Tag: Stress

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Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 215 and Leisure

I’ve got a bad relationship with work. Since I was a teenager I’ve been compulsive about the idea of hard work. I don’t know how I got to have a problem with the Protestant Work Ethic but it seems likely I developed it long before I read Max Weber and found it’s comforting rationalizations about work’s inherent morality.

I’m fascinated by things like commodity aesthetics, the history of consumption, and theories of leisure & status. Partially because I got a kick out of supposing I was a better person than those wretched lazy types. I wasn’t so sophisticated to sneer “rentier” class as kid but I was well on my way to veneration of hard work and productive capital. An economics degree finished the job.

This was compounded by growing up in a family that worshipped the culture of Silicon Valley. The innovation of computers and the people that worked all hours to bring their creativity to the world were the most important people on the planet. They hadn’t quite crossed the cultural rubicon of power that the tech industry has now, but the power of making the future was hard work and heady stuff even before it captured the mainstream. I wanted to change the world like the people my father admired

There was a time when computing and automation raised questions of a new era of leisure. If we could move all of the work we’d previously done manually to automated systems perhaps humans could ascend to The Culture of Ian M Bank’s novels. In a distant future of abundance, sentient AIs run industry and production, so humanity can do, well, whatever it likes.

But we haven’t achieved a post scarcity world. If anything accumulating resources and showing you’ve done it by the rules of the meritocracy makes hard work even more crucial. You’ve got to play and win two games. You’ve got to make the money and show you’ve demonstrated the proper status while doing it. It seems like leisure is losing the battle quite soundly.

I’ve been pushing all year to get back to hard work. I’ve worked hard at my health. I’ve committed myself to biohacking. But really what if the obsession with working myself to the bone is killing me? I’ve been completely relaxed as I prepared for a medical procedure this week. I’ve never felt better. Which forced me to ask myself if maybe I better come to live leisure like the way I have loved work. It might be a much better life for me. The future sentient AIs might approve as well.

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Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 211 and Laughter

I miss being able to enjoy time out in the world. You know that feeling when you’ve spent the last two hours at your favorite bar with your friends just talking about nothing? The ease that you feel being with your community and enjoying being together? The casual camaraderie and easy laughter that comes from no expectations time together has been lost to many of us. I miss it.

It doesn’t seem like those days are coming back for some of us in the near future. If I give too much thought to the impact of things like the pandemic I think I just spike my cortisol. That’s a stress hormone. The stress of reactivity is killing all of us. Constant panic over floods, heatwaves, outbreaks and all their downstream effects is overwhelming our capacity to live. And yes, granted a more globalized war with a changing climate is capable of killing us. But we don’t have to let futility do us in early. We can find our way into solutions. But only if we stay alive to do it.

I’ve been coping with apocalyptic nihilism by shitposting on Twitter. Yes I realize this is a popular upper class pundit class past time. I’ve got some self awareness. But it’s also the only thing that mimics being out socializing with your friends. And I think that’s worth a lot. Shitposting is good for the soul.

You don’t have to shitpost, but if you cannot find a way to lower your stress response, as we say in crypto, ngmi. Everything may be going to hell but you aren’t there yet. You’ve got a life to live, people to love and who love you, and a chance to be happy.

Fuck cortisol. It’s not good for you. That’s some metabolic poisoning eating away at you and you chose to let it kill you. There is no reason to give yourself unnecessary stress. Some stress is good. It makes you resilient. But stuff you opt into? Fuck that noise it’s only going to make you sick.

And despite whatever family trauma circuit you may be playing out in your head, YOU DO NOT DESERVE THAT SHIT. No I’m seriously disease and suffering aren’t a moral good. Everything might be rough but you need to find a laugh. It might just save your life.

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Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 209 and Synthesis

The only downside of spending a day intaking a significant body of knowledge is that it’s nearly is that it’s nearly impossible to do synthesis on it at the same time. I suppose this holds true for new emotions as well. Synthesis and understanding takes time.

I’ve been on a tear working through how I feel on a number of topics just as I’m trying to ingest a new body of knowledge. I’ve got some inklings of where I will net out on all of it but it’s still a gut feeling. Any capable articulation that will be external to myself will require some synthesis. I can’t tell you what I’m on about as I don’t yet know.

And while I’ve set personal deadlines for continuous daily writing I cannot simply apply willpower to everything. In other words, I can force myself to write today it’s not possible to force sense on it. The synthesis hasn’t arrived even if the force of daily habit has.

It’s not that I’m admitting defeat on willpower, I’m sure I’ll be able to push my understanding over time. But expecting it today is probably a lost cause. The spirit may be willing but my wetware is fragile.

