S3 E7: Compassionate Productivity in Your Real Life
Do you have a less-than-healthy relationship with productivity? I did, too, for a long time. In this episode I share how I changed that, and how I became more compassionate in my productivity. I also share what compassionate productivity actually means, with lots of tangible ways to put it into practice in real life, including all of those imperfect and un-ideal situations!
TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
The many personal meanings that people have for productivity
My relationship with productivity over the years and how I improved it
My experiment with time blocking in spring 2020
What compassionate productivity means
Ways you can put compassionate productivity into practice in real life
Being strategic about breaks
Balance between structure and flexibility
Integrating self care into how you work
Expecting less from yourself
Having an experimental mindset
Letting your mindset help you be kind to yourself
RESOURCES DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity workbook
Other podcast appearances where I talk about my experience with anxiety + burnout
Season 3 Episode 5 - How to Nurture Your Relationship with Creativity
My Instagram (tag me when you post about what compassionate productivity looks like for you!)
Self Control app for blocking websites
TRANSCRIPT
Hey, everyone, welcome to Season 3, Episode 7 of Being A Whole Person. Today's topic is putting compassionate productivity into practice in real life. I know in some ways it feels really weird to talk about productivity right now, when the entire West Coast is burning, we're still in a pandemic. There's all kinds of crazy things going on. If it feels like you're just hanging on by a thread right now, I totally get it, and I'm with you. I also know that even though taking time off might not be possible for you, and taking all the space that you want to rest and process all of this might not be possible for you. You probably still have responsibilities, a lot of you have kids that you are helping through distance learning right now, and that's just starting back up again.
There are all kinds of responsibilities that we have for ourselves and the people that we take care of, and those aren't going to go away just because all this stuff is happening. So that is why I want to think about compassionate productivity now, and all the time. We have to be kind in what we're expecting ourselves to do and how we go about it.
I'm seeing so many people expecting themselves or being expected by us to just keep going full speed ahead as if nothing was wrong, as if nothing is abnormal in 2020, and I think that's kind of crazy. If you're able to go full speed ahead, and it doesn't have a negative effect on you, that's awesome. But for most of us, I think we're sensitive and plowing full speed ahead is going to catch up with us.
I don't want you to be pressuring yourself to be in that position, because we're not machines, we're humans, and we're processing this ongoing trauma and uncertainty. You know, there's always uncertainty in life, but it feels acutely present right now. So, before I get into what compassionate productivity is, just want to say that productivity means something different to each of us. It's very personal.
I surveyed a bunch of people on what it meant to them and I heard lots of different things: stuff about factory work, like, our 40 hour work week was designed for a factory, that people want to be productive so they can get work done as fast as they can, so they can have fun; that they weren't “good at it.” They're like, “Oh, productivity is something that's problematic for me.” And if that's you, the next two episodes are going to be on mindset shifts so you can be more compassionate about productivity, so look forward to that.
But it's interesting, productivity has a lot of weight to it. Creative work requires a different structure than that 40 hour work week stereotype, and I know the lines between work and life are blurry, and for some of you it might be a total overlap. Then it's also tricky because our identities are wrapped up in our work, and our work is really important to us. So I'm not here to make a binary like: work = bad, rest = good, because It's not that simple.
I know also that people like to say, “Do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life.” If you feel that way, I'm super happy for you, but for a lot of us, that's just kind of this mythical ideal that we can never really live up to.
Even the work we love the most takes energy to do creative work takes a lot of energy, even when you love it, and of course, there are the more mundane parts of it that might not give you energy in that same way. So, we have to be mindful of how we're using our energy.
My history with productivity is complicated. I used to be kind of obsessed with productivity hacks, and tricks, and optimizing, and all this stuff. I'm really good at over-researching things, so I would spend a lot of time reading all the productivity articles and then never really putting into practice the things that I learned, and this was all underpinned by the attitude that productivity is the most important thing, work is the most important thing. And if I am not doing that, I am doing a bad job - not the most healthy of attitudes.
