What was that you said about “work-life balance”? (Progress report for September 22, 2019)

Total words written today: 0 (but I won’t stay at zero). Manuscript total: 121,884. About 80,000 words to go.

I’m often caught between the sentiments, “I waste too much time doing stupid things” and “Everyone needs some down-time.” I’m a firm believer in self-care, but I also believe that there are times in life when you have to push yourself beyond what’s normally considered reasonable if you really expect to accomplish amazing things. “Reasonable” and “Amazing” are not the same.

The overachiever vs. self-care

I don’t compromise sleep. That’s the one piece of self-care I won’t budge on, because once my sleep goes, everything else falls like dominoes — first my physical health goes, then my mental health goes, then performance in all arenas.

But lately, I’ve been treating all other forms of self-care as optional, which I think is why “I waste too much time doing stupid things.” Examples of self-care things I normally do that I haven’t been doing lately:

• Exercise — I’ve gone from 5-6x / week to 2x / week
• Meditating — I’ve gone from 5-7x / week to 0x / week
• Cooking — I’ve gone from one big (healthy) cooking event per week to “Tortilla chips for dinner sounds amazing. Or wait — maybe I should eat PB&J instead.”

The thing is, and the reason why I need to get back to proper self-care, is that if I don’t tick off the boxes of good, healthy habits, then I end up “self-medicating” with habits that aren’t so healthy — I spend an hour playing video games, I binge watch things I’m not interested in on Netflix, I spend way more time scrolling through Apple News than I actually want to.

I think I give up self-care because I buy into the myth of “I don’t have time,” because, hey, I have a novel I need to finish, student work I need to grade, my own homework I need to do, classes to go attend, teenagers to teach. Who’s got time to meditate when all that is going on?

But it’s like I used to tell my meditation students, when teaching meditation was still a thing I did…

“If you have time to meditate, try fifteen or twenty minutes. If you don’t have time, you should meditate at least an hour.”

I think my task this week will be to follow my own advice when it comes to balancing the demands of a busy life.

To use an analogy: When people eat junk food, they often do not provide the body with the nutrients it craves, and so our brain sends the signal that we are still hungry — which, of course, just leads to more junk food. Likewise, when we don’t take care of mental/emotional health and feed ourselves only “junk care” — like an hour wasted on video games, then we feel dissatisfied and often reach for even more “junk care.” Then that becomes a habit and we feel guilty about all that wasted time that we could’ve spent doing something that made ourselves or others better.

Anyway, it’s hard.

Balancing a master’s program, student teaching, novel writing, and a personal life is hard. I need to remember to give myself credit for just how hard it is. But at the same time, I need to put in some more effort into taking care of myself and cultivating the kinds of self-care habits that make me the type of person I most want to be.

To paraphrase William James, all we are is the summation of our habits.

My goal for the upcoming week is to get up (even) earlier, moving my out-of-bed time from 5:15am-ish to 4am. That should give enough time to exercise and still write. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What about you — what do your habits say about you?