I lay down to sleep on Sunday night with a sense of peaceful contentment and satisfaction — it had been a good weekend.
Plenty of time spent relaxing, reading, and watching a little TV;
A few beers and a takeout meal on Friday evening;
A 10km run on Saturday morning and a couple of walks in the sunshine;
The obligatory Zoom-based quiz with distant family;
Some writing to keep the creative engine ticking over.
All-in-all a solid couple of days of leisure.
My body felt tired but fulfilled. My mind felt energised but at peace. My heart was full.
Amidst all that was a nagging agitation at the back of my mind. Its cause? That my teenage daughter hadn’t left our apartment since Friday evening.
Sure, she’d joined in with the Zoom call and we’d watched a couple of movies together. We’d chatted over meals and even shared the occasional laugh. By-and-large though, she’d spent the weekend alone in her bedroom. I’d tried several times to persuade her to join me for a walk, without success.
Some might argue it’s not unusual for a 17-year-old to demure at spending time with her dad in favour of her good friends Netflix and Instagram.
If I genuinely felt those were making her happy then I’d forget about it — but I couldn’t shake a nagging sense that all was not well.
She’s become uncharacteristically insular and anxious of late. Occasionally she’ll open up but for the most part, she’s quiet and withdrawn. She’s always thrived on stress and pressure but of late seems more bothered by the demands that her school work are placing upon her. And she’s utterly sedentary at home where previously she was a competitive athlete.
I worry about her.
The effects of a year of living in lockdown have no doubt taken their toll on her just as they have for many of us. All of these are no doubt part of the issue. But there’s something else too.
. . .
Listening to Your Body
Reflecting on how I felt at the end of the weekend — physically and mentally tired but fulfilled and accomplished — it was thanks to having used my body and mind to the fullest.
When I contrast this with how my daughter apparently felt as I wished her goodnight on Sunday, the opposite seemed to be true.
She’d spent the weekend shut-away from the world and largely devoid of human contact besides occasional begrudging moments spent with me. She’d denied her body of exercise or even of simple movement. She’d spent way longer than was healthy or helpful on her phone or watching familiar movies in supposed bids to relax. The net effect of all these choices was to have made her seem ill-at-ease.
As humans we have in-built feedback mechanisms that shape how we feel based on what we’ve done and what’s going on inside us. If we do the wrong things or our internal chemistry is out of balance, we know it. If we’ve done something positive we feel good.
Each of us has either to accept that feedback and act accordingly in response to it, or to blunder on regardless, making one bad choice after the next.
Use it
Our bodies and our minds were designed to be used. We’ve evolved over millennia to rise to the challenges of competitive existence and while we no longer have to hunt down our food or figure out how to make fire, our bodies and brains expect to be taxed regularly.
It explains why we’re rewarded with a dopamine hit when we’ve pushed our bodies to the max — the runner’s high is its way of thanking us for using it as it was intended. When we push beyond physical limits, our cells and fibres multiply and grow so that we may eventually push further still. When our body has had enough it tells us to rest and recharge so that it may recover for the next time.
The feedback prompts us to reward ourselves with precious calories so we may replenish and rebuild. Food tastes better, for we know we’ve earned it and because it’s craved by our body — the nutrients absorbed and put immediately to use.
We don’t feel bad if we indulge in sweets or treats — we know deep down that we’ve put in the work to deserve them.
Or lose it
When we stagnate, on the other hand, when we fail to move our bodies and don’t use our muscles, our reward is lethargy and atrophy. We feel restless and twitchy instead of relaxed and recharged — the time spent lazing around is counterproductive if we didn’t earn it in the first place.
Our muscles yearn to be used. Our joints become stiff, our skeleton fixed in place and tendons and ligaments tighten when we don’t run and jump and move around. Just as a neglected bicycle rusts and seizes-up when left out in the rain, when our bodies are left to stagnate without the proper maintenance they become less capable of doing so.