In 2020, I started to do an experiment with time blocking that kind of led to this focus on compassionate productivity, and I'll tell you about that in a second. But first, I want to contrast it with what things were like for me in 2015, which is the last time I did time blocking. I know I talked about this a little bit in Episode 4 of this season, but I didn't get very into depth with it. I think it's important to kind of understand how this idea came about.
Like I said, I had this attitude that work was very important, and more important than most other things. I put a lot of pressure on myself and there wasn't really room for much else in my life. That was stressful for me, as you can imagine.
When I was teaching piano, which was my main work back then, I had 30 students, I had a packed schedule, you know, back-to-back lessons for hours. And I'm an introvert, so all this was very draining. It's not that I hated every second of it, or anything like that, but, for an introvert to spend one on one focus time like that every day for hours on end, it takes a lot of energy.
Then when you're working without breaks, or without it being easy to take a break, like I couldn't drink enough water. The nice thing about drinking enough water is it forces you to take more bathroom breaks, which gets you up and taking breaks. But of course, that wasn't really happening either because kind of the whirlwind pace of things made it like my body and its needs were an afterthought, inconvenient at best, probably. So, that pace of work, as you can guess, caught up with me in the form of pretty bad burnout and anxiety in 2017. I'll do a whole episode about the story of that, and I also have some interviews that I've done on other podcasts where I talk about that, I can link to some of those.
But I knew that I didn't want to return to that kind of schedule, because I saw what it had done to me, I saw it wasn't sustainable. I'd look back at my schedule from that time, because it's on Google Calendar, and I almost had a heart attack, because my schedule looks so full, not just from all the time I was spending teaching, but because I would time-block all the rest of my time and make it completely full. I would even feel kind of rushed while eating meals and basic things like that.
My Tuesday schedules back then were terrible. I had three students that I taught right away at eight in the morning, and then I would come home and try to work as much as possible until I came back to teach from 2 to 8pm. That didn't work for me. So, I knew that when I tried time blocking again, in 2020, I wasn't going to do it like that.
After the pandemic hit, I had felt the urge to be very unstructured in my time, because we were all adjusting to that stress, and it just really wasn't the time to pressure myself to have a lot of structure. It felt nurturing for me to not have structure for a while, but about a month in, I really started to crave having more structure, and knew that I would have to create it in a way that met my needs. That was flexible enough, and that would be kind to myself, because why would I want to put even more pressure on myself on top of the stress of being in a pandemic?
If you heard me say “time blocking” just now, and you're like, “Ooh,” compassionate productivity is not all about time blocking, time tracking, pro level structure. It doesn't have to be about that stuff at all, if you don't want it to. It's about being kind and working in a way that actually works for you, and that includes the adaptability that you need there to be.
I really hated the pressure that came with the word productivity, and the implication that we had to set aside our own needs and work constantly in order to be good, to do good work - the whole hustle mentality. So once I started thinking about how I want to work, and how I want to feel when I work, and how does productivity matter to me, the word compassionate kept coming up again and again in my mind.
I came up with a definition that compassionate productivity is working in the way that feels best and most effective for you personally, at any given moment, with the knowledge that that will change throughout the course of a day, throughout the course of a week throughout the course of seasons in your life, and that's fine. Also, that you want to work in a way that replenishes your energy as much as possible, and making it sustainable in the long run. Work, hopefully, that can make you feel good, because feeling good while you work helps you be more productive.
They aren't opposites, like I used to believe. They just feed each other - if you feel good, you're going to work more effectively, so this inherently honors your energy capacity. It is not productivity for the sake of productivity. It is doing the work that actually matters to you, knowing why you're doing that work, making sure you feel good about how you're spending your time, making sure those actions backup creating meaning in your life, being purposeful about your productivity. And the more energy you replenish, the more that you can put into your creative practice.
