💆♂️ Doing What Feels Right
Listening to Your Body Can Sometimes Be More Important than The Data
The past week I was sick, which is something I can’t say happens very often to me.
Sure, “it’s going around,” “there’s something in the air,” and “everyone has it,” but I usually don’t count myself among those who gets sick.
Newsletter Summary:
The things I did while taking my longest newsletter hiatus in two years
How that applies to you
💆♂️ Doing What Feels Right
The reason I missed the past two newsletters isn’t because of writers block.
It’s not because I had nothing to write about or because there was no health news out.
No, contrary to what you might think, it was because I didn’t feel up to it.
When it comes to exercising, I’ve often taken a different stance.
I always advocate for doing some sort of exercise even when you’re not fully feeling like moving.
But last week, the culmination of finishing my Hyrox race in Vegas (more to come on that in a future newsletter), catching a vicious cold, and being inundated with client work kept me away from a few of my personal projects.
For what it’s worth, I also skipped out on some exercise to let my body recover.
But I say all that to say this — there will be times where it makes sense to do what feels right, and in this case, resting felt right.
From everything.
And I wasn’t letting my smart watch, Strava, or any other fitness metrics/data guilt me into overworking myself.
I do have newsletters that are still waiting in the drafts, unfinished, that will go out later this week.
But the time to fire them off wasn’t right.
I knew I needed to get back to it, though, because multiple readers (thanks to everyone who reached out asking where I was!) we’re asking what happened to high-performance health.
But I feel good after taking that time to listen to my instinct.
I think we too often guilt ourselves for thinking we have to do something that feels important, when there’s no deadline, no pressure outside of the kind we put on ourselves, and no real incentive.
Of course, resting and relaxing has its limits, and shouldn’t be leaned on too heavily.
But I hope my candid admission that I took a “lazy break” from writing inspired you just as much as my relentless consistency in publishing three times a week for the past two years has (where my longtime subscribers at?)
How I Think This Applies To You
This was me just days before completely crashing.
I don’t think exerting myself 110% and then flying a six-hour flight home to a full work day the next day was good for my immune system either.
But there’s something here other than just taking the occasional break/backing off from the hard stuff.
I also think that you can’t be afraid to pivot when things get a little messy.
When we develop a firm routine, it becomes so ingrained that missing a day or two of that routine becomes catastrophic.
I know the Type A readers feel me there.
Even those of us who aren’t incredibly regimented get discombobulated when routine starts to crumble.
And when that crumbling crumbles to a far enough level, we stop completely.
We give up because that one (or two) failure(s) makes quitting altogether feel easier than pivoting.
I can’t quite explain why that is because i’m not a neuroscientist, but I think as humans we should become more adept at pivoting.
Giving ourselves grace for missing out and adjusting on the fly.
Our ancestors were so adaptable, it’s the reason we’re alive.
Now it feels like the comfort-mode we’re constantly operating in makes people want to do anything but adapt.
If you can become adept at adapting, you will not let little slip ups become massive depressive episodes.
If you adeptly adapt, you’ll have more empathy for people who change course and question them less.
And if you get good enough at pivoting, no expectation or curveball in life will be so insurmountable that you’ll have nowhere to go.
I’d challenge you to look at the current systems you have in place right now.*
(*If you don’t have any, that’s probably not wise.)
Could anything break them?
What if they broke?
How hard would things get for you?
Or maybe a better question would be:
How well could you manage the difficulty that would ensue from that break in the system?
Adapt. Adeptly.
See you tomorrow.