Fragility is of course one of my life companions this year. I’ve had to face that life is cheap and it’s simply not possible to worry about everyone. I have to sacrifice some of my own goals in order to keep myself alive. I suppose it’s not always a choice, except in that I’ve chosen to live and not die. That’s a choice.

But how I fortify and defend myself against the realities of biology, cultural frustration and freedom is in the end up to me. The pandemic has brought this home in a particularly acute way. Forced choices on us all, but particularly the vulnerable.

But I suppose I’m done trying to protect myself and gain ground. It’s going to be one or the other. It is time to take some risks even knowing that it will harm me. I’m recalculating what kind of destabilizing my body can take in the face of societal exhaustion. But the emotional synthesis of knowing consequences and having made a choice in freedom isn’t done in a day.

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Startups

Day 203 and Living Rent Free in Our Heads

There are two kinds of startup teams. The ones that forgive each other, and the ones that don’t. If you are very lucky, everyone forgives each other in time. But for the ones that can’t forgive each other, the pain of the experience is a curse. Your failures and weaknesses live in each others’ heads rent free. And that sucks.

I understand how the curse of the unforgivable startup sins get cast. I understand the pain of having people in your life that you cannot imagine forgiving because their sins against you feel too big. Startups are exactly the kind of place where forgiving seems impossible. Why? Building something new is painful.

New life, new business, new art. It hurts to birth something from nothing. Those laws of thermodynamics seem to indicate that energy doesn’t get made or lost, so sure, getting an idea to come into reality has to have an energy cost that comes from somewhere. I’d argue with startups it comes from our will. Maybe our soul. If you aren’t into that then money and time. It has a cost is what I’m saying and we pay it. And when we feel we’ve paid those costs unfairly it’s hard to forgive those whom we blame.

When you’ve given so much of yourself to make a new reality, the pain of it not succeeding is real. It hurts to realize we’ve failed. To come headfirst at the possibility that your sacrifice was for nothing is existential. That the energy you took to build something was for nothing.

With existential problems you’ve got two choices. Face who you are and your part in it or blame it on someone else. It is a lot harder to own existential yourself. If we are feeling like a victim there are people who we can blame. We hired wrong. We had cofounder issues. We couldn’t collaborate well. We had cultural mismatches.

There are endless reasons our failures are shared. And it’s true. Failure never has a single point. It wasn’t just you. But it’s not your cofounder or your teammates fault either. You have to forgive them. They have to forgive you. If you don’t they will live in your head rent free forever. And no one wants that. Find a way to forgive. Find a way to own your own existential failures. It’s not worth losing people over.

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Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 193 and Downward Pressure

I’ve had a terrific year (pandemic aside) with significant progress on my health. I’ve become used to seeing positive trends, especially within the last six months. But the last month has been a mess for me and the downward pressure is getting to me emotionally. I’m afraid. The fear of a setback is palpable.

I haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly what has been causing a dip in my progress or frankly if it is even a dip, as it could just be a few bad days. It may be that I’m just not progressing as fast as I could have hit some Pareto Principle limit and it’s just going to be a slog to get the remaining gains. Some of my metrics continue to improve (I’m seeing cardiovascular improvements still) but my energy, pain and inflammation seem to be going in the wrong direction.

I’m crushed by the exhaustion in particular. And sadly I know this to be real. Because I take immunosuppressants I am prone to infections. To combat one I was put on a course of antibiotics which seems to have some negative side effects. So now I can’t tell if I am exhausted because I am running an infection or because I’m having a bad reaction to the drugs. Could be both.

I feel angry at my body for this pause in progress. I’ve been working so hard at improvements. When I look at how I spend my time I am often overcome with resentment and envy of healthy people. It saddens me how much more of my life needs to be dedicated to doctors than a normal person. It’s especially frustrating as in the spring I was regularly noting how well I was doing and how much capacity I had to work.

Of course, the benefit of writing every day is I can go back and see what was going on. I’ve been doing plagued by the caprice of my body before.

The trajectory of my health is one of continual improvement but scatterplot is jagged as hell as each day vacillates between health and pain.

It’s my hope that this is just another local minima and I’ll be able back to my “normal” soon. Even if I have hit 80% of my gains I can manage with that. But it’s valuable to recognize the negative emotions as they come so we can let them go.

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Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 192 and Cherries in Air Conditioning

I found myself eating an entire pound of chilled organic bing cherries in bed while binging episodes of Downton Abbey this week. Watching the British aristocracy cope with modernity poorly seemed like an excellent balm for the climate anxiety that has been gripping me during the consecutive heatwaves inflaming the American West.

