What's Easy and What's Hard?

Post Reply New Topic

Nowadays, I have a very limited and idiosyncratic fund of willpower. FREX, I can either write a thousand words of a short story or novel, or I can mail a letter at the post office. They are equally draining, and use up most of my day's willpower.

Or I can clean half my horse barn, or bring one bag of garbage to the curb.

Anyone else find weird things easy or hard?

I'm exactly the same.

I'm the same too. There's only so much I can handle in one day without feeling overwhelmed and at my limits of ability to cope. I have to separate things out into their own different days, or I can't cope.

I have a feeling I went through a phase in life when I got better at this stuff, but I'm in a burnout phase now and it's getting harder and harder just to operate my life.

Bird in Flight: I agree.

I had amazing amounts of energy and willpower up until I burned out around 50. Luckily, that was when I had planned to give up my corporate job anyway and take care of kids, horse-farm, and writing. Unfortunately, I've never recovered from the burnout, and wonder whether anyone knows of strategies to increase willpower.

But what I find most odd is that it's weird things like posting letters and paying bills that leave me more exhausted than half a day of barn work or writing.

Same for me -- happened around 50, and yes, even paying a bill feels like a big deal! And things like filing my tax return -- the worst. Even when I know I've got everything lined up and it's not going to be hard, it feels hard for me, it feels like a mountain to climb, a stress factor, something I can't face in the same day as something else that's also hard to face.

Exactly!

Now how do we fix this?

When it's a burnout situation, I wonder if in fact the better thing to do is to go with it, ie, if one is finding that one is only up to one task per day, plan for that? It's like a form of being kind to oneself -- or realizing that when you have a broken leg you can't expect yourself to take part in a run. I don't know.

All I know is I've forced myself to cope for such a long time that everything in me seems to be disintegrating in protest these days. And I'm wondering if instead of fighting that, I do what a physically sick person does and take it easy, accept I'm not functioning optimally (and that may get better with time and care), accept the "one thing per day," I don't know.

And maybe stress relief methods, breathing, other coping techniques (there's a good thread on those).

But, I'm posting this but don't seem to be able to implement them for myself!

Sign up for automatic bill pay.

If tax returns are too much of a burden, it may make your sense to collect all the important documents in a box and have someone else do them for you.

I found it helpful to reduce the number of keys I need to use each day. You can now get cars and house locks that don't need keys.

I, too, find it easier to give good advice than follow it.

I did find one thing that made it easier for me to meditate a little bit, sometimes. That was reading "The Dalai Lama's Cat," in which the first-person protagonist POV is the cat. The cat struggles with meditation, but concludes that she shouldn't worry about the fact that she can only meditate two minutes at a time, despite sitting next to the Dalai Lama every morning during his two-hour meditation. After all, she is a cat.

Don't know why, but ever since I read this, I feel better/more successful about a two-minute meditation.

Yes, you need to start somewhere. Comparing yourself against an expert makes little sense.

BTDT:

You're right about automatic bill pay. It just seems like an enormous hurdle to set it up, one I have not yet sufficiently prioritized to overcome.

I find I can still overcome any psychological task hurdles, but only if I make it the most important thing in my world until I've accomplished it. Unfortunately, it is rare that I don't have more emergent daily tasks than making the future easier for myself.

Covey's Seven Habits for Highly Successful People, which I was forced to study with clients many years ago, points out that this thinking is the fallacy of "not sharpening the saw." But regardless of my intellectual appreciation of the fact that you need to sharpen your saw for effective functioning, my emotions don't allow me to.

Akrasia.

Automatic bill pay is easy to set up with some places, hard with others. I think I started with the cell phone service. You might try to set up one new one a month.

BTDT

You're right. I'll try setting up one, just one, tomorrow. And I don't mean "manana."

Thanks!

I can work for 14 hours designing, building and fixing complex computer systems and software. But it takes me a week to go to USPS to ship a package. And spending 1 hour to interview someone leaves me exhausted for the rest of the day. Doing anything that I don't know *exactly* how it'll go takes me several days to prepare myself.

I don't mind things that I can work out and do on my own like working out how to set up online payments. Google street view has been a godsend when I have to go to a new address.

I so often get told "You can do X so Y should be no problem". I think it is impossible to explain that it doesn't work that way.

Iammaz, that is exactly it. The only way I've been able to explain it to NTs is by saying, "it's like a phobia." But I don't feel scared to collect my tax documents or mail a letter or interview potential barn help, which is the emotion I associate with phobias. I just need to "gut it up" to do what others feel is simple, expending terrific amounts of willpower that leave me good for nothing else that day.

Just want to add, what I feel when I contemplate doing one of the "hard" things is sudden exhaustion.

I, too, have to plan ahead at least a day, and preferably much more, to schedule the "hard" thing, and then avoid thinking about it while I do it.