mentally separating health from productivity
I’ve recently read a good post by Stephan Joppich. In it, he talks about how trying to turn everything into a daily habit and tracking these habits meticulously became too serious and inflexible, an unhealthy obsession. It didn’t allow for life to happen, for good and bad days. He was too preoccupied with deciding the ideal order of things instead of trying the best at doing them. It came from a place of anxiety, not self confidence.
And I relate a lot to that. I had phases in my life where I would plan my week like a weekly schedule. Everything was the same, everything started at an exact time and lasted exactly x minutes or hours, like a school timetable. If I had free minutes here and there, I felt a strong need to fill them with something to be productive and not “waste” them. Checking mails here, reading a few pages there, Duolingo. I was thinking for hours about the pros and cons of doing this before that and vice versa.
I didn’t consider rest, intentional boredom or buffer times to be productive or helpful - that wasn’t modeled by all these people online planning their days and tracking their habits with precision. I now know that they are important, and the people who are the best with their static routines are usually extremely isolated or can offload more dynamic upcoming situations onto other family members (let’s be real: if a married man with children is successful in keeping up his meticulous daily routine perfectly, in which he is solely focused on himself and his work and exercise for hours, it’s because his partner is picking up the slack and handling the children). A four hour morning and evening routine plus daily todo isn’t kept up consistently by people who have to interact a lot with others and make time for people when schedules clash, which they usually do. They can only do this because they don’t have to respond to others needing them.
I think these detailed and intense routines and rituals are so enticing because they promise immediate improvement, and that means success. Planning a new routine feels like a new chance, a new self. But another thing is that they often come with supposed mental or physical health benefits.
People with this lifestyle sharing it online usually describe how doing these things helped with brain fog, improved the mood, made them less tired or anxious, made them lose weight or have more time for fitness, which helped this pain or that tension, and so on. They look happy, with clear skin and nice items. The routines feature things like meditation, journaling, stretching, walks, the gym, taking supplements and similar activities. And I believe all that truly helps and most of it is objectively good for the average person; I also had improvements due to adopting more of this into my life.
Unfortunately, when you are sick (temporarily or chronically), you have to be ready to let go of that mindset at least in the short term, and that can be hard, at least for me it is. When other people online talk about focusing on their health, they usually mean these good and productive routines and habits that look impressive - getting enough sleep, eating better, getting up and moving instead of being in bed constantly, and all that. They’re not necessarily actively sick, just looking out for themselves.
But being actively sick and focusing on your health usually means the opposite of that. You’re falling out of your routines and habits, you’re in bed a lot, sleeping more, not working out. And at that moment, this is the best you can do for your health and body. But it’s not the glamorous kind of health focus that’s shown everywhere.
Joppich also mentions it in his post that not reacting to the moment and instead clinging to the static routine wasn’t helpful when he was getting sick. I can relate to that as well, because while right now mostly resting in bed is the right thing for me to do, it doesn’t feel like it because it is so unlike the constant productivity narrative that seems to put health on a pedestal. With that mindset, just lying down is bad - you’re not doing anything to strengthen your body, lose weight, have experiences or educate yourself. It doesn’t look good for YouTube and it gives off depression and laziness.
Even now that I know that, I will still second guess myself. Shouldn’t I do more and push myself? This is supposedly healthier and better, and what I’m doing is bad. Then I got a particularly good day and go to the gym, or I get fed up and decide to visit a castle on a steep hill and walking around there, and my next few days are ruled by pain and post-exertional malaise again.
It’s time for me to separate health from the glamorous and amazing looking productivity rituals and markers. It’s clearly not applicable to me right now, and it will only start to make sense for me again when my medicines work and I am in remission. Until then, I need to listen to my body and not the instilled guilt.
Published 23 Sep, 2024, edited 7Â months, 2Â weeks ago