I’m a doomer and a prepper but recently I’ve felt completely defeated by the looming impacts of climate change. And I’ve been manifesting it is a kind of orgiastic panic of consumption. We had a windfall this year and it has soothes some of the panic I’ve had about having the resources to survive. Maybe it will be miserable but we might have enough wealth to avoid dying.

But I’ve been spending more on petty purchases of comfort. I’ve bought 2lbs of organic cherries, the large carton of organic blueberries, the $15 bags of dark roast coffee for espresso, and the $10 bar of 95% dark chocolate without a second thought. We’ve had sashimi for lunch and on Friday I ordered a lobster roll. We live thousands of miles away from the ocean in Colorado. We don’t grow or fish any of those crops here.

The excuse I’ve been using is that I’m concerned (nay convinced) none of these things will survive the next 25 years except as extreme luxury goods. If I can see the changes coming should I not enjoy the access I have to food that will no longer be available in my fifties? If I can see the end coming why conserve? I’m not Exxon or BP or some giant mining extraction concern in China. My forgoing small luxuries as an individual will do nothing to stop the catastrophe and I would like fond memories of the taste of a cool tart cherry in my twilight years. Burn me at the stake for it I guess.

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Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 191 and Logistical Leverage

I hate logistics. It’s not that I am incapable of operational tasks, but I do not find them enjoyable or energizing. I’m happiest working from the 30,000 foot vantage point and most stressed when keeping tabs on the 1,000 foot details. Thankfully I discovered this about myself early in life and had the good sense to choose a life partner that feels the opposite.

My husband is a genius operator and loves logistics. He can find efficient ways to manage nearly everything. He is a COO both professionally and personally. He manages everything about our household. I used to feel a bit guilty about the fact but I’m objectively terrible at home economics as frankly I just get in the way when I try to pitch in. All those sit-com jokes about husbands who can’t fold laundry right? In our house it is reversed. Which is a bit embarrassing as I worked in fashion but bygones. I just get in Alex’s way and he would prefer not to be slowed down by my bumbling efforts.

Recently I had to take on life & home workload in addition to my own. He had to take his first trip since the pandemic began. I haven’t been without him since February of 2020 so it has been a while since I’ve had to manage without him. And wow did it show!

I maintained the same of basics into my system, the same routine, supplements, diet and treatments with the only addition of Alex’s workload. I only added an additional 2 to 3 hours to my time obligations, so roughly an extra 9% my day, but it had close to a 30% impact across all my core metrics.

Because I track so many biometrics on a daily and even persistent basis I know my physical and emotional baselines. Without Alex managing life, my physical capacity dropped across the board over two days. The additional household logistics, errands, cleaning & cooking & overhead dramatically impacted my capacity.

Within 48 hours all my body’s baselines worsened. My HRV went down an astonishing 22%. Whoop gave me recoveries at 33%. My RHR went up by a full 10%. My qualitative pain scores went from consistent 3s and 4s to a 7. My energy scoring went from a perceived 6 to a 2. Gyroscope dropped my health grade from 85 to 78. It was a mess.

It turns out that Alex has added significant capacity to my life. Work that takes him just a few hours a week enables me to thrive. It takes very little from him but it means the difference between barely getting by and having the capacity to work for me.

Maybe it wouldn’t be as easy for another person. Alex is a very high leverage person in general but particularly for me. 10% of my day for a 30% improvement is significant. If your spouse is the operator in your partnership it may be quite fun to quantify their impact. Nothing says I love you quite like proof of how much their efforts impact your biometric data.

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Emotional Work

Day 188 and Space

I over scheduled my day today. I figured it was fine as I left some half hour blocks between calls, pitches, errands, workouts and chores. That’s what most lives are like right? You get up, shower, exercise, get the family fed, go to work, have a short lunch break to eat at your desk, go back to work, then you’ve got errands and then it’s back to family obligations.

If that’s what most people’s lives are like it’s no wonder we are in the midst of a rebellion. I’m exhausted. I haven’t had a moment to think or self reflect at all. I feel so far away from myself after the parade of obligations. And I actually meditated and did thirty minutes of “brain training” on my at home EEG. And I went for an hour long walk! So why do I feel like I haven’t had any space today? Those things are restorative right?

It sounds incredibly luxurious when I put it down on paper. I’m doing shit to improve my brain function and I got 10,000 steps (I like to take calls while walking) so why do I feel frazzled? As it turns out I’ve actually faced this problem before. And thanks to my daily exercise of writing I put it down on paper. I can learn from myself.

I benefit from unstructured unencumbered time at rest. It’s not that I need it to be alone time or quiet time as much I need full on rest. I thrive when I have no reason to get out of bed. I do my best reading and synthesizing when my mind is free to wander without any obligation to anything but that space.