But, if that doesn't feel possible right now, during a pandemic, this episode is not to pressure you to optimize your time and do all the things and make sure that you write your novel and write your album and all this stuff. If you're feeling kind of disconnected from your creativity right now, Episode 5 of this season is all about nurturing your relationship with your creativity, and there's lots of different prompts that you can go through to make friends again, if you're feeling a little bit estranged. So, if you haven't heard that one yet, I recommend you go back to it.
During this experiment, with the time blocking and productivity that I was doing last April 2020, I was actually more productive, because I was being so intentional about what I was going to do. It wasn't just that I had a structure, but it was that in order to figure out the structure, it forced me to determine what were the most important things for me to be doing, and then placing them on the calendar accordingly.
So today, I want to talk about putting compassionate productivity into practice in real life,
because we can talk about these concepts forever, but if you don't know how to actually use it in your life, it's not that helpful, right? I've been sharing about this a lot in my Instagram stories, and this is in a highlight on my profile if you want to look at some examples. I’ll write, “what compassionate productivity looks like for me today,” and then I'll make a little bullet point list and then invite whoever's reading it to weigh in on what it looks like for them.
I've collected a bunch of different ideas there, and I'm also going to collect a bunch of different ideas into a compassionate productivity menu, a free PDF that you can download in the show notes. And I say a menu, not a checklist, because it's not a checklist. You don't need to do everything on the list. It's like if you go to a restaurant, you're not like, “Okay, I need to go down this list and eat everything on here,” because that would be crazy. That's too much. You're like, “I'm in the mood for the fish today. So that's what I'm going to order.” Same with these compassionate productivity ideas. You're going to see, okay, what do I really need today, and you're going to pick based on that,
If you want more instruction on how exactly to put this into practice with more methodology, my e-book Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity walks you through how to make your to do list and schedule based on what you need in your life, what you need to get done, in a kind way that doesn't make you feel bad about yourself. Most importantly, in the month of September,, I have a bonus going on where if you buy a copy of the ebook, you also get a week of Q&A support from the date that you buy the book. So if you get stuck on something, you can send me an email, and let me know what your questions are, and I will send you a personalized video answer in loom, which is great, because you don't have to download anything, I just send you the video and you watch it. So that's a cool thing that is going through the end of September. Just want to put that in there.
All these ideas that I'm going to say today about compassionate productivity, none of them are binary. It's not like, work nonstop or quit everything. It's easy for things to seem like a binary and for people to talk in extreme terms about this stuff sometimes, but they're always shades of gray with this. If you only have the energy to try one little idea once, that's totally fine. And then you can see, “Okay, did this help?” And if it did, you might try it again. And if it didn't, you might not try it again. Or you might wait a while and try it again, whatever feels like the right thing to do.
These ideas are also not going to be productivity hacks. Some of them might be that, but it's not for the sake of productivity. Like I said earlier, it's doing this stuff because you really care about being kind to yourself.
So first, I want to talk about breaks. Taking breaks used to make me feel bad, even short breaks. I remember those terrible Tuesday schedules that I would have. I'd be sitting and eating lunch right before I had to leave for the teaching studio, and I'd be like, Okay, I have 15 minutes before I have to leave and I have to eat really fast. Then, maybe if I eat fast enough, I can still do this other thing before I leave. I would try to cram in as much as possible because it was like, I can't waste those extra minutes. I should just keep going.
It would make me feel if I took a break, I was falling behind, and then I would never get everything done. That binary extreme thinking was creeping in there. Then when I used to do those time blocks, if I got behind on one of them due to taking a break, it was like, okay, now the next one has to extend, and then suddenly everything is pushed ahead, and it all falls apart, mostly because I was pretty unrealistic about how much I could achieve in a day. I felt very bound to it, and I didn't have the flexibility, but more about that later.
