COVID, ICE, and burnouts — cycles in life
By: Laxman Soni
Tags: Covid Diaries, Cycles Of Life, Coronavirus Diaries, Growth Mindset

Since the last time I wrote, a fair bit has happened. Trump released new regulations for F-1 students and rescinded it in a week. COVID is peaking (and probably will continue in this upward trend) in India. Will Smith’s situation unfolded very badly, we all feel bad for him. Crazy few weeks. Matches the theme of 2020 very well.

Personally, I went into breakdown mode. With the added stress from the new ICE regulations, I could barely focus on work, ended up making the stupidest mistakes while coding, didn’t lift that much. didn’t meditate — basically everything ‘wrong’ that I could have done, I did.

I’ve noticed that I fall in these cycles quite often. A few weeks of me feeling amazing and leading highly productive days, to barely doing any work and just binging Netflix for days. This cycle is something I have struggled with since the start of college, and while I haven’t figured it out entirely, I have gotten better. Something that has worked for me is using certain times as motivation. What do I mean by that? Say I entered this bad cycle on Tuesday, I would slowly pick up my good habits until Sunday, and then I would do something very drastic so that I have no choice but to start over with the good cycle on Monday.

NOTE: Since I am a STEM major, I chose to explain this using geometry. Who knew you can use maths for this, right?

What this allows me to do is:

Stop me from feeling shitty. Yes, I’m binging Netflix, but hey atleast I drank enough water, atleast I cleaned up my room, so on and so forth. This stops the guilt trip and self-pity. It’s a positive delta-x in the very negative slope that I have at the moment. Here is a small graph to better explain.

Notice how the line goes from being nearly straight down to horizontal

Stopping the downward slope is the important bit here, not necessarily bringing it up right away.

2. Cool, I now have my life’s graph at slope = 0, what do I do now? Timing is your friend here. I learned this from the book When by Daniel Pink, recommended to me by my friend Nick. Some of the key takeaways from that book were to use special days as new beginnings. A very common form of this is the New Year, where nearly everyone makes a goal to improve in a certain way over that year, although not everyone holds on to that promise, I’ll get back on that later.

Now, there are a lot of these special days in our life, it doesn’t just have to be the New Year. There’s birthdays, anniversaries, public holidays, and the highest frequency special day — the beginning of the week, be that Sunday or Monday.

You can decide to lead the week in a certain way. “This week I will not be binging Netflix”, maybe an appropriate goal. Or maybe, “I will give in 2 hours daily to my side hustle”.

Now, of course, we humans generally have terrible discipline, as we saw with the New Year resolution case. How do you deal with that?

3. There are two ways to go from here, depending on the situation. You can choose to go all out, or you can build the momentum slowly. If you have a hard deadline, get a website blocker to block Netflix, or don’t buy any carb-heavy ingredients on your next visit to the grocery store. If you don’t have a hard deadline, build it up slowly. On Monday, make sure to your easiest habits, say, 5 minutes of meditation. On Tuesday, ramp it up, add in another habit, say, 15 minutes of reading Medium posts. This will ensure that you don’t burnout. Instead of balancing the week, balance the day. You won’t need extra dopamine on the weekend to offset the week’s hard work.

Willpower is a limited resource, and while it can be built like muscles, if you break it, it won’t heal very fast. Use it wisely, like you would any muscle. No point breaking your back to lift that 300kg deadlift if you can’t even lift a measly 20kg the next 3 months.