Work, Rest, Play, Pray
Work is not merely our employment or job. We are working when we have a hard workout, we are working when we clean the house or wrangle children, we are working when we do therapy, personal development, and have “spirited” conversations with our partners.
Work is when we need to be on. When your sympathetic nervous system is on. When you need to be more focused. When you are competing. When you go. Work is providing your body with a task or stimulus.
The economic system that we have in our place forces you to work, otherwise you won’t be able to cover your basic needs. It’s rare that I meet someone that is not pushing or working hard most of the time. Given the internet, we are now comparing ourselves to a broader group of individuals and feel that we suck because we’re not zen hyperfit billionaires with perfect families. I’ve yet to find any perfect people or perfect families in real life, outside of my wife.
Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, discusses how we practice working a lot of hours per week. If you’ve read any of BJ Fogg or James Clear’s work, we become what we practice. We are evolving into elite workers. Even those people who do not have traditional markers of success are working constantly. They are always on.
You can practice and adapt to working 80-100 hour weeks, but it will come at a cost. That cost is being tired, and the fancy medical name we have for that is the non-specific diagnosis we over utilize, fatigue. Overworked people use other terms like burn out, stressed out, exhausted, and just plain tired. I know a lot of people that are tired and it makes sense given they always work. If you run on a treadmill for a long time, you get tired. The right answer when you get exhausted on a treadmill is to get off and rest so that your legs don’t give out and you fall on your face. What I’m seeing now is people are cumulatively pushing to a point of exhaustion. When you get to this point your body will shut down and more or less force you to stop.
Because we don’t want to stop working we abuse stimulants like caffeine, nicotine, stimulant ADHD medications, and over the counter stimulants just to get a little boost of energy to keep going. America loves to work and that’s why Starbucks is worth a lot of money. Because we can’t stop working, we use aids like alcohol, marijuana, melatonin, ambien or other sedatives to turn off. All of these medications, pills and drugs are just band aids for a dysfunctional system.
Planning is a part of work, but if you spend all of your time planning or thinking about something nothing gets done. Action needs to be a larger percent of your total time working because this is what drives outcomes. Reflecting is the final part of work, so that you become more efficient the next time you do your work. If you follow the plan, do, review cycle you generally get this thing called progress in your life.
We need to work. Discomfort and stress are not always bad. But chronic, unrelenting stress is damaging. Our inability to look at the global context of our situation and identify that work is not only time we are clocked in limits our ability to see that some of us never turn off. If you’re laying in bed with thoughts racing through your head while trying to fall asleep, you probably are working all the time and trying to work when you sleep.
The analogy I give to exercisers is you don’t go to the gym and bench 7 days in a row at max intensity. If you max bench 7 days in a row, you’ll likely injure yourself. So why are we living our lives in a similar manner to max effort bench 7 days in a row? Don’t spend too much of your time planning a perfect workout, conversation, talk with your spouse, or life plan. Just go out and do it. Spend some time in reflection, but not so much time that you’re just living in the past. After a workout you need to recover and recovery is called rest. This will be discussed in the next article. Human beings were meant to work, but if you want to be more effective in your life you need to recover and rest.
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