This is temporary. Keep Walking

was in a weird headspace and feeling lethargic. like being mentally and physically constipated and bloated and overall scattered.

took some time off social media. still checking in every once in a while, but not in a very active manner.


mentally

one mindset I want to remember to hold more: This is temporary

the restlesness, the stress responses, the running on fumes, the anxiety, the deadlines, the emergencies, the anticipation, the urgency, the backlog, the FOMO.

all can be dealt with and “fixed” with doing the next thing I can, to my best ability, and having PATIENCE to keep doing it even if I don’t see the immediate results. // blargh, so abstract. could give a concrete example but somehow doesn’t happen naturally.

I guess it’s necessary to go through all that to get to a place where my sleep is all patched up. to get out of the weird headspace I was in.

the tradeoff is I felt uninspired lately. that firehose of insights was shut off. and it’s actually fine because I have too many backlogs already. but this also means that I am not developing any of them. and there’s that fear of having a rotting blob of ideas. losing momentum. not there for the “wave”. missing the train, or whatever

to think that I’m trading that long term potentials / assets / possibility and instead spend time on my day job (temporarily, I know… just this week, to catch up and pedal to get it back to the stable pace so I can go back to cruising, till the end of this Q2), for this short term, low hanging fruit of a finite game I sort of able to navigate somewhat easily, where it doesn’t seem the gain will scale linearly let alone exponentially as the pain.

like I’m cheating and doing my future self a disservice

opportunity cost. resentment. again

want to give myself that permission to “slack”. to sit through the peak and the trough. to have downtime. to not be productive. to keep whatever I committed to myself, of producing X quantity of Y over Z timeframe. to keep walking through the hell without being overly ambitious about maximising my resources for the long (or even short) term. to really take my foot off the pedal. even for just a week, felt difficult. the guilt

effin Total Work

I know it’s just the ebb and flow. I’ve seen this many times and I have data for it. I will have days where I could churn out 10 hours of really good work, and then the next day, if I really listened to my body, I can barely function. feeling exhausted. it felt like I am taking a loan of my mental and physical bandwidth out of the next couple of days. I can jumpstart it and get a 6.5 out of a 4 day but I know it’s just taking a loan again for the longer timeframe.

so on average, my output will still be 7 / 10. but does this mean I should probably stop at 7? or keep milking the good days and be OK with having a 4-day after a 9-day?

20 mile march?


physically

Feeling fit! The workout felt less intense / “stressed”, close to how I felt before I stopped “seriously” exercising mid Feb

at that point I pretty much just maintained the strength and body comp

now it seems like it takes 3 months to actually “lose” the fitness assets. and it takes 1-2 weeks to substantially regain the strength. not bad

perhaps it is mostly the good amount of sleep I’ve been getting the past 1 week. which I can link directly to when I started exercising again. so it’s a good reinforcing cycle there. was having trouble sleeping, feeling lethargic, anxious

sure correlation isn’t causation but sleep and exercise is pretty close on the physical dimension, so….

and mentally, I am happier because I know I am less sedentary. I wasn’t sleeping well partly because I was worried and unhappy about hairloss, gaining fat, losing muscles, and guilt for not doing any significant exercise (although I have been very mindful about not going over the line to stress my body. to just focus on getting 30 mins of movement, without the HiiT effect. not to focus on doing it as fast or as heavy as I could)

anyway, this made me think that I didn’t actually overtrain back then. and it was really the OMAD and the low bodyfat that triggered the amenorrhea. but it is highly possible I am rationalising here and I am sabotaging the recovery journey…. by 1) exercising 2) inhibiting the weight and fat gain process and 3) being stressed by other factors (Covid, BLM, Total Work / hustle culture)

hair meh. still some falls but I guess less severe. slowly getting back there…. patience…..

I’m trending in the right direction….


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