Life is like a river

Life is like a river. It’s moving, and you can be at the mercy of the river if you don’t take deliberate, conscious action to steer yourself in a direction you have pre-determined.

-Anthony Robbins

Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits recently wrote a very honest post about The Dirty Little Secrets of Productivity Bloggers, and I’ll be sharing one of my own with you in this post. To give you some background, over this last month, I have been on two extremes, and am now back to normalcy. For the first two weeks, I was on vacation. I had lots of free time, and I managed my own schedule and did what I wanted to do. I lived on my own sleep schedule (I’m a late riser). I meditated and exercised every day. I did a lot of reading, writing, and relaxing.

When I came back to work, I was immediately placed on an intense project, which involved long hours and weekend work for 2 weeks. I went from 100% free time to 100% structured time. Was I able to maintain my positive habits when my routine changed so significantly? Nope. And this explains my dirty little secret- I wasn’t able to follow my own advice.

I ended up building sleep debt due to long work hours. I was unable to maintain my exercise routine due to getting home so late from work, I ate unhealthy food (catered into our conference room at work), and I stopped meditating.

Why couldn’t I maintain my daily positive habits when my routine changed?

I love being challenged and pushed to extremes- this is a way to personal growth for me. I dedicated myself to the success of the project at work, and gained a lot of experience from it, but in doing so, I also adopted the norms (eating and sleeping habits) of the team, and temporarily lost my positive habits along the way.

I wasn’t able to follow the advice of my blog post about living like a sprinter (having a healthy balance between stress and recovery), versus living like a long distance runner (no balance/time for recovery, leading to burnout). During these past two weeks, I have been confronted with how difficult living like a sprinter can be. How do you maintain positive habits when routine changes, and the nature of your work can be so chaotic?

Your routine will change, that’s a given- plan for it

I’m learning that routine changes will happen to you and I many times in our lives, but the important thing we need to have in place is a a backup plan. A back up plan is your pre-determined way of handling drastic routine change and maintaining positive habits. Why come up with a backup plan early on? If you have to come up with the backup plan while you are in crisis mode, it’s already too late:

Here are several examples of creating a backup plan:

Routine Change: Working long hours, unable to work out at gym

Backup Plan Options: If long work hours are going to be a long-term occurrence, you will want to find an alternate work-out time, such as early in the morning or over lunch break. If it is only short-term, you can simply cut back on your daily caloric intake, and plan to get back into your workout routine as soon as your work hours go back to normal.

Routine Change: Unable to leave work for lunch break due to deadlines, unhealthy snack options in the office

Backup Plan Options: Bring a bag of trail mix or nuts with you to work, use this as a meal replacement when you are unable to eat a normal lunch. Otherwise, you may end up eating unhealthy office snacks, or even worse, you will be starving by dinner time, and overeat to make up for the missed lunch.

Routine Change: Unable to get enough sleep during the week

Backup Plan Options: Take a mid-day 20 minute nap at work. If you have you own office, this will be easier to do. If not, you will have to be more creative with napping at work.

It’s Your Turn to Share

It’s much easier to maintain positive habits when your external environment and routine stay the same. But when the situation suddenly changes, are you able to adjust? Do you maintain your positive habits, or do you revert back to the way you were before you acquired the positive habits?

I’m still working on my backup plan, and experimenting with the best ways to maintain positive habits when my routine changes. I’d love to hear your experience with maintaining positive habits through routine changes- please leave a comment!

photo credit: aledt

Popularity: 4% [?]

Related Posts:

• How to Prevent Burnout from Stress: Live like a Sprinter, not a Long Distance Runner
• What’s Wrong with Taking a Nap?
• Defeat the Multitasking Virus: The Power of Finishing 2 Mission-Critical Tasks Each Day
• How to Pay Back your Sleep Debt, the Smart Way
• The Two Week Lucid Dreamer: #1 eBook for “lucid dreaming” on Amazon.Com Search Results

When we expend energy, we draw down our reservoir. When we recover energy, we fill it back up. Too much energy expenditure without sufficient recovery eventually leads to burnout and breakdown (Overuse it and lose it). Too much recovery without sufficient stress leads to atrophy and weakness (Use it or lose it).

-Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement

Nature is constantly oscillating- think of tides moving in and out, the seasons changing, or the sun rising and setting. We as human beings naturally follow a similar rhythm with our energy levels. Our natural state is to oscillate between rest and activity, similar to a sprinter. Unfortunately, our society of technological innovation socially sanctions living like a long distance runner- we ignore rest and fail to recognize its necessity for preventing burnout and sustaining high performance.