We really have to make space in our schedules for breaks, and buffer time before we even start. You might need more breaks than you deem acceptable. You probably need more breaks than you deem acceptable, especially right now, with so much happening this year. I think specifically scheduling breaks can be a great tool. If you want to just go with the flow, and you're like, “Well, I scheduled a break at 12:45,” and, you know, I don't want that, whatever, that's fine, keep going. But just make sure you still take the break, it can flex to when you need it.
Making sure you have a break after something that you need to process mentally can be so essential. If you have to go straight into the next thing, you might not get a chance to process it. Having recovery time after energy intensive activities, like when I record a podcast episode or do an interview - I know that that's something I need to rest after. I go more into this in the e-book, too.
But, I think the most important thing is to be strategic about your breaks. You can be strategic about when you take them, like I always have a sort of a 2pm slump in my energy. I plan on having a break then because my brain doesn't work very well. I know that I'm not going to get much work done during that time, so taking a break then is perfect. And then, being strategic about what breaks do for you, like, this sounds really basic, but taking snack breaks, or taking breaks to drink water. You don't have to take a break to drink water, I know, but like, how many times have you been like, “Wow, I've been sitting here like an hour after I thought, I should get up to have a snack,” and your brain needed food,and you didn't give it to your brain. So, you know, that can be an afterthought.
You might need a break just to have some quiet time, or to engage in meditation, or some spiritual practice. Sometimes I like to pull some tarot cards. Sometimes I like to just take a cat break. Like yesterday here in California, it was very dark and smoky and orange and I'm sure you saw it on the news, because it was crazy, but it was very unsettling. I felt the need to pick up my cat several times during the day. I just picked him up and held him and walked the length of my house, just like paced up and down in sort of a meditative way, and that was an amazing break, because it got me away from my computer. It felt really nice to kind of hug something warm.
You might need a reading break to get away from screens, other types of self care breaks. Knowing why you're taking the break and what the purpose is can be really helpful. But you can always just take a break and stare at the wall. You don't have to be like, “My break has to have this very specific intention,” if that feels like too much pressure.
I know also, doing creative tasks in small bursts can be great. If you kind of hit the wall and get some brain fog in the middle, it's okay to just work as long as you have the capacity for and then take a break, as long as you have that flexibility. I think most of us can create more of that flexibility than we think we can.
We just kind of have a lot of ideas of what productivity should look like. And we're trying to match those, even though nobody's making you match those. You're allowed to do what is best for you.
Another element to play with is the balance between structure and flexibility. So, to have a schedule that really works with your energy level, I think you really have to be flexible. I know that's not always possible, but if you do have control over the structure of your day, you have to be willing to be flexible and respond to your energy: what it is in that day, what it is in that moment. Like, maybe in the morning, you're feeling awesome, like you crank out all this stuff. You make your to do list, it has like 10 to 15 things on it, and then after lunch, you just hit the wall mentally and you're like, “Whoa, there's no way I can finish this, this isn't realistic at all.”
Then you could respond to that by beating yourself up over it. Or, you could just say, “Alright, I guess some of this has to happen tomorrow, how can I adapt to make that happen?” Just knowing that that adjustment is normal, and it's going to happen, and you will just do it. There's going to be even more of that adjustment based on energy now, because we're dealing with so much anxiety and uncertainty.
You can kind of predict, to some extent, like I was saying about my 2pm slump being a normal thing. I don't try to do creative work at that time, or anything that takes a lot of mental energy, because I know it just doesn't work for me. I might do something boring, like going over accounting stuff, just mundane things like that. Or, on Friday afternoons, I have this period of time that I call “leftovers”, or the random stuff that you don't want to interrupt something else to do it. But I batch that together on a Friday afternoon, because I don't care if I'm kind of bopping between things, I'm kind of tired, and then I can just kind of get those things done.
