Through our routine lives we pass through hyper productive and super lazy phases. Out hyper productive days give us boost of endorphins for each tick on the to do list while we also encounter days when no amount of caffeine gets us going. Nobody talks about the good days but only search for the remedies to overcome the low days. Since the average balances our overall productivity, most of us including myself rarely bother about this. But recently this came to my notice as I have been repeatedly failing to surpass my 10 days perfect activity streak on my apple fitness.
As some might be aware that the cause lies in our behavior during the good days. We tend to over-perform physically as well as mentally on those good days. My typical good day involves 10,000+ steps with 250-300 kCal workout and a few tasks along with errands while my bad days exclude workouts with bare minimum steps and nothing accomplished. This drastic difference between good and lazy days is quite common among most and is also acceptable.
A week or ten good days in a row definitely drives fatigue. And taking a lazy day after that is not worrisome but while going through bad or though phases in life, such lazy days become more frequent or continue to have a streak of their own. During the hay days, there is enough motivation around to drive your adrenaline but the gloomy days are worrisome as motivation is scarce and disappointment is plentiful.
The two main culprits are fatigue and saturation.
The first one is fairly easy to overcome as you can do so by merely reducing the frequency of hyper drive on your good days. It may not even matter if you fail to overcome this during the hay days. But during the gloomy days, it becomes quite critical as it is one more reason that can set off the spiral of lazy days. Hence, you can always utilize time management and task planning to avoid running into a burn out.
Now moving on to the important concern: saturation. When your days are filled with disappointment as nothing seems to move forward or your situation seems to remain stagnant, you seem to lose all motivation to do anything at all.
Imagine the mental endurance of Mr. Nelson Mandela that helped him not only overcome almost two decades of prison time but also pursue his purpose later on.
Especially if you are young and impatient, you need to understand and accept that things take time. And not everyone succeeds in their young age. In fact for professionals, the wealth is always late peaking. Most people I closely know have achieved more and accumulated most during the years immediately preceding retirement.
In fact on a deeper thought I realized that mental saturation is a luxury! Unless the first two levels of Maslows need hierarchy, which include food, shelter and safety, are fulfilled one cannot afford to be mentally saturated. And hence the hard working labors across developing nations that lack social security keep working for their next meal. Since this is just another hypothesis for behavioral economics, your thoughts are welcome in the comments.
So whenever mental saturation hits, you should feel grateful to be able to afford it and remember that good things take time. I do not know how long did it take to build Rome, but I am pretty sure that it even took a few years to build Facebook and Microsoft. And instead of giving up when you are stuck, you should re-strategize your ways.
On an ending note, as Einstein may have once said that it would be insane to do the same thing the same way and expect a different result. In fact in the modern management world we have the legendary ISO 9001 Quality Management Standard to ensure that doing the same thing the same way does NOT result in a different output!
PDCA – Plan Do Check Act, and Repeat.
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Header Image by Raúl Nájera on Unsplash
Savvy Munshi 