“I can’t want to” has been our household’s favorite saying created by my 4 year old son Sebastian. He uses it in all of his toddler rage and drama when he doesn't want to do something. Today, I completely understood what he meant by it.
It was one of those days where I just was in a FUNK and I did not want to do ANYTHING. I love starting my day with a workout and even though I reluctantly pushed through it, I just did not have any “want to” in me.
I was venting to hubby and he said something that made me press pause in my crazy over thinking suffering from analysis paralysis brain. “The more you work, the less your return on investment is.” At first I didn't get it. Shouldn’t doing everything in my power to make this business thrive make me super productive and amazing? I asked for clarification and he put it pretty simply “The more you work, the less productive you are. Looking at the same thing for a long time can make you miss important stuff. Is it time sensitive? ” Now, while he was speaking more in terms of business and work/life balance the same logic can be applied to our overall health. What I was experiencing even while eating well and exercising daily was in fact very unhealthy.
What happens when we push ourselves to the furthest extent possible mentally, physically, emotionally? We crash. We over think. We make poor decisions. We wrestle with an overloaded foggy brain and settle for quick fixes because we are exhausted. Sprinkle a little guilt right on top because later on we feel like we should have just done it…a recipe for disaster.
Who even told us that we had to work this hard?! Unnecessarily pushing ourselves to the point where we are so stressed out that we “can’t want to” do anything?
I’ll tell you who told me to work that much… I DID. Now, if I would have had a small coaching conversation with myself and pointed some of these things out the way I stated it above I would have never allowed myself to get to this point. But instead it looked and sounded a little more like -
“Okay, just another hour or so.”
“Guys, Mommy just has one more thing to do..”
“If I can just figure this out RIGHT NOW it will be so much easier and streamlined”
“I just need to get this done.”
“I’m just doing research on how to improve this..”
“Just get us something for dinner on your way home because I’m in the middle of something.”
I write this to tell you that the above is NORMAL and happens to ALL of us. What matters most is how we choose to handle it when we see it happening to us. It took some self convincing but I decided to just listen to my hubby. I put on a movie and took care of personal things that I hadn’t paid much attention to for over a week.
Rapper Andy Mineo said it best when he said “I know that I'm good to nobody else, if I can't be good to myself.” We get so caught up in life, all of its moving parts, and responsibilities that we forget that we are responsible for taking care of ourselves too. God didn’t put us on this earth so that we could work, pay bills, be stressed all of the time and die. In fact he actually said he wants us to have peace and live life more abundantly. We are all here for a reason. There are people waiting on you and counting on you. Whether it’s working in the community, for the community, or in your household..people are waiting on YOU.
Are you setting yourself up to be able to do all of that to the best of your ability? Are you prioritizing taking care of you? Are you taking time to slow down? Is it time sensitive? If not - it can wait. Take care of yourself, so that you can better take care of your responsibilities and the people waiting on you. Whether it’s eating, exercising, getting a good night's sleep, doing absolutely nothing and having a REST day…take care of yourself.
Health is an inside job.
XO,
Jess