Ignoring recovery for too long causes burnout- symptoms of being burned out include emotional exhaustion, loss of motivation, detachment, isolation, and irritability.

Are your addicted to living like a long distance runner?

Living in a state of stress produces an adrenaline rush, and over time, this becomes addictive, and we lose the ability to relax. Common sense would tell us we need to take breaks and rest, but instead we overindulge in work, and face the consequences. Researchers have found that self-described workaholics have a significantly higher than average incidence of stress-related illnesses, divorce, and alcohol abuse.

Are you creating artificial relaxation and alertness?

If you regularly rely on alcohol, marijuana or sleeping pills to calm down, you may be trying to create relaxation (artificially). Similarly, if you rely on stimulants such as caffeine or amphetamines, you are trying to create alertness (artificially). Both of these artificial means of oscillation are masking the bigger problem- you are still living life like a long distance runner.

Are you creating artificial importance?

Do you like the feeling of importance when you become busier? Even when it means being unavailable to your friends and family? This artificial importance will only create artificial success, as you are still living life like a long distance runner.

Are your work habits putting you at risk to karoshi?

Karoshi is the term in Japan which means “death from overwork”. This is apparently a fairly common occurrence. In fact, I just read about a Toyota engineer who worked himself to death today (he died of heart disease). Additionally, I have known several people in the workforce who have had heart attacks after working extreme long hours under high pressure.

Research shows that these five key factors contribute to karoshi:

• Extreme long hours that interferes with normal rest patterns
• Night work that interferes with normal rest patterns
• Working without holidays or breaks
• High pressure work without breaks
• Extremely demanding physical labor and continuously stressful work

Here are some tips for preventing burnout (or karoshi!), and living like a sprinter:

Tips for Preventing Burnout from Stress and Living like a Sprinter

1) Balance stress and recovery to achieve your best performance

Push yourself beyond your ordinary limits, and regularly seek recovery, and you will grow. This is similar to lifting weights at the gym. The problem with people who live like long distance runners is that they don’t allow themselves to recover, and get burned out as a consequence. This brings us to the topic of tip 2.

2) Create a ritual of disconnecting

New technologies such as Blackberries/PDA’s, and social networking tools (ex. Facebook, Twitter), make it easy for us to never truly disconnect. Several people I work with will bring their work phones/laptops with them on vacation, and check e-mail/take phone calls the entire time. This is faulty, socially-sanctioned “live life as a long distance runner” logic.

It is a very good plan every now and then to go away and have a little relaxation… When you come back to the work your judgement will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgement.

-Leonardo Da Vinci

Da Vinci’s advice still applies to us today. To prevent work burnout, create a daily ritual (read my post on creating consistent daily habits) of completely disconnecting- have a daily stopping point. For example, if you are a business traveler, make a habit of not working during your commute, and instead, relax and read books/magazines. If you are on vacation, completely disconnect from your work- don’t bring your PDA or laptop.

Another option for preventing work burnout is to disconnect during your lunch. A lot of people fall into the habit of eating at their desk, or eating with coworkers and discussing work-related topics. To truly disconnect and use your lunch break to recover, you may need to eat by yourself.

3) Create healthy breathing, eating, sleeping, and exercising habits

Breathing: This is an easy way to relax and prevent burnout- throughout your day, make a habit of breathing in to a count of three and out to a count of six, for several minutes. This will help you relax deeply.

Eating: Eat small meals at regular intervals (five to six times a day is recommended), in amounts that are satisfying (not over or under filling). Try to eat primarily foods that are low on the glycemic index, as these will provide a steadier source of energy. And don’t forget to drink plenty of water!

Sleeping: Get 7-8 hours of sleep. If you are able to, take at catnap in the afternoon. Winston Churchill was a proponent of this, explaining that a catnap helps you get two days in one, as you wake up more alert and sustaining energy.

Exercising: Work out 3-5 times per week, and add some form of strength training to your routine (read my post on losing weight by gaining muscle). Strength training is just as important as cardiovascular training, especially as we age- on average, we lose one-half pound of muscle mass each year after the age of forty in absence of exercise.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Related Posts:

• How Significant Changes in Your Routine Can Threaten Your Daily Positive Habits
• How Does The Law of Attraction Explain The Holocaust?
• Extreme Failing: Learning from the Pros
• Breaking Free from Genetic Programming
• Defeat the Multitasking Virus: The Power of Finishing 2 Mission-Critical Tasks Each Day