When I wrote that I meant it in the context of devoting enough time to active rest. But as it turns out I don’t just need rest on weekends. I need to give myself time in between tasks. I need to let my mind wander off instead of forcing it on to the next activity. I need to take some space to myself between each activity, even if it’s a nice one like a walk, to absorb and synthesize.

I’d encourage you to consider if you are giving yourself enough space to let your experiences integrate back into your mind and body. Sure we all have our obligations but maybe you’d be more efficient at them if you have yourself the space to breathe in between them. On that note I’m going to put on some television and go shit post on Twitter. I need to integrate my learnings from the day.

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Emotional Work

Day 187 and Reactivity

I do not back down from a fight. I think quickly on my feet and enjoy pugilist types who are always looking to land a point or a punch. I think it is fun to scrap and throw a hook. But I increasingly find reactivity to be unappealing. The difference between enjoying a fight and being reactive is simple: fighters are in control and reactives are not.

Reactivity comes from emotions. When someone says “I feel triggered” in popular culture it’s viewed as a funny jokey way of indicating that something set you off. But being triggered has a real meaning in psychology. It’s a reaction to a memory, consciousness or unconscious, that is emotional in nature. Generally it’s in reference to something traumatic.

Traumas exist for most of us in our past. When you go back to childhood what we perceived as a trauma when young may not rationally be worthy of the emotional response we have as an adult self, but it is crucial to remember is actually real to the inner child. It’s hard to remember that feelings are not facts. So when you are triggered it’s because you have gone back to a traumatic time where those feelings were absolutely real. But they are not real now.

I used to be intensely emotionally reactive in my twenties and early thirties. I am still physically reactive and likely always will be. That’s a different issue. I’m talking about emotions. When I was younger I was sensitive to being hurt and abandoned. I nurtured codependency and recoiled from those who I perceived as disliking me. Thankfully my godfather noticed this pattern and how it was making me both miserable and unproductive, and introduced me to an old school Swedish family systems psychiatrist.

Now five years into my practice I am finding that I am able to take a beat and assess “why” I am having an emotional reaction. I can track back it’s source to my childhood. I can parent my “inner child” through the reactivity and get back on track. You will often hear me use lots of feeling words. I feel hurt. I feel sad. These help me stop the emotional reactivity. It’s ok to have feelings. It’s ok to express them. But you must be like the fighter. You must as an adult be in control. Your inner child who experiences the trauma as real will never be in control. That’s ok. It is your job to parent your inner child through it.

Obviously this is incredibly hard work. I slip up every day. But I try to work on my self awareness. I try to control my reactivity so my inner child isn’t puking all over the floor. It’s not that I don’t have reactions or emotions. I do. Big time! But I no longer wish to be emotionally reactive. Nor do I wish to be around those who are. We must work on compassion and empathy so that when someone triggers an emotion in you instead of snapping back you work to understand where they are coming from.

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Emotional Work

Day 185 and Small Potatoes

I’ve been stewing on something for the whole day so I’ve not felt I had the mental focus to write. Plus it’s 4th of July and I was busy eating BBQ and watching Roland Emmerich movies. I’ve watched Independence Day every single year since it came out and that’s as traditional as Die Hard on Christmas.

The reason I was stewing this morning is I feel like I’ve been wasting my energy on something. It didn’t start as a waste but it’s dawning on me that I’m not the best at protecting and preserving my limited reserves. I say yes to say too much.

I’ve got to stop fucking around with small problems. If I’ve got the capacity to manifest shit into reality 20% of the time why am I using that up on small potatoes when it’s just as much work to do it at scale?

Why put my energy into solving smaller problems when I can swing for the fences? Why do I think small potato problems are worth an iota of my energy. I am the type of woman who refuses to cook because it’s an inefficient use of time when industrial society has packaged foods. So why the fuck do I keep saying yes to people and problems that I don’t think are worth my time when I won’t even boil water? What the actual fuck is wrong with me.

I just feel too much social pressure to say yes to asks. If someone gets me excited to help I’m terrible at stepping back. I got convinced I was a mean bad person when I said “no” as a younger woman. I was told I wasn’t being accommodating. I was told I wouldn’t be well liked if I wasn’t nicer. Now I’m beginning to realize this was potentially poor advice. Might even be a function of gender (got to be a good girl). Either way I’ve got to stop saying yes to shit.

I’ve got limited energy and time. We all do. But it’s especially true for me as I deal with a disability in my ankylosing spondylitis. A chronic disability means saying yes like an abled person is terrible strategy. I’ve got to play the game smarter, budget my energy and time like the limited resource that it is and get over any past perceptions I cling to about “being nice.”

You know what isn’t nice? Saying yes to something you don’t want to do because you don’t want to hurt someone. Then you hurt two people. And one of them is yourself.