Grace 🤗 and Discipline 🔨
On and off the wagon, or just driving yourself
Welcome back to the
Very Mental Lifeletter!
Off the Wagon
After we found out that Hugo has cancer, I missed six of my running workouts. I really didn’t want to do anything. I was struggling with a lot of heavy feelings. I was feeling depressed. I was feeling anxious, even feeling like I was going to slip back into getting frequent panic attacks.
I was grieving.
There’s this part of me that thinks that I should be able to maintain a workout or diet regimen, no matter what the circumstances à la Jocko Willink or David Goggins.
And a lot of my self-talk in the past week has been negatively bashing and beating myself because I haven’t been getting up at five in the morning, I haven’t been running, I haven’t been stretching, and I haven’t been eating well.
Cycle
This is obviously not a new situation for me. I am constantly in this cycle:
Discipline
Falling off the discipline wagon
Shame/guilt
Planning
Getting back on the discipline wagon
So I’m taking a moment.
I understand that the most important thing that I can develop right now is an awareness of this cycle.
On Sunday I hit my first run since we got the Hugo the news.
It wasn’t something that I necessarily wanted to do but I understood intellectually and spiritually that I really needed to go for a run, not necessarily just for the physical components but also for the emotional and mental health aspects of the run.
And I also understand that sometimes the only way to combat feelings of shame and guilt and anxiety about not doing something is to just do it.
Long Game
I’m really interested in longevity.
I’m trying to look at my life not as a series of weeks or months but of decades. As I’m in my early 30s, I’m starting to consider what I want to be doing 20 or 30 years from now when it comes to exercise, diet, lifestyle. I’m trying to let my actions this week or this month be influenced by what I would like to be doing at 50 or 60.
In the past, I often get very much lost in the sauce of disciplining myself today or this week and lose out on the bigger picture.
If I can look back on my habits, or the quasi-manic/depression cycle of discipline that I experience, it often looks like several weeks or months of hard hitting or getting after it, and then months or long stretches of time where I do hardly anything in the vein of discipline.
There’s two choices that I can make from that.
One is to just try harder and be myself and whip myself more extremely to make me push through the times when I don’t want to do anything. Maybe that’s what works.
Or the second option I seem to have is to get much more intentional about listening to myself and what I need and understanding that I will have the need for times of rest, and be much more intentional about resting when it’s required so that I can get back into my regimentation sooner.
The idea is that rest is required for the work. And I often like to think that it’s not.
I like to think that I am some cyborg or super machine or superhero. I can just hammer it out without giving myself the necessary rest.
So this week I am back on my proverbial bullshit: I’m eating healthy, I’m working my marathon training program, I’m doing some cool new things in my business, and I’m feeling good about myself.
I’m able to dive back in in a relatively short amount of time.
Because, in the past, I could go completely off the rails. I could completely disregard the marathon I signed up for, skip the race, and just slip back into a nasty shame spiral.
But that is not today and I’m proud of myself.
I love you,
Mike
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