Also, if you're a person with a menstrual cycle, tracking that has been a real game changer for me. Knowing that the second week of my cycle is going to be when I have the most energy physically, has been so so helpful. And knowing that after that point, it just wanes until the cycle starts again. So I don't expect as much of myself during those lower energy parts of the cycle. I'm not an expert on this, but I will find some resources to put in the show notes about it.
You can create structure in a less time bound way too, by batching things together. For instance, I'm going to be recording a few podcast episodes at once today because it's easier to stay in the same frame of mind. I like feeling ahead and not behind. Sometimes I also leave room
for adapting based on like weather conditions, or external conditions. Like if I know it's gonna be really hot, I might save my errand for the afternoon, because that's when I'll want to get out of the house and it'll be too hot for me to really focus on anything, without air conditioning. Or like with the air quality issues we've been having lately, I might save my walk. Even though I like to do it in the morning, I might save it for whenever the air quality is better. And again, I know not everyone has the same flexibility in their schedule, but maybe there's some space for some of it.
Another big theme of compassionate productivity is expecting less from yourself. And I know, perfectionists, overachievers, you're cringing a little bit right now. Honestly, I have cringed many times, it's a process of sort of retraining my brain not to think of expecting less as laziness or, you know, doing a bad job. But honestly, you might have to scale your expectations back when there's so much going on. Even when there isn't so much going on, you still might have to.
Even a half hour of focused work could be better than eight hours of scattered work. If you haven't really made that commitment that, you're working now, and you're just kind of bopping around the internet and “Oh, yeah, I should get back to that email I was writing,” and then you get distracted for another, you know, hour or whatever.
Then, that time you save in between could be spent doing something else that is more replenishing for you. I think one of the hardest things about expecting less of yourself is not pushing through when you're tired, because it just feels like you have to, right? You have to uphold your responsibilities. But energy is not infinite. I know, newsflash, everybody knows that, but really, it's really hard to accept, because I feel like we're expected to have infinite energy.
I like to think about waves in the ocean. Energy goes in waves in the same way - even the biggest wave is still going to crash into the shore. But, it's all cyclical, the waves are gonna keep coming, that wave doesn't crash and then the ocean’s like, “Okay, I'm done now.” It all is just a big cycle. That can be freeing, or that can be frustrating if you're like, “No, I just want more energy, why can't I have all of it?”
So I know you can't change the fact that it's a cycle, but you can do things to support yourself, so that expending energy is more balanced with actually replenishing it. I have found it personally hard to trust that there will be waves that will keep coming back, even though I just said that about the ocean, and that it's a cycle. Like, you might be afraid that this wave will end and you won't get the energy back. You just want to keep riding that wave you're on. You might want to ride it past the point of using up your energy and into burnout.
That trust, I know, I know, it's hard. But the more that you can cultivate that, the more you can be kind to yourself, and actually trust that that rest that you're taking is going to build you up for the next wave.
So some tangible ways that you can do this. Deleting things from your schedule that don't have to happen, delegating them to other people, if that's possible. Maybe you realize you need to defer some project that's just not that urgent right now. I know that's not always possible when you're bound to other people's expectations, but there might be more wiggle room than you think. Just be willing to ask yourself that. There might be something that you thought you're expected to do, but you're really not expected to do or you've always done a certain way, in an overachieving way, but maybe you don't have to?
I know this can come up in personal stuff as well as work stuff. Like, maybe you always bake a cake from scratch to bring to your family birthday gatherings. But maybe this time, you just go buy something. That might be sort of a silly example. But a lot of us have so many of these expectations on ourselves, and maybe they just don't have to be that way, and it's totally fine.
Putting fewer things on your to do list. I know this one is hard, and I struggle with this still sometimes. But making that shorter list to start, and then if you complete that, usually lets you get as much done as if you made a huge list and you're like, “Oh man, I didn't finish everything on the list.” One of them inherently makes you feel good about yourself, even though you have a choice about that, of course, but finishing the short list, awesome, I finished the list. But finishing half the list of those same five items or whatever, doesn't feel as good. So if you can support yourself in that by starting smaller and being realistic about it, that's awesome. This is a long process too, I know.
