Busyness: Healthy distraction or unhealthy coping mechanism?

You tell me.

Contemplations

How do you cope during a challenging time? Fight, flight or fawn?

How do you recognize your patterns and work with them?

***

I’ve been thinking a lot about rest lately. Well, rather my body has ached for it. 

These last few months have been non-stop. Between work and life and life and work, my brain hasn’t turned off and my heart is very very tired.

Not too long ago, I wrote about how hard rest is and contemplated what resilience actually is. And as I sit and reflect on the last few months, complicated feelings arise when I think about my busyness — my proactive opting in.

In many ways, my busyness has helped ground me, let my mind fixate on something other than my suffering. But simultaneously, it has distracted me, been a place for me to mentally run to. And there is much research in the trauma world that suggests that perhaps this isn’t a bad thing — that taking my grief bit by bit is the way to chip away at it.

But even still, I wonder, which is telling.

This past week I have been quite inconsistent with my practice. Much of that is because of the mass amounts of travel I have done in the last six weeks, resulting in my tiredness, feeling like I don’t have much space for my thoughts, much less my practice.

This is, of course, counterintuitive to what the practice is about. It is a place of rest for me, of spaciousness, of reprieve, a refuge and it is also the place where emotions arise, for me to touch the human, hurting parts of me. And considering I seem to be avoiding those parts of me on some level right now, my practice feels both like a warm blanket and a minefield.

I have been shocked I have not burned out these past few weeks. Tired? Oh yeah? Exhausted? Absolutely. Burned out? I’m not so sure.

From Psychology Today:

Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. Though it’s most often caused by problems at work, it can also appear in other areas of life, such as parenting, caretaking, or romantic relationships.

Another clear sign is a lack of motivation, which hasn’t necessarily been the case for me. If anything, I’m feeling too motivated to do everything besides face my own feelings. This is the age-old coping mechanism, right? Fight or flight.

Lord knows, I have been known to have racked up frequent flyer miles over the years.

The funny part is that the best way to battle, well really, prevent, burnout is mindfulness. And for this, I am grateful — for the accumulative years of practice that has helped me through this moment, through the last few months and through this past week when I couldn’t muster facing my heart.

So what’s the big takeaway this week? Every bit counts. Every breath counts. Every moment, of every day counts. I hope you practice now because you might reap the benefits years from now when you least expect it and need it. Until then, I’m going back to the basics of the practice, of the core teaching of meditation, of samatha vipassana. Ven. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh translated it to: Stopping, looking, deeply.

First step: Stopping.

As I navigate through the end of this exhausting season, I will be shifting a few things at Everyday Magic:

1. I’m taking a bit of a brain break from my everyday life. My wife Jess and I are going to Europe for a honeymoon we were never able to take before now. I am looking forward to the time away and eating my face off in Paris and lounging on the beaches of Corsica. So you won’t hear from me for about a month and I hope you find ways to rest during as well.

2. Once I get back, this newsletter will go from being weekly to bi-weekly. I have noticed that my production brain has taken over the writing experience of this Substack to keep up with the weekly cadence. I don’t want that experience for me or for you — but instead one in which I am writing from a place of real tenderness, of insight. And I can’t always do that every week so please expect correspondence to come every two weeks from here on out.

3. We have been experimenting with different publishing days for the last few weeks —both for me as a writer and for you as a reader. I’ve decided to publish on Sundays to give you more time to be with this newsletter and to dig deep into reflections and contemplations.

4. I’d love to hear what you want more of from this newsletter and from me. I started this newsletter to be of service to you, the reader, and I want to make sure I am giving you what you need and want. I would appreciate it if you took two minutes to answer the two questions below and if you have more feedback, please of course comment and/or email me.

Until then, thank you for reading, for being a vehicle for my practice, to bearing witness to my journey, to me. My act of writing this is itself an act of mindfulness, and for that, I am forever grateful of you and your support.

More soon.

deep breaths and much love,

Kim