Stop Pretending You're Not Tired

A Case Study

On Tuesday I had a breakdown. I was walking through the quaint Buckinghamshire village of Marlow with Amie—grey sky, a little bit of water on the ground, a jumper and a jacket—and I felt that pit open up in my stomach.

The car ride from there to the gym was me just stream of consciousness telling Amie all the reasons I don’t deserve a nice life. Complete illogical bullshit.

Amie tried to calm me down but I was deep in an anxiety spiral. We sat in the gym parking lot for half an hour, watching the boys strut in and out, biceps pumped and legs suspiciously scrawny. Eventually, I decided we should just go inside.

I scanned in, smiled at the guy on the desk out of reflex, and started my warm up. It took two reps of body weight bulgarian split squats for me to realise what had gone wrong.

I was tired.

Yep. That’s it. I wasn’t a worthless piece of shit. I was simply tired.

For some reason, this was obvious when I tried to do something strenuous with my body, but not when I tried to use my mind to cognate through it. An hour of anxiety spiral couldn’t tell me what my legs, arranged as they were at that strange angle, top of the rear foot resting gently on the tattered black bench, knew instantly.

It was the same problem.

It’s simply true that, when I’m tired, I’m more likely to be anxious.

Why?

Why do we so often forget that our brain is part of our body? Why, for our supposed advanced reasoning, does so much more wisdom seem to reside in our quadriceps and our nervous system, than in our cerebellum?

I see this in creative types all the time. We’re in the habit of thinking we are a brain in a jar.

There’s a concept in bodybuilding called Maximum Recoverable Volume. The MRV is how much work you can do in the gym before you lift so much and so intensely, that you actually start to go backwards. Your body can’t recover from the stimulus and so refuses to grow muscle, or even starts eating its own muscle.

Lots of things contribute to your MRV, not just the amount of sets you’re doing in the gym. If you sleep well, eat well, and have low stress, you’ll be able to do more volume in the gym. If you have trash sleep, eat poorly, and have lots of stress in your life, you simply won’t be able to train as hard.

While I’ve never seen a study that proves it (they must exist though), I’m sure something similar happens with our brains.

We can’t improve unless we give ourselves the chance to be well rested.

We also can’t expect our mental health or our cognitive abilities to improve if we don’t give our minds and bodies the respect they deserve. The rest they deserve.

We understand that we can’t simply run continuously for 12 hours (well, unless you’ve specifically trained for it and even then it sure as shit isn’t good for you), yet we have this idea that our brains should just be able to go all day.

You aren’t a brain in a jar! You are a brain in a body!

The Best Example I Have Ever Seen

When Amie signed her contract with Penguin for We Need Your Art, they gave her THREE MONTHS to hand in a completed manuscript. Not just a first draft, a polished to the best of her ability, 60,000 word finished book. When we told other professional writers this they thought it was insane.

I’m not quite sure why the turnaround was so tight. Something to do with production schedules. But it was unusual.

I’ve never seen someone crush such an intense task so easily. The woman was a machine. I remember that time like a blur of productivity. Amie would get up every day with purpose, ready to hit her crazy deadline.

But that’s not really true. For some reason, I remember the writing sessions, but I often forget everything that went into supporting the writing sessions. Amie took immaculate care of her body for those three months.

There were no all nighters. In fact, she slept minimum 9 hours per night.

There were no 10000 word days. She capped herself at 1500 words, even if she was feeling good.

She took a ten day break over Christmas. She ate plenty of food. She went to the gym. She took her SSRIs. She watched TV.

She was amazingly productive but she would have spent ten X more time preparing her body to write, than writing.

I think back to that time in absolute awe of what she accomplished. And she made it look so easy.

If Amie hadn't taken care of herself, there wouldn't have been a book. If she'd written that much each day then also answered 50 emails, slept for four hours, had twenty arguments on twitter, and eaten nothing but hot dogs, it just wouldn't have worked. Or, she would have gotten there and been shattered.

Instead, she handed in the manuscript and was just… fine. Better than fine. She had energy and pep.

I know you know this

I am, of course, not the first person to say any of this. I know you know that you need to be well rested in order to do anything meaningful. But we can let ourselves get sucked into the narrative that more is more.

More weight, more reps, more hours, more words.

It might work in the short term, but, even if you only value yourself on output (which, what??), you’re leaving gains on the table.

Your body knows. Listen to your body.

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Enjoy this article?

You might like this one I wrote about how much I love walking.

Or this one about finding your own work rhythm.