How to take care of an aging racehorse brain

I know I’m fucked when my brain tells me that I absolutely cannot slow down. Those words inside my mind are the call to awareness, the call that I need to put down what I’m doing, and choose to take a break, before my body breaks.

Taking a break is easier said than done, though. As an anxiety-prone entrepreneurial information worker in this late stage capitalist economy, it can feel damn near impossible to stop working. Even as I try to tear myself away from a project, hiding my laptop from myself, my mind will scream at me: We’re almost there! The race is just getting good! Wait, no, just a little bit more! Keep going!

In my 20s and 30s, I loved that screaming. I’d get fatigued, and my mind would start the screams, and the high was in just how hard I could push myself. My nervous system would lean in, my body would check out completely, and my fingers would fly across the keyboard. It was just me and my mind, connecting dots, taking action, lit up with insight, and racing across the internet, my mane flying behind me.

My work brain peaked earlier that I expected, and I ain’t mad about it. In part, that’s because I recognize the fuels behind the peak for what they were: long-held misconceptions about worth and value. Productivity as a compulsion. Coping mechanisms to try to outrun existential discomfort. The sensation of being a cog in the late-stage capitalist machine, my attachment system triggered and manipulated by algorithms.

Once you see it for what it is, the game just isn’t as fun. You see the ways that the race is killing you.

Now I know what happens if I let my brain go too hard, for too long. It’s not a coincidence when a body part spectacularly failed five years ago, it was my ovary. When you over-rely on your creativity (grinding out too many ideas, producing too many little mind-babies), of course it’s a creative organ that eventually explodes.

I only have one ovary left, and I’d like to keep it around through perimenopause, thanks!

I know the costs of an information economy stress fracture, so now when I feel my brain lean in, whispering that whatever I do, I must not stop, I know that it’s time to slow down.

Just like a 40something athlete can’t push in the same ways as they did in their 20s, a 40something information economy worker can’t push in the same ways as she used to.

I try to slow myself down to a canter, and enjoy the ride.

Learning to smell the roses

I’m writing this essay not because I’m so good at slowing down, but because I’m struggling with it right now. Deeply.

I’ve been working too hard these past couple weeks, my friends.

It’s incredibly difficult for me to put down the crackpipe of productivity when I’ve got a new toy to play with and a new venture to build! I start having trouble sleeping when there are too many exciting thoughts! Marketing plans and promotional blitzes and content strategies and and and — and I should really go to bed but I absolutely must keep going!

Blink.

There goes that little light of awareness.

Shit, I’m doing it again.

“I’ve been working myself too hard,” I told a friend. “I had to force myself to stop and go take a bath instead, because otherwise I would have just kept working until midnight.”

Some context, here: My friend is a guy who literally stops to smell the roses.

Sometimes on our walks together, I’ll find myself five breathless minutes into a monologue about some incredibly valuable insight. Take your pick on the topic: self-dev, biz dev, analyzing someone’s behavior from every possible angle, strategizing ways to avoid pain, elaborate mental gymnastics about why I don’t need to feel bad about something, etc etc etc.

My friend will put his hand on my arm, reminding me that I have a body moving through time and space.

Insert an internal record scratch sound here. My brain is always a little baffled by these interruptions. Wait, I… I have an arm?

My friend will then point at a rose bush and say something like, “Hold on — take a load of the smell on this one!”

Smell? I… I have a nose?

Often, the bafflement then gives way to being peeved.

I was right on the brink of saying something profoundly insightful! My analysis was about to reach its impeccably-structured denouement!! If you just give me 60 more seconds, I am about to explain to you the entire framework of the universe!!!

My friend will smile patiently at my protests (…Don’t distract me!), and bend himself toward the rose, and then take a huge theatrical inhalation. Eyes closed, he models for me what it looks like to take 10 seconds to be present in the actual moment, smelling an actual plant, with your actual nose.

Then he looks at me like, “Eh? See how great that was?” Then he leans the rose towards me, and it’s my turn.

UG! So irritating, my brain tells me. You must not stop — we’re having clever thoughts over here! You absolutely must not slow down!

…And there’s my cue to wake up. That’s when I know I’m fucked, and I must slow down. Opposite action, friends. Opposite action.

Then I agonizingly slow my analytics pony down, her eyes rolling with impatience at me. Then, I lean in to smell the roses.

…Oh right! I have a nose. I have a body. There’s a flower here. I can smell the flower with my nose that’s attached to my body, letting the fragrance work its way into my entire present moment!

My brain wants to analyze it (ooh, this one smells apple-y!) or make a compelling story about it (face-palm: guess what I’m doing right now with these very words!), but in that moment, I try to stay with the ineffable experience of smell and sensation.

It’s incredibly difficult, even when I have someone else cue to me.

It’s even more challenging to slow myself without an outside signal.

Ways to choose rest

At least I’m more aware of it, though! Slowly, agonizingly, I’m more aware of my brain’s whisperings.

Having that internal cue helps: through mindfulness, I’ve slowly trained myself to recognize the whisperings to keep going, and use it as a call to awareness.

I know this from my daily prompts from @findingawareness: just recognizing the pattern is often the only action I need to take. If I can be awake enough to notice when I’m running hot and starting to froth at the muzzle, and just be with the noticing (oh look, I’m doing that thing I do!), that’s often enough.

Sometimes that awareness buys me a little wiggle room, a small space to make a different decision. Sometimes I can stop and choose to do something else.

Here are my favorite something elses to do. These are my current favorite ways to choose rest, even when my mind is screaming that I must keep going:

• Put down all devices, sometimes going so far as to hide them from myself. I am truly an addict.
• Take a very long, very hot shower, and then lay down and put on one of Tanis Fishman’s hour-long Yoga Nidra meditations. They make my body buzz with presence. I can rarely stay awake, but trying is half the fun.
• Smoke some weed, wrap myself in a blanket, and sit in the Mama Chair, my armchair that now lives on my balcony. I sit and watch the trees breathe, and watch my neighborhood go about its neighborhooding.
• Make myself a big to-go cup of hot tea, and go for a long walk. Sometimes I make it to the cemetery, or sometimes I take the secret alleys to Volunteer Park. I try to find things I haven’t noticed before.
• Vespers or at least one-song lapdance for god.
• Putter around the house: tidying, organizing, pinching the dead leaves off of houseplants.
• Lay in bed and stare out the window while listening to an audiobook by Eckhart Tolle, or a Ram Dass recording.

Interestingly, as much as I love talking to friends and socializing, generally speaking, doing so doesn’t actually help me rest. My ego gets too excited, and I’m back to analyzing, theorizing, and storytelling. Socializing is lots of fun, but it’s not restful.

Thankfully, I have friends who dare to call me out when I start jazz-handing and falling into my ego trap of entertaining them instead of connecting with them, but it’s hard to stop that ol’ racehorse once she gets going. Still, that’s my responsibility — not anyone else’s.

I’m always looking to expand my repertoire of rest, though… let’s call it my RESTpertoire.

MY QUESTIONS FOR YOU

• What are your favorite methods of finding conscious, intentional rest?
• How do your ways of resting differ from the ways you veg-out, and the ways you have fun?
• What early symptoms do you get when your body needs to rest? For many of us, it’s not as simple as feeling tired… we have chronic physical conditions or negative mental spirals that show up before we’re even conscious of needing rest.
• Who in your life helps you stop to smell the roses?