people watch has no substance to genuinely interest you… they must rely solely on instigating your emotions.

So…

How the fuck am I supposed to get good sleep now that I am in this frustrated and exhausted state of being early in the morning?

And that’s when it hits me –

“Oh fuck, I still haven’t ____.”

And I can fill in that blank with a handful of different answers

A work assignment.

Paid my taxes.

Followed up with that important person.

Heard back from that girl.

Studied for my test.

Etc.

I’m sure you get it.

Because this wasn’t a random, spontaneous event.

This was a pattern.

A pattern that had existed in my life for probably over a decade at this point.

The reason I was on this bullshit binge on YouTube was because I was numbing and avoiding.

Sometimes it was something I hadn’t completed.

Sometimes it was a big intense emotion associated with a fear or worry I had.

Sometimes, honestly, it was a smaller but ever present emotion constantly there under the surface of my mind…

That of feeling behind or discontent with my direction in life or lack of clarity over things.

Two clear examples stick out in my mind here, first on the feeling of anxiety, anticipation, and fraudulence and the second of fear and embarrassment.

In the first example I remember a night vividly where I tossed and turned thinking about an upcoming meeting I had.

I set it up.

It was over an opportunity I was pursuing.

I had an idea and I wanted to speak to someone I looked up to a lot, so I reached out and set up time with him.

And that night it hit me,

“Holy shit, I’m not ready for this.”

“I don’t have enough work done yet.”

He even liked the idea on the surface and responded back positively, telling me he might have some resources I could use right away.

But I wasn’t ready for that.

Did I accidentally make it seem like I was further ahead than I actually was?

Will he actually like this idea?

Or is he going to think it’s dumb and turn me down?

If he does like it, am I even capable of doing this?

“He’s going to find out I’m a fucking fraud and never want to talk to me again”

“Jesus, I’m blowing it.”

The anxiety of burning this relationship was, if I’m being honest, less crippling in that moment than the thought of feeling like someone who I deemed successful was going to realize.

“Ah, Flint is all image and talk. Not who he said he was.”

Every time I closed my eyes to try to get to sleep, I just laid there with my mind racing.

And then I would think,

“Wow, there’s no chance I’m going to get to sleep like this. I should do something to relax my mind.”

Oh, you mean, like get your phone out again and put a bright LED screen 12 inches from your face?

Great idea.

Nothing like trying to calm yourself like stimulating your nervous system with bright lights and scrolling annoying bullshit.

No chance I slept well that night.

Because the anticipation of starting something cool and new that I might not be able to handle and the anxiety of feeling like I would be found out as a fraud led me straight back to consumptive behaviors and away from genuine rest.

The second example was before a different type of meeting.

A meeting to check in on work progress that I was supposed to have already completed…

That I…

Well…

I hadn’t completed.

Once again the thoughts came up and the sleep evaded me:

“What am I even doing here? I’m clearly not the worker they (or I) thought I was.”

“I can’t believe I’m this behind. What have I been doing?”

In this example, I remember even actually having made some progress.

It wasn’t like I was going to show up completely empty handed.

But it wasn’t done.

And it wasn’t done perfectly.

And how could I ever live with myself looking that boss in the eyes and seeing his disappointment that I didn’t follow through.

I clearly was not the type of person I made myself out to be.

The hard working, trustworthy man that I thought of myself as.

It was going to be so embarrassing having to face that reality.

I’m sure you’ve seen your mind spiral through similar thoughts, whether or not they are based in reality at all

(They usually aren’t. Even when they are based on real events, the spiral tends to lead toward completely irrational thoughts and beliefs about ourselves or our situations.)

I have plenty more stories like this, but I want to dive deep on a specific subject here to avoid being too broad

The reason I scrolled YouTube and social media and ended up with short, horrible sleep, was because of my inability to separate from the emotions and actions of the day.

