Hello, Adversity Weekly Roundup #12 - April 22, 2023
Hello, Adversity Weekly Roundup #12 - April 22, 2023
Avoiding the distraction spiral, how to spot signs of burnout, the science of sleep, and thoughts on a somber anniversary
Hi everyone! Welcome to the 12th edition of the Hello, Adversity Weekly Roundup. I hope you had a great week.
A brief note about next Wednesday’s newsletter: it’s going to be a little different. I will be sharing a personal story about a formative moment on my rare disease journey. The story takes places on a cold February night in 2013 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a night that forced me to come face-to-face with my deepest fears about my disease.
There have been several somber 10-year anniversaries this year. There was the anniversary of the passing of my cousin Laurie in January, followed by my friend Carly three weeks later. (Next week’s story takes places smack dab in the middle of those two losses.) Then there was the recent 10-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing. I was in Boston that day and remember the events vividly. I will share my thoughts about that day at the end of this post.
2013 was an awful year in many respects, but it was also instrumental in helping me find my purpose in life. It feels like a lifetime ago and yesterday.
Without further ado, here are this week’s links:
In this article, Michael Ashcroft shares his daily battle with technology. The flood of notifications and the distractions of social media can bombard us from the moment we wake up if we’re not careful. As I read this, I found myself repeatedly nodding my head in agreement. I face these same distractions every day.
Ashcroft walks through two different scenarios: a day where he checks his notifications within ten minutes of getting up, and one where he waits several hours before checking.
The first scenario leads to constant stress and misery. As he puts it:
At the end of the day, I find myself strangely exhausted, unhappy and dissatisfied by how little I've achieved relative to my expectations.
This is exactly how I feel when I fall into the distraction spiral. I’ll get texts or check the news or follow my fantasy baseball team’s performance and next thing I know hours have passed. At the end of the day, there is the unsettling feeling that, although I was busy, I have nothing to show for my efforts.
For Ashcroft, when he waits several hours to dive into the online world, his day goes much smoother. He is more present. He is better able to focus and enjoy the small moments of the day. He is productive, but most importantly, he is productive on the right tasks.
When he does finally get around to checking his notifications, they don’t have the same impact on him. He even finds the process boring.
When he compares these two different scenarios, Ashcroft realizes that living well and doing good work is more rewarding than the temporary reward of checking his phone. One scenario produces misery; the other produces work of enduring value.
It is not easy to choose a distraction-free day. Life is a tug-of-war between both types of scenarios. But if we can have more productive days than distracted ones, they can add up in a hurry and take us where we want to go.
This is a helpful article about recognizing the signs of work burnout and how to evaluate what might be causing it.
As the article states, burnout is more than just exhaustion. It is cynicism and negativity. It is unproductivity and disassociation. It is chronic stress, encountered hour after hour, day after day.
The article then goes on to offer a quick checkup for pinpointing what part of your work environment is causing you to burn out. The thinking is that if you can identify the burnout trigger, you can address it in advance before it snowballs out of control.
Although the article only covers work burnout, I don’t see why this checkup couldn’t be expanded to other parts of life, such as family, school, or, as mentioned in the previous article, our relationship with technology.
The earlier you can spot burnout and address it, the better off you will be in the long run. So often we justify the status quo because of pay or career advancement or because we don’t know how to get out of the situation. But try we must; burnout is a tax on our wellbeing, and is a cost that only gets more expensive with time.
I like reading words with pictures, so I found this interactive article a nice change from the typical “sleep is important!”-type piece. We all intuitively know why we need sleep, but this article does a good job of showing, with visuals, the way sleep affects different parts of the body.
When we deviate from our body’s circadian rhythm, our capacity to function goes down significantly over time. This has real-life consequences:
For brief periods, this is not harmful. But when it lasts months or years, we become more vulnerable to cognitive and emotional effects and eventually to cardiovascular diseases, mental illness, diabetes, overweight, and other metabolic disorders, Foster said.
Other studies suggest we also face higher odds for divorce and road accidents.
Yikes.
Life is hard enough; without adequate energy to handle the stressors of the day, our quality of life deteriorates substantially.
This reminds me of the famous Vince Lombardi quote: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”
On April 15, 2013, I took a taxi to my office in downtown Boston. It was 7:30 am - way earlier than I usually went in - but I wanted to get to work before hundreds of thousands of people descended on the city for the Boston Marathon. The streets were quiet that morning; roads were being closed all along the route, although the cab driver was able to sneak down Boylston Street before it was shut down to traffic. The street was deserted except for a few workers setting up signs and bleachers. I pictured the sidewalks soon being packed with cheering spectators.
Six hours later, Boylston Street would be the scene of a deadly terrorist attack that would shake the city to its core. I am not a native Bostonian, but love the city like my own. On that day, everyone in the city felt panic, fear, anger, and above all, grief.
The 10-year anniversary was this past Sunday. I still have vivid memories of that day that bring goosebumps. It was a scary time, in an already heart-rending year. But if there was any silver lining to the Marathon tragedy, it was the way the city pulled together. Bostonians - not people usually known for their hospitality - were there for one another, determined not to let this attack define us.
On this website, I talk a lot about personal resilience, but there is also such thing as societal resilience. In the days and weeks after the bombing, the whole city was struggling. But as I would soon learn, both types of resilience have the same remedy: community.
We can’t make it in the world alone. Nor can we heal alone. We need each other.
If you have a story you’d like me to include in a future newsletter, please email me at HelloAdversity@substack.com or drop a comment below.
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