Sometimes what keeps you crispy also burns you out. I think about this a lot whenever I’m going through yet another newsletter or chasing another YouTube video for insights, when I’m looking for something that will help me finally get something together – be it my creative process or my ideas or sense of disorganization – and spend far more energy entertaining possible solutions than just doing something. Or, you know, resting.
For a while, I couldn’t escape the Instagram pushes for ultraproductivity. The calls for starting your day at 4am. The hand-slapping for not having the financial house in order. The workouts with all kinds of resistance band variations. It felt like I was constantly behind the ball while the person telling me what to do – often at a desk and with headphones – had all the answers. After a while, I started to realize these up-and-coming productivity experts were disciples, which begat more disciples, which beget an entire, trickle-down industry of diminishing returns. Every Starbucks I went into had one of these people. They were always on the phone. They were advising people to quit their jobs and purse their passion. And you just knew that person was going to, in fact, quit their job, buy a set of Air Pods, and set up shop in another Starbucks location. It would only be a matter of time before the head ate the tail.
Once I saw the vicious cycle of it all, I found it easier to let go. I stopped checking the emails. I went inward, reminding myself of all I had accomplished instead of all I had yet to accomplish. I recognized rest needed to truly be rest, and that playing video games or watching a movie or zoning out on Twitter did not mean I was wasting time. I was, instead, giving my body exactly what it needed.
The other thing about avoiding burnout is you gotta unplug. There is a very real thing called vampire energy. If your appliances and electronics aren’t plugged turned on or charging, they can still be drawing energy as long as they’re plugged into a wall outlet. Sometimes we think we’ve actually unplugged – we’ve put our phone on a counter face down, we’ve turned off the TV – but it’s still plugged into the system that wears you out, and it still finds a way to utterly exhaust you. It’s like a subscription service offering a free trial – they just want you to plug in your credit card, hoping you’ll forget to cancel as they bill you a little bit of money each month. The goal is for it to seem a small enough cost you don’t do the work to cancel. But it still adds up over time.
I still feel the pangs of not doing enough. I still wonder if I’m letting things pass me by. But it isn’t met with a deep dive into the tail-eating world of hyperproductivity. Instead, I look for ways to simplify my life further. To say ‘No’. To declutter. To eliminate down to the essence.
