Learning to Do Less to Live Longer
I lost nearly two months to illness this summer, but I gained something more important in the process...
I thought I had balance figured out perfectly this summer. Working for a university, it gets mercifully quiet over the summer months, which I thought would perfectly counter-balance the ramped up activism volunteering I was doing with local Palestine Solidarity Campaigns. In hindsight, the math wasn’t mathing. Even with a quieter workload, I had taken on far too much volunteering than my physical, mental or emotional capacity would allow. And, as always, my body showed me the error in my calculations by breaking down mid-July and forcing me to do less than I could ever have imagined.
Whenever I think of ‘doing less’, I am reminded of this clip from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Paul Rudd plays the stoner surf instructor advising Jason Segel that “the less you do, the more you do”, all the while berating him for doing anything, until finally Jason lies still on the surfboard. At which point Paul concedes that he does actually have to do something.
The last few weeks/months felt exactly like this for me - I stepped back from commitments temporarily, then quit some of my volunteering roles to create space for me to recover. But that was not enough. As weeks passed, the virus showed no sign of abating. Despite daily holistic practices from sinus rinses to infrared light treatment, and finally resorting to taking multiple prescriptions, it took over 6 weeks for my body to eventually feel some sort of normality.
In some cases, the something I had to do was simply to wait. It was going to take time for my body to recover from such an awful dose, particularly when I had primed my immune system so perfectly (badly) to be the most fertile environment for the virus to prosper. It is of no surprise to me that the day I first felt ill was the busiest day I had had in months - from breakfast with a friend, to a meeting, to a rally, to yet another meeting. All to come home and drag myself right back out again to socialise on what should have been a sociable Saturday night. The candle wasn’t just burned at both ends, it was completely melted into a puddle. I had nothing left to give. It didn’t matter how rewarding any of these activities were, I was just doing far too many of them.
And so the recovery period was not just waiting for the congestion to ease, or the sinus pain to reduce, or coping with coughing fits as I tried to find comfortable sleeping positions. It was learning to do less. A lot less. For longer periods of time. Not just a day or two, but weeks on end. I got into close routines with our streaming services, working my way through box sets I had already seen in an attempt to soothe myself and avoid anything too mentally challenging.
Every now & then I would attempt do something - anything - from a load of laundry to even daring to leave the house and afterwards I would have a relatively increasing price to pay in return. One trip to the local market for lunch resulted in a nearly 24 hour coughing fit and a trip to the GP for a prescription and sick cert. No such thing as a free lunch indeed!
“Less, less than that, less than even that!” Went the repeated message in my head.
I was very aware of the lessons I had learned last summer - I had felt so proud at the different boundaries I had put in place at work - I just hadn’t realised that I might need to relearn these lessons in a volunteering/activism context too! Same old bad habits being applied in a new harmful way!
I felt both called out and seen when a friend sent me this alarmist-appearing Instagram post on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome:
Scrolling through the slides on the post, it was painfully accurate to my lived experience… For those of you who didn’t click through, essentially, in order to heal from burnout/repeated illness & injury, you don’t just rest when you’re sick, you regulate your nervous system to get out of fight or flight mode and allow your body to maintain consistently itself in a healthier way.
You regulate your nervous system.
There is no one way to do this, and even rest alone cannot do this, because your nervous system requires attention, action and reaction to be consistently regulated. It is a living organism, for want of a better term. It is dynamic, not static.
So yes you do less - less stressful activity, less pushing past your limits, less overextending and overcommitting yourself. But you don’t do nothing. Because you have to do the something that your body needs. Whatever that something may be.
At times for me, that was craft - knitting, crochet, embroidery - anything repetitive that would let my mind wander while my hands moved gently.
Or it was baking, listening to what my body wanted to eat and then following recipes step by step to produce comforting results.
So I may have lost nearly two months to illness this summer, which meant cancelled plans, the most low-key birthday ‘celebration’, and endless episodes of mindless TV. But, in the process, I have gained the valuable insight of creating space in my life. The realisation that a schedule that is too full is simply too much for me, even if it is full of rich, rewarding activity, I simply cannot regulate myself or my nervous system in that way.
Space.
Space to rest.
Space to imagine.
Space to create.
I invite you to do the same - don’t wait until an illness or injury forces you to slow down - create space today, if even for a few minutes, and check in with yourself. What does your body need? What do you crave? And how can you make that happen, today.