Yes, at this time, I also didn’t have sufficient routines, focus, a good ability to prioritize effectively, I allowed too much noise into my life, overcommitted myself, and ended up spread thin and inconsistent.

These are real and important issues that I was facing as well.

They are obstacles I talk about in lots of my content, so I want to aim my attention to a slightly different place right now.

The reality is that we will never act perfectly.

I don’t think there has been a day where I rested my head and thought:

“Yes, down to every dotted i and every crossed t, that day was 100%, absolutely, unquestionably, undeniably PERFECT.”

I’ve had plenty and plenty of days that were remarkable, don’t get me wrong.

But there is no such thing as perfect, and therefore I cannot achieve it on any given day.

And, if we’re being honest, most days end up falling far short of this bar.

Don’t lie to me about this if you’re resisting it in your head.

How many days do you end with your to-do list unfinished?

Or, maybe you got the to-do’s that you wrote down done, but there are still dozens (or hundreds) of other things you’d like to have gotten done today, or done by this point in your life.

I’m not saying this to try to point to you or I being a failure for not achieving everything we want in life by a certain age or during a certain day.

All I’m saying is that by-and-large, we must rest our heads every single day with the realization that we have not yet gotten done or achieved everything we want.

And that realization is only amplified by how ambitious you are as a person.

For example, for me, my journey with this company iAlign is to support 1 BILLION people EVERYDAY.

I’m well on my way, but let’s just say I’m orders of magnitude away from that goal.

So even if I made progress, I haven’t hit that goal.

It will always be in the back of my mind.

And that’s not a bad thing.

Unless it eats at me, like the emotions I talked about in those earlier stories.

If I constantly let anxiety or disappointment or fear or insecurity lead me toward consumptive behaviors and shitty sleep…

I’ll scroll my phone for the rest of my life and never consistently get good rest.

That’s just the reality.

Because these emotions will continue to show up for me throughout my life, whether the reality of my situations justifies them or not.

I don’t have control over my emotions.

Sometimes I am going to feel like I could have done better or am disappointed or embarrassed by a response.

Sometimes I’m going to have remarkable success and then walk into a new room with more “successful” people and feel insecure, even if I consciously don’t compare myself against them and their versions of success.

It just proves my point:

If you are an ambitious person then every day for the rest of your life you will have to go to sleep without having accomplished everything you wanted in life.

And that’s okay.

However, if this is true, we need to make sure that we are capable of handling this inevitability.

Because even if I become the absolute best version of myself with regard to my routines, focus, prioritization, efficiency, consistency, etc. (all those cognitive obstacles I was working on that I mentioned before)…

I am still just one man with 24 hours to spend each day.

As much as I would like to build a multi-billion dollar human-centered and positive company tomorrow, it’s going to take time.

It’s going to be uncomfortable sometimes.

It’s going to give me anxiety and anticipation and the occasional feeling like a fraud.

So at the same time as I work on those cognitive areas of my life, I also have to work on the emotional ones.

Because that’s what led to me scrolling my phone each night and making my sleep (and life) worse:

I was unable to handle the emotions associated with not acting perfectly in the way that I wanted.

But since we’ve already established that it is impossible for any day to end perfectly, that means that I was failing to support myself emotionally every single day as well.

And that would lead into me trying to numb or avoid those emotions.

Which led to tangible negative results:

Scrolling, eye strain, late nights and mornings, poor sleep, low energy, brain fog, etc.

And what do those lead to?

Intangible, emotional negative results:

Self doubt, fear, anxiety, sadness, embarrassment, – all that juicy stuff.

This means that any comprehensive personal development methodology must pay attention to the emotional side of the equation.

The more I build, the more responsibilities I will have.

The more people I will hire.

The more lives I will impact.

The stronger these emotions will have the capacity to become.

Meaning as I grow with my capacity to work smarter and harder and be less distracted and prioritize better and all that,

I will actually be increasing the potential and consistency for strong emotions to occur.

