Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 99
I'm recording a little podcast about how to rest when you need to get the work done and you need to pay the bills and the stuff needs to happen still. Or maybe I should flip that round. How do you actually get your work done when your body is telling you no?
And I don't have an ultimate answer to this. And ideally, I'd love us all to be able to rest as much as we can whenever we need to. But there are some little bits and pieces that I've learned with a wayward body in terms of getting my work done not feeling overwhelmed, and not feeling like I am at odds with my body and trying to work in tandem with it. One of the key ways to do that is to be able to create a methodology that works in a way that is compassionate to what my body needs and to make sure that I'm actually listening to it, hearing what it's trying to tell me, and responding.
Of course, there's stuff that still needs to happen, right? One of the key things that I start by doing when I have another task to add or something to check in on the list that really needs to be done this week is to try and break that thing down into 20-minute chunks. And 20 minutes is a completely invented timeframe that works for me. My back starts to want to move after about 15 minutes or so, and so it kind of just gives me a little bit of leeway on that when I want to move differently. And it's also quite often my attention span. It's when I start fidgeting, 20 minutes is sort of when I start to notice that I'm not doing things as stealthily as maybe I would like.
So I separate out something into 20-minute chunks, and you might be like, how do you do that? You may have a proposal to right for work, or you need to clean your house, or you need to get on top of your inbox, which all sound like huge, enormous tasks, but we can break all of these things down into 20-minute chunks.
If I take the proposal example, it could be that you spend 20 minutes writing an outline, and then another one of your 20-minute chunks could be fleshing out one of those outlines into paragraphs and points that you need to get rid of. Then, another 20-minute chunk could be spent writing the introduction. For example, if you have the idea, the big old task, the fourth bridge of cleaning your house, what could be done in 20 minutes? Could it be that you hoover one room? Could it be that you wipe the surfaces down in the kitchen? What is your body's capacity to do a task in a 20-minute chunk?
When I've sort of got those essentials down, and I've broken it down into those 20-minute chunks, I then put it in my diary, and I put it in my diary in those 20-minute increments, and I put it all in on a Friday. And the reason I put it in on a Friday is that I, when I get to the beginning of my week, my week if I put everything in and I time block my entire calendar out, I can quite often feel quite suffocated and feel like I don't have any room to breathe or respond to listening to my body. But when I put things in on a Friday, what I can do is if, for example, on a Wednesday afternoon, I've got a bit more energy and I can hoover one of the rooms, I can take that, I can delete that task out from Friday, and I feel like I'm ahead of myself. And when I feel like I'm ahead of myself, my brain gets a little dopamine reward because it thinks that we've achieved something, rather than this feeling that I think most of us battle, which is that we're constantly behind. We're constantly firefighting.
So all the things that I do throughout the week, I start removing them from my diary on Friday, and maybe Friday rolls around and I don't have any tasks left, or maybe Friday rolls around and there's only a few things on there, and even if it's still packed, I just try and be compassionate with myself along the way, but actually rewarding myself and giving myself this immediate gratification of thinking that I'm ahead of myself rather than I'm always behind, really flips my motivation and The way that I think about my week and the way that I think about the things that I've got done.
It also allows me some space to be able to listen to my body, respond to what it needs and not try and a sort of railroader into a lifestyle that capitalism has told me that I have to fit into.
I thoroughly believe that if you don't listen to your body, if I don't listen to my body, if we don't listen to the body signals that we receive long enough, our body just shuts us down. There's nothing in between. Like, you can only ignore your body for so long and then it will completely rebel. And whether that is just in you coming down with a cold or flu, or whether it is in, you know, breaking out in other things that might, you might have going on with your body, or maybe it is just a complete energy crash, your body will only let you push against it for so long before it takes over completely because your body's more interested in keeping you alive than your to-do list. It's just that your head is sometimes more interested in your to-do list.
I really know that when I respond to my body by trying to ignore it and ploughing on through, what I'm doing is I'm breaking trust with my body. And as a fat person in a disabled body, it's taken me quite a lot of time and concentration and effort to try and make sure that I've built a trusting relationship with my body. And so my body doesn't need to be shouting to get my attention constantly. It can just give me a little bit of a message and I will listen to it rather than feeling like it needs to be really over the top the whole time.
Ploughing on through things and ignoring what it actually needs doesn't gain trust in my body, but planning ahead does. Knowing what I have to deal with, being able to see what I have to deal with, and then being able to check in with my body, what I can do today.
So maybe my body might have the energy to answer some emails and it doesn't have the energy to do the laundry today, but maybe one day it has a little bit of surplus and it might be able to, I don't know, change my bedding. But it doesn't have the brain space or the capacity to try and think about creative, project and design a course.
When I can look at what my body actually has space for and feel like I'm really ahead of myself, then what I'm doing is allowing myself to be able to fit my life around my body's needs, not try and shove my body into a lifestyle that, frankly, it hasn't consented to.
So this is the way that I manage an unruly body and the life that we live and try and use ways of reward and pleasure and listening and communication with the vessel that I stroll around in to try and make sure that I live a life that is encompassing joy and pleasure in my body and feeling my way into a more peaceful relationship with the skin that I'm in. Rather than feeling like my body's an obstacle that must be got around so I can get the things done that I need to.
I hope that this is useful if you don't live in a body that has bad behaviour sometimes, or this is also really useful if you've got any kind of caring responsibilities. But at some point, all of us get sick, and hopefully we'll all live to a ripe old age where we might be having bodies that change and work in different ways. And so hopefully methodologies like this are ones that you can collect along the way and use throughout your life whenever you need them to. So I hope that this has been useful and look forward to speaking to you next week. you're feeling a bit more of your units in them. I'd love to see them.
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