I hope you had a safe, unburnt turkey Thanksgiving and are enjoying a relaxing Black Friday weekend.
This last week for me has been a long one. Autumn has been marked by worsening shoulder arthritis, my mother needing heart surgery and suffering a bleeding ulcer, work changes, professional challenges, supporting colleagues, and the complexities of patient care at year’s end.
My all-purpose activity of choice has been Brazilian jiu-jitsu, to shake out the stress and keep my mind sharp. It took me 30 years to realize how critical it is to make class attendance as frictionless a thing as possible. Unless it’s as easy as collapsing into a sofa, a positive habit usually gets crowded out by work and family demands.
But once in a while, throttling back into yin territory makes more sense than going all-out yang.
I know what it feels like to overtrain, and that staleness was definitely there, along with fatigue, sleep deficit, and inflamed joints.
But I argued myself out of skipping: Go to class, I told myself, keep up the consistency, skip the sparring rolls at the end if you must, or work low-intensity positional drills.
In the end, I went and rolled without breaking off any bits.
And felt, as always and as close to 100% reliability as there is in this life, a ton better than before, and glad that I went.
How do you decide to go/not go?
The default should be GO/DO, of course.
But there are legit times when it makes sense to pause your self-improving practice. Whether it’s BJJ or another martial art, losing weight, journaling, yoga, meditating, writing, developing your business, or donating time to your community—the practice may deserve 100% participation, but human beings aren’t 100% anything.
I’ve found 4 factors to consider when the time comes to pause:
- Consistency
- Risk of (re-) injury or furthering burnout
- Sidestepping (not suppressing) RESISTANCE
- Supporting others
1. Consistency
From a purely selfish standpoint:
To attain a lofty goal, you’ve got to put in the hours.
Without consistently showing up, even if you touch base occasionally, you’ll generally be taking additive steps. And significant improvement comes from multiplicative steps, or magnifying what you’ve built.
It’s the difference between adding cash to your mattress, vs. having an investment grow with compound interest: a bigger bag of cash vs. retiring to a château after 40 years.
Consistently showing up makes it easier for your brain to make all those connections that translate into periodically surging ahead, what The Lost Creonte refers to as crossing a threshold:
The biggest argument in favor of Go, baby, go is maintaining the compounding effect of improvements, the so-called 8th Wonder Of The World.
Backing off strikes at the root of your secret sauce.
2. Risking re-injury and burnout
This is a thing, and the most potent argument for taking a break.
Past a certain age, your body needs more time to bounce back after a hard workout—or injury. Even moderately hard training can tear your body down enough that over time, the microtrauma can lead to a nasty surprise.
You don’t want a repeat injury if you can avoid it.
The corresponding burnout issue is very real: doctors and nurses quit the medical field because of it, and I know someone who stopped training on the verge of black belt due to cumulative injury and, I strongly suspect, mental burnout.
If something can make you walk away from years of professional and personal commitment, that’s not a thing to be taken lightly.
When even the thought of training feels like chewing aluminum foil, you’re way past the point when you should have hit the pause button. Only you can tell if the negativity you feel is a legitimate signal to come back afresh another day, or the voice of Resistance (see below) to be set aside. This is one of the advantages of maturity; it’s hard to tell these apart, unless you’ve had years and years of experience of being honest and dishonest with yourself.
Once in a while, the best thing you can do is to stay home, to fight stronger another day.
3. Sidestepping RESISTANCE
Steven Pressfield writes extensively about Resistance in his book, The War Of Art. Having a background in Classical Civilization, he personifies it as if it were a force or an entity: the never sleeping power that pushes back whenever you try anything to improve yourself: physically, mentally, professionally, financially, or spiritually.
Staying home and eating a bag of Doritos on the couch? No problem, Resistance is applauding your perspicacity.
Getting up early to work out? Geez, it’s awfully cold outside, and cold muscles can be stiff and prone to injury; we don’t want that, do we?
Long full day and deciding to get in today’s workout at bedtime? Geez, it’ll activate our mind and make it hard to sleep, and we know how important sleep is for brain health and not being crabby tomorrow, right?
Time for dinner, and keeping your portion to one plate with minimal carbs? But it’s been such a grinder of a week, it’s cold outside, don’t we deserve some comfort food and going nom-nom brainlessly on the couch while watching Netflix?
Resistance pushes back the harder you try to stifle it. The bigger a deal you make of Being Virtuous, the stronger and more clever your inner arguments become to Take It Easy On Yourself.
This is an ancient force to contend with, as old as Grok and his cavemates around the fire. It’s a primate survival trait: Ug ventured away from the fire to try something new and got et, so let’s not be like Ug, and live. New and unknown behavior bad, safe and known good.
Good for basic survival, not so much for civilization and advancement.
There will always be the urge to fall back to the couch, lasagna, and ice cream. Smile and wave, as you pass this one by.
4. Supporting others
My daughter reminded me of this: if your development activity involves working with others, they will miss you if you don’t show.
If your activity depends on two of you taking turns with something, not showing up means denying them their practice opportunity.
This may not be a driving force for your development, but it may be the most compelling reason to get off your duff and get to class: I feel crummy but don’t want to let John and Lisa down. And by supporting others, you support your own practice.
There are more reasons to go than to stay
And that’s on purpose.
You should find it easier to do something good for yourself than to skip it. Especially if, without fail, you know you’ll feel better right afterward: instant positive reinforcement.
The main reason to not-go is if going that day would realistically up your risk of injury, or going from a bad place to a worse one in your mind. A sidelining injury after age 40 is a distinct possibility, if your activity involves intense effort several times a week. Inserting more recovery time or lower intensity sessions is the smart move, when your body is starting to break down.
Feeling mentally beat down is more challenging.
Does Going mean “I feel mentally and emotionally better?” Then Going is probably the better choice, especially if what’s beating you down is something “off the mat.”
Is what’s making you feel stale and dreadful coming from your practice? Then a pause makes more sense, either taking a temporary recovery beat, or examining whether the practice itself needs adjusting.
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