Echoes of Accountability: One More Chapter Down
Greetings, Echolettes!
Alas, I have not had the most productive of weeks. I still managed to show up and work on my novel most days, but only a little here and there, and I only made it through one more chapter of edits since last week — nowhere near what I’d planned to do.
Still, progress is progress.
The problem is that I got dumb with my health. Longtime readers may remember how last spring I had to take a long break due to health issues. The biggest problem then was having no energy, which I eventually figured out was likely caused by adrenal fatigue. I cut back on caffeine, eliminated some stress, gave myself plenty of rest and adjusted my diet, and eventually I recovered my energy and got back to normal.
But it seems I’ve made my adrenals unhappy once again. I thought I was doing a good enough job of taking good care of myself, but in my determination to develop more consistent habits, I’ve been great at consistently getting up an hour earlier, but not so great at consistently turning out my light on time the night before. And I’ve been making up for the sleep deficit by drinking more coffee and caffeinated tea. Which is a perfect recipe for adrenal fatigue.
Sure enough, this week my body said NOPE! to what I was doing and started refusing to cooperate. I’ve been pushing through, battling tiredness and brain fog with MORE coffee because I am dense and slow to figure things out. It finally hit me what’s likely happening yesterday when we were at Walmart around 9 AM and I hit a wall and crashed so hard I literally could have lain down right there in the aisle and fallen asleep.
So starting today I’m being kinder and gentler to myself. The prescription for my woes is to slow down, prioritize sleep, cut WAY back on caffeine and get some gentle exercise and movement, preferably outdoors in the sunshine, when the sun decides to make an appearance in these here parts, occurences of which lately have been few and far between.
I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll be well enough to get things back on track by Monday, but it’ll likely take quite a bit longer to fully heal and recover. But let this be a lesson to you — and to my future self — not to get complacent and fall back into old, health-damaging habits once you start feeling good again.
Am I happy about having to cut back on the coffee? Not really. I LOVE coffee. But I love having energy more, and there are few things I hate more than having time for my projects but not having the capacity to do anything with them.
If all goes well, I’ll be sending out the Big Letter for February during the first half of next week, and I’ve got something a little different in store which I hope you’ll enjoy more than the standard “here’s what I’ve been up to lately” e-mail. So keep an eye out for that.
We’ll skip the cool thing this week but I’ll leave you with this tweet that cracked me up:
Until next time,
Jean