My Healthy Habits Can't Fix Everything

When it's time to look at what you've been avoiding

Several years ago, I sat on a call with an organizational consultant who was explaining the results of my leadership assessment to me. He told me that my scores on the work/life balance portion of the assessment indicated that I was severely burned out. I couldn’t help but laugh. The test was right, and I knew it. I’d just decided to give notice and leave my job as a growth equity investor several days before.

Over the past few years, I’ve worked to reverse a lot of the habits and tendencies that led me to get sucked into a cycle of perpetual burnout. I am now religious about sleep, I prioritize exercise and getting outside, and perhaps most importantly I no longer check email before I’m about to go to bed. I don’t want to even think about the amount of sleep debt caused by checking slack messages from my bed (face palm). All that to say, I’ve gotten a good handle on stress and built a foundation of healthy habits that allows me to be ambitious but generally operate and work in a much healthier way. Turns out, life is a lot easier and my brain works better on eight solid hours of sleep with regular exercise. Who knew!

However, what I’ve come to realize is that healthy habits are not the end all and be all. Sometimes I can be doing all the things and still feel the tension of stress; that nagging sense that something is wrong or off. It’s easy in those moments to hyper analyze sleep, try going to bed earlier, prioritize an extra long walk, pull out the meditation app…you get the gist. And sometimes things have gotten out of whack and that is the right answer. But the point of this essay is that sometimes it’s not. Recently I’ve come to realize that in the moments when I’m generally taking good care of myself and finding it hard to escape tension and stress, it’s a sign that I’m avoiding something and no amount of extra sleep, exercise, or additional walks can make up for facing the thing that I need to face. Maybe it’s a tough conversation with a client. Maybe it’s a feeling I have a hard time acknowledging like sadness or anger. Maybe it’s something that my gut has known but that I don’t want to believe. Maybe it’s a business decision that feels scary. I think hyper fixation on healthy habits is what the neuropsychologist Julia DiGangi calls the “overs.” As she writes in her book, Energy Rising,

“Recall that ‘overs’ are a pain-avoidance response. You might work because you enjoy it, but you overwork because you are afraid of what might happen if you don’t. The act of thinking likely brings you plenty of pleasure, but overthinking is brutal. And where giving is enjoyable, overgiving is depleting.”

Let me tell you - obsessing over sleep, exercise routines, and healthy habits when they are already solid is depleting. What I’ve learned is that there is no relief quite like facing the thing I need to face even when it’s scary. There are moments where I could swear to you that the tension is quite literally melting off of me when I finally stop avoiding the thing I’ve been working so hard not to face. That’s probably the most insidious aspect of avoidance - it ends up creating more stress than the stress you are allegedly avoiding!

All this to say, please keep prioritizing sleep, exercise, time outside, and anything you know helps you operate at your best. Healthy habits are incredibly important, but they can’t fix everything. I’m endeavoring to take the space in the moments when I’m doing all the right things to not optimize my sleep schedule further, and instead take a deep breath, and give myself the space to ask: What are you avoiding?