We’re nine days from Christmas, and I’m feeling pretty exhausted. Usually, I would start feeling reminiscent about what I had achieved around this time of year. But right now, I honestly don’t really feel like it. It just doesn’t seem very fun to reflect right now. I’ve had an ample share of emotional intensity for the last few months, so adding more doesn’t feel like a fun thing to do
Tag: #rest
Finding the balance between reflection and overthink
The last few weeks I’ve kept my days clearer and my evenings quieter.
Some call this ‘slowing down’, though I find that term a bit confusing – because whilst I am doing less activities, my mental space doesn’t feel particularly less active. If anything, it feels like I think more, rather than less.
It’s been an interesting experience for sure. Having freer evenings has allowed me to lounge around and enjoy spending time alone. When I tried ‘doing less’ in the summer, I ended up getting fidgety and felt quite miserable because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I think I’m having a better crack at it now though.
An invitation to try less hard in your life
This is the first weekend I’ve spent at home in Brussels in over a month.
The last four weekends I’ve been away, on a mix of travels through India and successive trips to the UK.
And you know what? I’m tired. Not because of any overt travel fatigue, but because I’ve felt like life has been a consistent set of new hurdles.
The irony is that the only person who fundamentally has been placing these hurdles is myself.
Having now got through a lot of courses and personal adventures, I’m feeling quite worn out. I’m really glad I did these things, but I’m also conscious at how hard I have been pushing myself. Do I really need to live life as if I don’t have time to breath?
How much have you been overcommitting?
As we head towards the end of 2022, I found myself in a race against time to complete the commitments I had made myself – I wanted to finish a number of things before the end of the month.
But who am I really racing?
I notice that I have a habit of creating smaller commitments for myself that when put together with all the other things I want to do become a gargantuan task. It’s also interesting at how I put a very short deadline.
On the one hand these smaller goals feel more targeted than ones in the distant future. Yet they also give little flexibility – most of these commitments I had made to myself in the last few weeks, essentially giving myself little space to take a break. In hindsight, I gave myself little room for manoeuvre in case life hit.
Going through a period of brain fog
I’ve been feeling quite bogged down in the last few days. I even had a day sick off work. Part of this has been combating what I’d describe as ‘brain fog’. I’m not doing terribly, but I’m also noticing my brain is not working as quickly as it usually does.
I think the particularly scary part of it is the fear of somehow losing our ability. When I’m not as quick at reading a report, I feel like I’ve somehow lost my skill, and so my worth has decreased. I worry that a part of me is gone because I’m not quite as good at doing the things as I used to be.
Your biggest productivity hack? Give yourself a break
If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably just come back into work a bit bleary-eyed after a long weekend with the bank holiday. It’s a nice novelty, considering as a country we have one of the lowest amount of public holidays in the world.
We usually appreciate the feeling of having some time off, so this is a good moment to reflect: what if we could tap into bringing ourselves out of our work routines more often?