The Mental Battery
The mental battery feels flat today. Zero sleep because the stress jug overflowed.
Two days ago I was back into a 40k word manuscript I wrote – a new short fiction collection called Madheads – and I felt optimal. The battery was charged.
It changes so fast, and so frequently in this 1000mph world.
This way of life we’ve all become victims of. All those demands on our time and attention wear us down. Leading with creativity requires a slower pace, some space for reflection, pondering and pottering aimlessly. But that space is precious and hard to find in a world in which patience is a dying art.
We have to be intentional about preserving our mental battery. I ask coaching clients if they’d just hammer their phone, draining the battery in the first few hours of a long day out without consideration for its limits. They tell me no, they’d need to make it last so they can get home and be available. So, why do we treat our minds differently, then? They have the same finite energy.
When my stress jug overflows, everything feels heavier. Simple tasks like replying to a message, or putting laundry away overwhelm me, causing cortisol floods and a racing heart. When I lived in London I wanted all of the bustling lifestyle and spent weeks at a time in that frayed, exhausted state, sat at my desk, staring at the wall, or dicking around on social media because I wasn’t managing the battery well enough. The tank was empty.
I’ve never let a client down, but to deliver, I have to work against my sorry self, hair askew, giant crack bags under my eyes, straddling my nose. My untrained puppy of a brain received little training until my late 30s when I began to suffer at the hands of a frenetic and action-packed existence.
I’ve never been very good at stress management, but I’m getting there.
A rising tide of anxiety over the last few years forced better organisation and deep inner work. But the thing is, even in making a decision like getting organised, sensitivity to information processing capacity must be applied. Some people love digital tools and planners, but my brain abhors a system. It must be 10-year-old friendly for me to commit. I’m happy to admit that.
Simple ruled notebook, one column for DO and another for REPLY, then distil it down into Google Calendar. Sometimes I neglect to write in the book, and sometimes I forget to check Google Calendar. But progress has been made.
Social media had to be whittled down to the lowest possible use to remain visible. That’s why I accepted the Do Radio invite to co-host I Am Not Creative with Danny Allison. It seemed like a form of marketing that wasn’t contrived, that filled my battery insted of depleting it.
Each of us owes ourselves such honesty. If it kills you every time you go onto whichever platform, then don’t.
I used to like Instagram. Now it assails me with content and adverts that bruise my happiness and scream at my inner peace. I’ve been sharing the radio show there, but I found more focus on LinkedIn served me well. I’m conflicted and still working it all out.
Danny is incredibly candid about his mental breakdown before he committed to his creativity and got well. For this alone, episode 2, ‘The Mental Battery’ is worth one hour of your time.
Today I have to put my head in battery-save mode. This means limiting my intake, ordering tasks in single file and giving each one all of my attention. Writing everything down in my embarrassing notebook. If I don’t, it’ll start running around my brain when my head hits the pillow.
I remember a time I spent sharing a workspace with Danny in Sydney, Australia. 40 degrees heat and a massive workload. Sleep deprivation and work stress brought on these terrifying lucid dreams, or waking nightmares, one of which involved a dribbling, vampiric possum at the end of the bed.
Too many creators are trapped in an exhausting loop of excessive information and sensory overload, leading us to a place where it is so testing to be optimistic and hard to sustain any kind of regular, healthy curiosity. When the battery is flat, we are marooned from great ideas, insights, and big steps forward become sideways shrieks voicing agitation and discontent. Then, thanks to the low processing power, we build damaging narratives about our creative desire, or our belonging in this industry, our ability to make great work.
It need not be this way, but only we can design it for ourselves.
Danny and I are getting into all of this on episode 2 of I Am Not Creative on https://thedoradio.com which airs three times daily all week. Each episode will be available on demand 3 weeks after release.