And if I can’t handle those, then they will inevitably lead to restless nights filled with consumptive behaviors.

So if you resonate with this.

If you have big goals and a lot of potential.

But you find yourself falling into consumptive behaviors,

Part of the reason is likely because you don’t have the requisite competency and tools for alleviating emotions enough to destress and give yourself genuine rest.

One element of this is legitimately just structure.

If you are just going straight from high-stress work into other areas of your life, you’re working against your mind.

The way that I personally started to handle this was by simply paying attention to the emotional side of my life.

I started identifying what emotions were showing up, not so I could remove them, but so I could find out why they were there and how I could handle them better in the future.

In that first example, I realized that when I was feeling anxiety associated with a new, upcoming event that I might not be prepared for, it was actually anticipation.

It was a form of excitement that manifested for me as a similar sensation to anxiety.

It still gave me the lightness in my chest and the racing of my mind.

And there are many ways that I worked through this, but one of them is just a series of simple reminders, honestly:

• Just because I haven’t finished my goal yet, doesn’t mean I can’t make progress on it.

• Even if someone else thinks I’m less impressive than I’d like them to think of me, doesn’t mean that that’s true and certainly doesn’t prevent me from doing great things in my life.

• If my idea or new opportunity were to fail, it would be an opportunity to grow and learn from and do better next time, and so a failure, if I’m genuinely trying, would actually be a positive thing, even if it didn’t feel great.

• The feeling of anxiety associated with a new opportunity or risk is actually part of my value of adventure. There are no good, real adventures where you don’t feel some level of anticipation, right? Otherwise there is no risk at all. So the more often I feel this, the more I can KNOW that I am aligning with my value of adventure!

Or the second one:

• Even if I truly didn’t get my work done. Even in the worst, worst case scenario where I didn’t do my work and I got fired and laughed at and humiliated… Could I still get better, and find and do work and support myself? Yeah of course. That would hurt a lot, don’t get me wrong, but I could do it.

• If I didn’t get enough done and it was embarrassing and demonstrated in this moment that my follow through isn’t where I would like it to be… is it a life sentence for me to have poor, lazy character? No of course not, I can change my behavior and act better next time. Even if this were a consistent pattern, it doesn’t mean that I am forever labeled a lazy person. It just means that I have had some lazy actions in my past, and those can change.

These reframes are methods that I personally used to alleviate the emotions associated with those events.

I also used other practices like breathing exercises, coaching, therapy, exercise, all sorts of things, to specifically target where these emotions were preventing me from resting.

Because if I want to pursue my large goals, and I know that large goals come with the potential for strong emotions, then I must be able to handle those strong emotions.

If I don’t I am quite literally teeing myself up for failure.

I’m saying,

“Alright Flint, I’m going to commit you to a responsibility with potentially serious and large consequences…. But I’m not going to give you any method of coping with the emotions that might show up. Good luck!”

Which, when looked at objectively, sounds like a horrible and stupid plan.

If you’re best friend was going into a big interview and had a ton of anxiety would you say

“That sucks. Maybe you should try scrolling through those short, angry dating tiktoks and go watch the news on the most recent war and famine, that always helps you relax and feel better, right?”

Hopefully not.

You’d probably point them toward a rational view of the situation, maybe positively support them with validation or a compliment, and advise them to “Take a deep breath, you’re going to do great. Just do your best!”

So why wouldn’t you support yourself the same way?

Long story short, if you find yourself consuming things (food, social media, porn, etc.) instead of doing positive, healthy things (sleep, focus, relaxing, etc.), you likely aren’t giving yourself space to handle certain intense emotions that are showing up.

And if you have big goals that you want to achieve, like me, then it’s a good idea to pay attention to those emotions and to build your competency and toolbox to be able to alleviate, move through, and separate from those strong emotions, so that you can still engage in life in a healthy way, even when they are present.