How Do You Want to Spend Your Time?

Due to my chronic illness, I have a significantly smaller energy pool than most healthy people. Though I've been living with this condition for almost 4 years now, I still make huge mistakes when it comes to time management. In this short post I want to reflect on the benefits on being mindful about time management and I think even healthy people can benefit from this.

The biggest thing I get wrong is not allocating to much time for being productive and too little to rest but rather choosing the wrong activities. When the fatigue is at its worst, I find myself often distracting myself with mindlessly scrolling through X/Reddit/Hackernews/YouTube. This can happen in the middle of work or when resting in bed. I don't think there is anything inherently bad about scrolling through those apps from time to time - but using it as a coping mechanism to distract myself from the fatigue and having to face negative emotion generated through this, is.

In the last couple of weeks I noticed this behavior more and more. Especially in the morning (where the symptoms are the worst - a common pattern for people with chronic illness), I start my day by looking at my phone, unsubscribing from newsletters, answering Email, Checking news and social media. Often times it's literally the first thing I do after opening my eyes. Why? Partly because I'm addicted (like many people nowadays) to the short dopamine bursts those activities give but also to overshadow the negative emotion, the pain and the intense fatigue I experience after waking up.

Always overshadowing those feelings works for some time, but after a while, you start to pay the price. There will come a time when you stop scrolling - when you go to bed. And now you can't distract yourself so easily anymore. Now there is finally room for all those thoughts whom you denied space throughout the day. And they make it so hard to fall asleep and then you wake up even more tired, and the cycle continues.

So what can I do to combat this? The answer is simple: When fatigued, don't try to overshadow it. Embrace the feeling and take a real break. Nap or just sit around and do literally nothing for 10 minutes or 3 hours, however long it takes. You'll allow your body real physical and mental rest. This might seem boring, but the gain from this really outweighs the initial effort: First you'll have more energy again to do tasks you really want to spend your time on and second you'll learn to be contempt with just being - a very important ability I've learned (and am still refining) through meditation.

Although this doesn't always work as it reequires a certain amount of mindfulness, I feel the positive effects cleary when it does. I'm much more calm, have more quality time throuhout my days and it's easier for me to fall asleep.