What (not) to do when the wheels come off…
So a couple of weeks ago here, we talked about winter coping strategies and how I was feeling motivated, ready to hunker down and raring to smash lockdown 2. It was going really well for a while. And then, just as I was feeling I’d finally got this 2020 thing sussed, the wheels spectacularly fell off last weekend.
For no good reason except probably my annual bout of S.A.D., I stopped sleeping. I started to feel disconnected from everything. And then the black dog of full-on depression bit me harder than it has in years. And next thing I know I’m sitting in front of a camera, in a studio two hours from home, with a massive list of videos to film for a course I’m creating… and I’m just completely blank. I’d ignored the warning signs. I kept on going at a hundred miles an hour and then the wheels just fell off.
I’ve been battling it hard for the last few days: upping the vitamin D, the light therapy, the morning exercise, abstaining from alcohol, taking some magic sleep potions… really doing everything I can to reboot my brain back to normal. It feels like it’s working — slowly — but the last week has been a massive smack in the face. A reminder that good mental health isn’t automatic, or to ever be taken for granted.
Now, this might be a kind of confirmation bias, but it has also felt like everyone else I spoke to last week was in the middle of a massive struggle too: A lot of people are struggling with their mental health, there’s overwhelm about Christmas planning, relationship dramas, work overload, illness, exhaustion.
So if you feel a bit like you’ve been on overdrive for too long, and now you’re limping through to year-end (as I’ve been feeling this last week), then this is for you.
Many years ago, I was going through some crazy imposter syndrome that nearly resulted in me cancelling the release of what ironically became my biggest selling book (even more ironically, the book which contained a whole chapter about how your brain will sabotage your best work and best intentions). My coach at the time, Rasheed Ogunlaru let me get my venting out as we sat having coffee in Victoria Station and then just calmly looked at me and said “Graham, you’re the productivity guy. THIS is your material”. And he was right. If life was so easy, we wouldn’t need books to make sense of stuff. If making stuff happen was so easy for me, I wouldn’t have found a career relating to other peoples’ struggles with it.
When my brain is at full-pelt, I’ve found ways to think about doing that makes doing feel pretty effortless. And that can feel magical and great. It also goes a long way to reducing the voice in my head that says “you need to do more to be more”. But that voice never fully goes away. A lot of us have it. It’s a useful motivator sometimes, but can also be a harsh critic when you have a bad day. It can lead to a cycle of self-criticism where we tell ourselves we’ll need to get up early tomorrow to ‘make up’ for the hours of lost productivity today. Most of productivity ultimately boils down to fear or guilt, after all.
THIS WEEK has been my material (and not just because I have a deadline to say something positive or productive in your inbox). Sometimes that hard thing we’re dealing with is our material for something, we just don’t yet know what. It will show itself as some wise lesson at some point in the future. It’ll be some learning, some inspiration or just something to have experienced — but it can be hard when we’re in the middle of a shitty bit to work out how to use it, or what it’s for.
So I just have a single observation from my tough week.
When we’re struggling but still getting through, we tend to give ourselves the hardest time. But when the wheels fully come off, somehow it’s so much easier to let go of that critical voice. The voice that tells us that to do more is the way to be more. This week I stopped telling myself those things. Not for the first time ever, but for the first time in a long while. And it allowed me to take a step back, be kinder to myself, and make space just for me just being, rather than trying to fill every space with more relentless doing to make up for a suboptimal few days.
The day after my day of non-filming and wall-hitting, I dragged myself out for a morning run. My first in about a month. It was freezing cold. There was a glimpse of the sun poking through the trees as I ran around the park. The sunlight was nowhere near as spectacular as the red sunset I’d seen a few days before, with my son on the back of our bike — the beautiful sunset that I’d felt completely disconnected from, as I pointed it out to him in some kind of abstract ‘in-theory this is good’ kind of thing, as my depression sucked the joy from its reality.
No. On this day as I looked at this tiny bit of colourless sun, I could see its’ beauty. I realised that whatever I got done today, it would be enough, and that although I might not be fully through this particular shitstorm, I’ve got an umbrella and I’ve got the right clothing for it.
So I write this to you, really as a way to write this to myself.
You’re doing great. No scrap that. You are great, however much or little you’re doing.
It’s been a tough year. For all of us. Give yourself a break. A pit-stop and new wheels might be needed before full speed can be resumed.
Like everything else, this will all pass.
And when it passes, we’ll enjoy seeing those sunsets for what they are.
This article was originally published to my ‘Rev Up for the Week’ e-mail newsletter. If you’d like to receive a little productive or positive thought into your inbox every Sunday evening, sign up here: https://www.grahamallcott.com/sign-up