2020 was a rough year for a lot of people. A lot of us experienced disruptions in our professional and personal lives. This disruption has forced so many people to work in their homes. It’s also forced people out of their jobs. While I was lucky to not experience much of either of these things, I have recently caught myself in a negative feedback loop. In this loop, I constantly berate myself for a lack of “productivity.” This lack of productivity I’ve been experiencing has been through an active choice to embrace stillness by taking a school term off before jumping into a new job at a new school here in Daegu, South Korea.
I started out 2021 thinking of all of the changes that I have experienced in the last year. I thought about how many things I have completely turned around and I was able to give myself a few pats on the back. But why did I still end up feeling so shitty on most days? Why was I constantly feeling shame for not “doing enough” during my days?
I feel that the reason I am able to clearly see the mechanism in which productivity shaming truly brings a person down is due to the fact that I simply don’t have many obligations at this moment in time. Therefore, any “productiveness” that I perceive is necessary is actually not necessary at all. I literally have nothing that I have to do besides eat, walk the dogs, feed the dogs and cat, and clean the cat’s litter box. Technically, if I wanted to lay in bed all day and sleep, I had no obligations to stop me. Yet, I found myself feeling tired, hopeless, and full of self hatred.
I began to go into productivity overdrive a few weeks back. I scheduled every hour of my day to include some kind of activity. I started working out, studying Korean, walking the dogs 5 times a day, and reading. I even planned out exactly when I was going to prepare my meals and how long my meals must take. The first day was great. I finished everything. I felt this little high off of my accomplishments. I proceeded to try to pack the next day in the same way. While I succeeded, I found myself absolutely drained and exhausted from all of the hours I was devoting to studying and working out.
Ten or so days passed and I woke up this past Wednesday and felt absolutely hopeless. I was doing so many things, but I didn’t want to do any of them that day. I let my alerts on my watch and phone ring. Every time I swiped them away, I felt like a piece of crap. Feeling exhausted was getting to me. My insomnia was and still has been out of control. I was running on 4 hours of sleep every day and not allowing myself to rest was catching up to me. Yet, that Wednesday was not restful. I laid in bed, awake, frustrated and full of self-hate. Why couldn’t I just get my lazy ass up and do the stuff I’ve been doing every day?
I had completely depleted myself and instead of allowing myself to take a break on reaching these expectations, I mentally berated myself for being a “failure.” The guilt and the belief that you are not enough can be extremely taxing. That Wednesday stretched onto Thursday. Somewhere between Thursday and today, I finally figured out why I was “stuck” in this loop. I was setting expectations and goals that were so specific and grueling that I was setting myself up for failure.
You see, productivity shaming is an internal battle you fight with your perfectionist self. The self that sets these goals doesn’t have “happy, healthy, balanced” you in mind. It has the “cracked out, stressed, gotta survive” you in mind. It pushes you to the limit because perfectionist you was created under extreme scrutiny and stress. Your perfectionist self has served you well, and has likely helped you in many of your successes. However, the reality is that we can’t always be in “perfectionist” or “go, go, go” mode.
On Wednesday, when I woke up with the “fuck this and everything on the list” feeling, my mind and body was telling me, “Girl, it’s time to go easy on yourself today.” The checklists and reminders from perfectionist me were there to remind me of how I continue to set unrealistic goals for myself despite how badly I feel when I don’t meet them.
So, between Thursday and this moment, I’ve been working out how I can reconcile these parts of me. I reminded myself that it’s ok to not do everything on my checklist down to the amount of time I have allotted. I began to adjust my tasks from having allotted time slots to simply being a loose list of things that I’ll attempt during the day. I also broke down my list into “obligations” and “desires.” The obligations were simply to get out of the house twice a day for at least 30 minutes each time to walk the dogs. I tried to keep each of the lists manageable.
On Friday, I woke up in a pain flare-up from a condition I was diagnosed with a few years back. It’s called interstitial cystitis, which causes bladder pain/UTI-like symptoms in the absence of any actual infection. There’s limited knowledge on the condition and after many tests and scans, I was diagnosed with it based off of the fact that I was not diagnosed with other conditions that exhibit similar symptoms. I often have pain flare-ups during especially depressive/anxious times, and it’s just icing on the cake. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, is my body trying to tell me something?”
I recently saw a quote on Instagram that said something along the lies of, “If you’re guilting and shaming yourself while you are resting, then it isn’t really rest. If you feel exhausted after resting, then that’s a sign that you weren’t truly resting at all.” It’s definitely not the exact quote, but the gist of it is there. My body was telling me, “Girl, you aren’t resting enough. You aren’t giving your body what it needs while you can and your mind is making yourself feel like shit while you’re telling yourself to rest.”
If anyone else can relate to a chronic feeling of not “doing enough” please reach out. I’d love your insight on how you deal with this never-ending feeling that you should be busy with something at all times. How do I embrace stillness and rest? How do I get the most out of it when my mind/body seems to reject simple acts of rest such as sleep?
Turbulent Mind 