It’s been a rough couple of months. Sometimes, I have a real ‘my eyes are bigger than my stomach’ thing going on when it comes to things I want to do and accomplish. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it does lead me into situations where I am stressed and overwhelmed and wondering why. I read something lately, I think it was in Ali Abdal’s ‘Stress-Free Productivity,’ that focus is as much about what we decide not to do as what we decide to do. In the past few months, my focus has been all over the place.
The semester started, and I had two in-person classes, both of which started early in the morning, as well as two online classes, which could be done whenever. For the first week or so, I was handling this well, but eventually my anxiety, always a challenge to deal with, started to get out of control to the point that I started not being able to sleep. I would sleep for something like four hours every three days, then missing classes because it was dangerous for me to drive. I would be a zombie during the day and still not be able to sleep at night, and it was definitely the fault of the anxiety. All night long, I would find myself drifting off to sleep, and then I would have a mini panic attack, and I would be wide awake again. This cycle would repeat several times.
I didn’t know where it was coming from. Everything seemed fine, otherwise. I said this to my psychiatrist, and she said, “Well, gee, let’s look at this. In the past year you’ve left your volunteer job, you’ve lost your house and moved in with your parents, you started going to school full time, and you broke up with your fiancé. Have I missed anything?’ and I was like ‘oh. I guess that is a lot.’ She told me to double up on my sleep meds and to see her again in a week, to see if that had helped.
I realized that I was in a toxic feedback loop. I was anxious, which was making me not sleep, which was making me more anxious, making it even harder to sleep, repeat, repeat, repeat. Thanks, I hate it! What I realized is that this was kind of a gordian knot. I had to do something drastic to cut through it because this was seriously bad for both my physical and mental health. The main problem was the stress I was putting myself under trying to sleep, and that was necessary because I had to be functional at 8:00 in the morning four days a week.
There is a process in farming, where you take your harvested grain, and in order to separate the grain from the useless husks, you drop it from a little bit of a height, and the wind takes away the much lighter husks, leaving you with just the grain. It’s called winnowing because you’re using the wind to accomplish the process. These days we have machines for this, but this is what they did in the ancient world.
I needed to winnow down to the things that were the most important, and somehow remove the pressure I was under. I didn’t want to quit anything important, but I looked at what I was doing and realized something. The classes I needed for my digital art and design certificate were the online ones, which could be done anytime. The two in person classes, I thought would be a fun challenge, they weren’t strictly necessary. I needed to winnow down.
So, I dropped the two in person classes. They were supposed to be fun, but under the circumstances, I wasn’t enjoying them, and they were kind of a side quest. Nothing wrong with them, but they were outside my core mission. If I didn’t have to go to them, I could remove the pressure around sleep, and just sleep when I slept and not have to worry about being on anyone else’s schedule. This was my way of slicing through the gordian knot.
I wish I could report that this solved the problem, and I immediately fell into a deep, restful sleep, but it took a couple of days for that to happen. It did happen, however.
I also realized that I needed to get on my body’s own sleep pattern, which is to sleep from 12-9am or so. When I was going to bed too early, not falling asleep quickly kicked up my anxiety and began the feedback loop that would keep me up all night.
Over the course of the next couple of days, I started to sleep, and actually wake up refreshed, which had never really happened before. The anxiety is not gone but is better than it was. I started going to the gym again, which helped a lot. I was able to get all my work done, and even get back to writing, which had been on the back burner for a while, something else that was causing me stress.
As a person with ADHD, I want to do so many things. I forget that just because I have the hours free on my calendar, that does not mean the new activity will fit into my life. I only have so much energy and executive function to go around. The fact that I can’t run full peed in every direction at once does not make me a failure. I needed to winnow my activities down to the essential ones, and maybe eventually I can work another class at a time into the schedule. We all have to do that from time to time, pare down our activities to a manageable level. I am in an immense position of privilege that I don’t have to have a crummy day job, or kids at home, and can make these decisions for myself. I can build a life that works for me. Some people don’t have that option, though some winnowing is usually always possible.
So, that’s what we need to do. Figure out what our core mission is, and winnow until we are able to handle it without having a breakdown. It sounds simple, but it’s anything but, I know. But give yourself permission to say no to things, and to realize that now might not be the time in your life when you can accomplish all the things. There will be time later, especially if you don’t burn yourself out.