Setting boundaries on your own work hours, that can be a huge slippery slope. If you're someone who works for yourself, or if you're working from home right now.
Like, have you ever eaten dinner, and then been like, “I'm just gonna grab my laptop again, and I'm just gonna do this one thing,” and then 10pm rolls around and you're like, whoa, I'm still here? I just worked all day long, oops, and that probably wasn't quality work, because you've been putting in so many hours. And then maybe the TV is on at the same time and you're kind of distracted, in and out, or other things are going on in your house at the same time, and your focus is just kind of waning, it's been a long day. So if you just close the laptop after, like, 15 minutes of that just one more thing, or maybe not even opening it again. You might actually get more done, starting fresh the next day.
I know that always feels risky, because it's like, well, what if I don't have the more energy the next day and that just puts me further behind? But trust, and notice what isn't isn't working for you.
You might have to accept that things take longer than you think they will. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating how long things will take. Like, I think we should double all our estimates just as a baseline, maybe like triple or quadruple, because that's just how it works. And that's okay, because we have to accept what actually is right.
Also, accepting an un-ideal physical or mental state can be really helpful. I know sometimes I wake up and I'm like, “Oh, I'm anxious this morning. I hate this. This is a terrible day.” When in reality, it's like well, no, it will probably pass in a couple hours and I can do things. I could go take a walk. I can, you know, eat breakfast if I'm hungry. I can do things that might help the anxiety move through. And it doesn't mean I have to write off an entire day. Or if I'm really tired that day, who knows, I might get more energy at a later time in the day, it doesn't mean the entire day is shot, you can do something with it.
But on the flip side of that, be careful of making yourself work extra hard, just because you feel really good that day. I know I've heard people talk about the Tuesday slump, because they feel fresh on Monday, and they're like, yeah, I'm gonna crank it out. And then they work like a 12 to 14 hour day. Then, the next day, they're just dragging, because they went way beyond their capacity, but they just didn't quite realize it, because it was the first day of the week and it hadn't built up. The tiredness hadn't built up yet.
I kind of just touched on this, with the ideal physical or mental state, but I think mindset is such a huge piece of compassionate productivity too. I'm going to talk more about this in the next couple episodes, I'm gonna walk you through limiting beliefs about productivity that I've identified, and some mantras for reframing them. Those have been really helpful for people when I've posted them, so look forward to that.
The mindset part of compassionate productivity is mostly about the word compassionate, being kind to yourself and how you react to what you can and can't get done in a day. You're not a failure because you didn't finish all the things. You're not a failure because you didn't carry out your plan exactly as you wrote it out. You can prime yourself a little bit by visualizing what your productive day could look like - setting some intentions for it.
And, like I keep saying, noticing what happens, noticing if something needs changing and then thinking about how you can change it is a huge part of this, too, that experimental mindset. Viewing it all as an experiment really helps you detach from those emotions that you might be tying to what you didn't get done. It really helps you not judge yourself as much, because inherently within this process is things not going as planned.
So if you can accept that, and of course, this is a process too, but if you can accept that, it's so freeing, because if you're trying to do things perfectly all the time, you're going to fail, because you're not perfect. You're human, and it's impossible to do things perfectly.
It's so much kinder to just say, this is an experimental mindset. I'm ready to deal with things that don't go perfectly, and I get to adapt whenever I want to. I get to test and change because that is a part of the process. It's science. It's not just failure that you have to internalize and put on your permanent record.
You can experiment with the time of day that you do things, like we were talking about earlier, or the day of the week that you do things. I like to ask myself questions about how is it really working for me? Like, it's an interesting experiment to see if I can adjust how I feel, in those moments when I feel pressured. I just ask myself, “Do I have to feel rushed right now? Do I have to feel stressed right now? Do I have to pressure myself right now?” And usually the answer is no. Or, do I have to do all those things this much - can I reduce it at all?
