That’s the million dollar question. Bills need to get paid. Family need to be fed and kids need to go to school. So you may not be able to walk out of your “allo blah blah” job tomorrow. Due to the responsibilities that you’ve already picked up, you need to stick around a little longer while you figure a way out. This does not have to be at the expense of your own health though. Luckily there are many tools to help you stay sane and below we outline some of them.
One of the biggest impacts of “allo blah blah” jobs that we outline in the book is on physical health: reduced activity/sedentary lifestyle, high stress, garbage consumption (takeaways or poor quality food) and thus poor sleep. Step 0 to take back control is awareness. You need to take a close look and do a proper “MOT” because your body is your vehicule: what’s your average step count over the last weeks/months? How many take aways have you had this week/last month/last year? What’s your resting heart rate or heart rate variability or any other proxy for stress levels? How many hours are you sleeping and are you getting enough quality sleep? In fact this follows Dr Rangan Chatterjee’s intuitive framework on health: sleep, movement, stress (or relaxation) and diet. The next step is to set yourself quantifiable targets and address any shortfalls you may have. We show you in the book how to do it while juggling your day to day responsibilities but we can not emphasise the first step enough: awareness! It is very easy to live like a Zo(o)mbie while doing allo blah blah non stop. We were Zo(o)mbies ourselves and broke free luckily.
There is obviously a direct correlation between physical and mental health. However there are specific tools to help you strengthen your mental health, which can also take a serious hit from all the blah blah flying around. Meditation was a big discovery for us. It’s one of those buzzwords that you keep hearing but until you experience it first hand, you can only underestimate the benefits. Our basic advice is: give it a try if you haven’t already and experiment for yourself. The key benefit that we experience is that it creates this tiny distance between you, as the observer, and your mental activity, which can be uninterrupted and overwhelming. That tiny distance, which for the sake of the argument is 1 millimetre or below, can be liberating because this stops you from identifying with your mind. Once you stop identifying with your mind, you see it for what it is, a super instrument, or programme, that helps you navigate this (allo blah blah) world but is not supposed to be you. Take a plane, there is software or autopilot, which is a key component of the plane but not the whole plane! If the software goes crazy, and let’s face it, our minds can go crazy during allo blah blah, you need to disconnect it and take back (manual) control. There are plenty of other tools that we outline in the book but meditation is definitely one of the key components. You can do it via any app, or on youtube or without even any tool once you become more familiar with it!
The first two pillars above involve “inner” work and can be summarised as taking better care of your body and mind. Once you do the inner work, you have to take this improved version of yourself to the “outer” world which includes all your social interactions. We like to think of these interactions as energy or currency exchange. You bring in your (hopefully) positive energy and get (hopefully) positive energy back…ideally! We all know how zoom meetings go, they are draining! Do 6 or 7 of them back to back in a day and you’ll have the impression that you ran a marathon while carrying 2 dumbbells of 20kg each (ok maybe we exaggerate a bit). The point is that the balance is negative…even if you bring in the most positive energy in the world, it’s difficult to conceive that you will maintain the same energy or let’s dream, be even more energised, after a day full of zooms with 10-15 participants. So what’s the solution here? We show you in the book how to prioritise your time in work and out of work. Diary management is an important component of that, you can easily reduce both the number and duration of zoom meetings and be ruthless in prioritisation. What you do before and after work to recharge the batteries is super important too. For example, going for a walk and/or doing a meditation before your first zoom does wonders to your day. How many times have you started your day from bed after checking your emails and your first words were “sorry I was on mute”? Asking for a friend…there are countless techniques to help you here as well, but again step 0 is raising your awareness and stop sleepwalking into your day/month/year/….life!
By Hadi and Nabil.