Midlife MavericksThere are talks you leave thinking “that was good”, and there are others that expose you completely. Beatriz Subtil‘s talk on the science of performance was the second kind.
I recognised myself in every slide. I’m obsessive compulsive. Anyone who knows me knows. I work from morning till night, I always have 10,000 things on the go at once, and rest is what happens when my body finally gives out and shuts down.
But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is what comes next.
When I finally stop, I don’t rest. I think about what I should be doing. The task I left unfinished. The email I didn’t answer. There’s always a voice somewhere telling me I should be making better use of my time, that other people are getting ahead while I’m standing still, that resting now means falling behind later. I’m physically sitting on the sofa while mentally compiling a list of everything that condemns me for being on the sofa. At 3am there I was, eyes open on the ceiling, cataloguing everything that needed to be done.
I don’t rest. And then I feel guilty for not resting properly.
I don’t know if this is Galician-Christian. I have my suspicions. I say this as an agnostic, and yet I carry this idea that rest has to be earned, that stopping without justification is morally dubious, that a person’s worth is measured by how much they produce. It’s not the Church telling me this. It’s something much deeper that I can’t quite name, but which is clearly contagious because everyone around me has exactly the same problem.
Beatriz arrived with a different explanation, and it was the first time I felt absolved without having to ask anyone for forgiveness.
The nervous system has one objective: ensure survival. For 95% of our 300,000 years of existence it did this with simple logic: activate when there’s danger, rest when the danger passes. When our ancestors were fleeing predators, the body fired everything it had, resolved the problem, and then switched off. The stress was short and the body knew exactly when it could stand down.
I’m very fond of cheetahs. The fastest animal in the world can reach 120 km/h, but can only sustain that for 20 to 30 seconds. Then it lies still in the savanna for 15 to 30 minutes before it can even eat what it just caught. The body simply stops. If it ignores this, it dies of overheating. The incompatibility for a cheetah in the modern world would be if the predators never stopped, if there was always another lion right behind the last one, no interval, no end. Which is more or less what we’ve invented for ourselves.
The body treats an aggressive email at 6pm exactly the same way it treated a lion. The difference being that the lion ended.
This is where Beatriz really got me. Coffee, sugar, alcohol, scrolling your phone, TV in the background, podcasts playing, all of this keeps the nervous system activated. And I’d been lying to myself for years, believing that convenient story that I was resting while my nervous system stayed on full maximum alert.
After the talk I did something radical: already at the airport, I had a double espresso (sorry Beatriz, but I’m not made of stone) and ate a pastel de nata without opening my phone, without any podcast. Slowly chewing the approximately 457 calories of the custard tart while eyeing the croquettes and rissoles still sitting at the counter, which I couldn’t eat because I’d already had lunch with alheira and morcela. I looked around me without doing anything useful for a good few minutes. I felt completely accomplished for having done absolutely nothing.
I got on the plane, switched everything off, and fell asleep for almost the whole flight. It was wonderful.
I don’t know when resting became something that has to be justified. But until I figure that out, I’ll keep practising. One pastel de nata at a time.
Comment below. What does your 3am list look like, and when did you last let yourself rest without justifying it? I read every response.
This article was first published in Portuguese in my weekly column Oh pá, não me lixem! for Executiva.