For those of you who do have a stricter schedule, that don't have control over it, or this mindset piece comes in too, you can choose not to contribute to the feeling of being rushed or stressed. You can say, I'm gonna take five extra minutes to do this thing. Sometimes when I'm manufacturing that rushed or stressed feeling for myself, I will deliberately take 10 extra minutes to make my breakfast a little more elaborate, just to send the message to myself that, okay, I'm allowed to slow down a little bit. Those 10 minutes, I don't take those if I have something like, I have an appointment with somebody or anything like that, but when I have extra 10 minutes, it's easy to convince myself I don't have an extra second, but it just sort of proves to my brain, okay, yeah, I am allowed to be a little more luxurious. And that's great.
You can choose to view what you're doing in a more positive light, finding fun in it where you can, or just infusing fun into your day that doesn't relate to your work, if you just don't have it in you to make your work fun. That's okay. But mostly letting go of the “this must happen or I'm a failure” idea. Sometimes we put such pressure on ourselves to keep doing things the way that we've been doing them, and we can be so hard on ourselves about this. Just take a second, remind yourself, yeah, there's another way. Maybe you don't have to be so hard on yourself.
I'm not saying that you need to fix it immediately, in that moment, because that's a lot of pressure, too. You're just planting a little seed: “Oh, maybe I don't have to think this way.” Or just asking the question like, what if this isn't true? What if I don't have to be hard on myself right now. Anytime that you notice it happening, that's a huge victory ,because we have so many subconscious thoughts like this, that we don't notice throughout the course of a day. So just taking a second to notice it. Thank yourself for noticing it.
You also might notice anxiety. Your body is giving you a message that something needs to be adjusted. It might mean you need something else, more care, a different kind of care. You might need to make yourself feel more safe in that moment. And doing that in a way that engages your senses is a great thing to do. I like to put my hand on my heart and just take a deep breath when I feel that way. You can be more intentional about checking news. That's a huge one for me, because the doom scroll is powerful.
I've coined this term called the digital munchies for when you feel kind of anxious, and you feel like you have to be glued to the scroll, because you have to consume all of the news about it. And ironically, the more anxious you get about it, the more tabs you open, and then the more that feeds your anxiety. This whole self perpetuating cycle. You just have to cut yourself off in
order to break this cycle, set limits on your consumption of social media and news. I really like the Self Control app if you have a Mac, and I know there are PC options too, which I should look up. But basically, you can blacklist or whitelist websites for a certain number of hours, and your computer will not let you access them - Facebook, Twitter, all that stuff. That's been really helpful for me.
Maybe your inner child is trying to talk to you, too, like you're feeling extra tender. Your inner child might need more comforting at that time. This seems to be most days for me lately. And I know, along with these hustle-based ideas of productivity, come the ideas that comfort is a bad thing, like the message that you can't stay in your comfort zone because you'll never achieve anything you'll never grow. I see what you're saying there, if you never leave your comfort zone, that could be detrimental to your growth. But if you're feeling stressed, comfort is not a bad thing. Comfort might be what you need.
There's definitely a place for pushing yourself, but when you're already in a traumatic, anxious state, that's not a time when you need to push yourself. Just check in on that. Am I in a place right now where I can push harder? Would I benefit from that? Or am I in a place right now where I'd really benefit from feeling more comforted?
Some of my favorite things to do are to lay under a weighted blanket, putting my hand on my chest like I was talking about. Just asking myself what I need, as if I were a friend asking me and then of course, my relaxation mentor, Rusty the cat, I take breaks to pet him or pick him up.
So those are a bunch of tangible ideas for how you can put compassionate productivity into practice. The effects of this really do spill outward to how you're able to show up in your life, how are you able to show up for other people for your work, take action on issues that matter to you. You really have to take care of yourself in order to take care of everything else. So I hope you can take this to heart.
Pianist and composer