The past few weeks I haven’t been recovering well from my exercise. I thought it was perimenopause or something, but upon examining my journal entries I could trace it back to one bad night of sleep. Its effects cascaded into several days after, manifesting in fatigue and headache. I do think perimenopause is also affecting it.
The morning after I didn’t sleep well I still went for my scheduled 5km run. Previous experience had taught me that I would probably feel like shit after but I would possibly still recover within a day or two. But this time round I didn’t recover well. My morning hrv was low for the next few days.
I think age is catching up with me.
I lived a very unwieldy life from childhood till my 20s, which had lasting consequences even till now. So I compensated in my 30s by developing the discipline to keep habit streaks. I would feel deeply uncomfortable or disappointed in myself if I broke a streak. When I first started running I went from being totally untrained to running every single day for about 90 days. I was lucky I didn’t end up with an injury.
I tend to over-optimise my life and decisions, also an overcompensation that resulted from under-optimising my life when I was young. I try to exercise as much as I can, so that I can hit optimal fitness within the time given – at least based on theory. When travelling I’ll try to pick the most optimal stay in terms of comfort, value and location. I’ll strategise how I use my credit cards in order to maximise the miles earned.
But lately I realised hyperfocusing on optimising is ironically making me live a suboptimal life. Because I want to maximise my exercise time even on days I am not in an optimal state I end up falling ill. Or I’ll spend so much paralysing over a decision because I want to make the best decision possible that I end up wasting precious time of my life. The desire to over-optimise for certain things because of some traumatic phases in my life has caused me to become really inflexible in many ways. I have been missing the forest for the trees.
Sometimes we are just locked into a certain mode of operation because it has served us well for a time period, but we don’t realise we can stop operating that way because our life, circumstances and selves have changed.
I have to accept that I am getting older, and my body will be shifting its limits as I age. Things I could comfortably do before will become harder. Maybe I cannot aim for ultimate fitness, but I can aim for being as fit as possible for chronically ill women within my age group. Sometimes I can seem so well I forget that I am actually chronically ill. I can be pain and migraine free for long periods of time, but it is always lurking in the shadows, threatening to bubble up whenever I am not careful enough.
I used to eat really low carb to manage my migraines, but as I started to exercise more and gain more muscle I slowly started to notice that it was hampering my recovery. My body was also struggling to support an ageing reproductive system while being in ketosis.
I learnt that in health, there is no one optimal way of being. We could optimise for one part of the body and yet the same intervention is at odds with a different part of us. For example, I can optimise for cardiac health and have very low supposedly healthy fasting glucose numbers but feel like shit because my reproductive system demands more. I once read somewhere that nature and evolution just wants us to reproduce, even at the expense of our overall well-being. So my theory is that it favours a slight energy surplus so that it can support any potential pregnancy. But if we over do it and have metabolic issues we cannot be fertile either. Health interventions are almost always on a spectrum: too little is bad, too much is also bad. But people who are health conscious – myself included – can be very black and white.
How does one find the middle ground, the sweet spot? Research and scientific journals may not help either. They may be behind time, or only for a specific demographic. I have also since learnt that people can respond very differently to the same intervention because of genes. Yet medical and health advice is dispensed as though one size fits all. I do think healthcare will be increasingly customised in the future if we survive the climate and virus apocalypse. It seems to already be on the way there for some areas, like cancer treatments. Unfortunately, this is where economic privilege makes a huge difference.
Though I seem to be writing about health or practical matters in life, essentially I think it boils down to developing some from of self-knowledge and creativity flexibility. This applies to the more abstract areas of life too, like in our creative practice.
Perhaps this post is an example. Sometimes I get into a very fixed mindset that I should only focus on one topic. But so much in life overlaps and impacts one another. My consciousness is also always burdened with overlapping concerns, so why should I consciously restrict myself just because there is a mainstream belief of what is right and better? To me, life is a constant repetitive process of freeing ourselves from our inner prisons.
Some of our internal baggage is obvious and heavy, and paradoxically that makes it easier to work with. But there is some baggage that just seems innocuous so we don’t really notice them or think that they are hampering our life, yet we are slowly being injured by a thousand paper cuts. Going back to the subject of optimising – it is something that is traditionally perceived as positive, but it can become an invisible block.
I guess it is a good thing that I am even noticing this instead of being in autopilot mode. There have been recent times when I have caught myself being hyperfocused on optimising, and suddenly I become aware of it. It is still not easy to break out of old behavioural patterns though, even with increased awareness. My mind still defaults to thinking that habits and routines are preferred, even if I am actually physically suffering in trying to keep to them.
Sometimes at the age of 44 I still can’t help but feel like a baby learning how to crawl. That I am encountering something new about myself, and I have no idea how to manage or respond to it yet. There was simply no such mental flexibility when I was young, because I was so heavily conditioned by the mainstream beliefs of society. There was no sense of self to say that hey I don’t actually want to do this, let me do something else instead. One positive thing about getting old is the capacity to say no, even to our selves. That the brain becomes more open to possibilities in a different way.
When we are young, we are naive and idealistic, so we think anything is possible. As I get older, I am less prone to unrealistic thinking and hence I am definitely more close-minded in a way. However, still I have seen enough of life to know that shit can get weird sometimes, the world is more diverse that we can ever know, that things that used to sound so frightening or impossible are actually not that scary and can be possible, pursuits that were appealing are no longer so, that as we know ourselves and the world better new doors can open too. Maybe the most liberating of all is that 99% of opinions do not matter so feel free to go our own way (within legal reason).
With recent times, things have gotten even more uncertain: doctors and scientists can also be ignorant, politicians are untrustworthy, the earth seems to be on her last legs according to climate data etc. It seems pessimistic. But like the zen master likes to say, it is with uncertainty and impermanence that there can be creative possibilities. If things are certain and fixed then we will only be inclined to do things a certain way.
My ageing body too, makes everything more uncertain. If I have to see the silver lining I guess it would be that I can now finally learn to be more flexible as a person. I hate to admit this, but most of the time people simply won’t change unless push comes to shove. I guess I got shoved, and now I am forced to start a new journey.