When we eat without really needing the calories, we feel bloated and sluggish. The food sits heavily on our stomachs for we haven’t kick-started our inner-furnace to digest it. We may be tempted by indulgent foods — we know we haven’t earned them through exertion and the sense of reward or enjoyment of them might seem muted by guilt. The sugar-crash adds to our lethargy.
Using our body to the full is part of keeping it in good working order — how it feels in response to our activity level gives valuable feedback on our choices.
. . .
Nurture Your Mind
What’s true for the body extends to the mind. No matter how productive I’ve been during the week, if I take the entire weekend off from using my brain then by the time the new week comes around it’s like starting again from square one. Momentum is lost. Tasks that were taken in my stride seem suddenly daunting and insurmountable. I feel anxious in the face of my to-do list instead of motivated to take it on.
It’s alarming just how quickly the brain ceases to work optimally if it’s not regularly stretched and challenged. Helpfully there’s a feedback loop for our mental activity too.
We suffer feelings of apathy and indifference while trying to select the second or third movie to watch when we’ve been on the couch all day. Our mind yearns instead to be stretched and taxed and not by choosing from the plethora of options presented on Netflix. It yearns instead for problem-solving. Our imagination wants to be stretched by reading a book or doing something creative.
We’re struck with mental-indigestion when there are too many options or when we’re presented with limitless free time. This often takes hold at the weekend when we’ve lost the structure of the working week and when we’re less disciplined with our time and our choices.
Earned freedom feels like a blessing but excess freedom can lead to us drifting from one thing to the next without purpose or satisfaction. We miss the senses of structure and fulfilment that come with purposefully planning our time and getting the most from the day.
Certainly, we need time spent in quiet contemplation to recalibrate. Watching a movie or a little TV can be a welcome means of decompressing — this weekend it presented the one opportunity for me and my daughter to do something together. The benefit gets lost when it’s the only activity or the default activity because we’ve lost the discipline or will to do anything else.
Our mind benefits from a balance of time spent in leisure and time under tension. It’s why elderly folks who keep their minds active into retirement through reading, puzzles, and mentally-engaging social activities are more likely to avoid mental decline than those who merely stagnate after retirement.
Our minds benefit from being challenged and allowed to relax and tune-out. Too much of either results in our feeling mentally exhausted or restless and unfulfilled.
. . .
Service Your Soul
My writer friend Marisa Hoenig recently shared a thought-provoking piece considering the loneliness that so many have had to cope with during the pandemic. I’m usually pretty self-reliant and spend much of my time alone — even I’ve struggled in this regard.
What Marisa really nailed was the notion that isolation has had such deep effects during coronavirus lockdowns, having forced us to live in a way that we’re simply not designed to.
We, humans, are tribal beings — we exist as part of a collective whole, within numerous communities and sub-groups as well as the human species. We each fulfil roles and functions in our families, our teams at work, our local communities and in our social groups. As importantly, we take socially from those groups and are enriched by them too.
When we’re denied access to that social contact either by lockdowns or because we can’t muster the enthusiasm to leave the house or even to pick up the phone and talk, we’re robbed of the enrichment that our soul relies upon. We may sit, as my daughter did this weekend in quiet isolation, convincing ourselves that we’re contented being left to our own devices. Deep down we know that we want and need contact — and yet the longer we avoid it, the harder it becomes to reach out and to adapt to it as the norm once again.
I see this evidenced in her behaviour now that schools and colleges open up again. While she’s missed being in a classroom with her friends, she’s finding it difficult to contemplate getting on the bus and seeing her friends daily again. Like many, she fears having lost the ability to function in social groups. Like all self-conscious teens, she worries that she’ll be the only one who doesn’t fit in.
Many of us feel this exact same way of course — I certainly do. Most realise at some stage that the only way to conquer the fear is to get back on the horse from which you’ve fallen — the thing that is most daunting of all.
Our souls require time alone to reflect, and with others to form and enjoy social-bonds. Too much of either can lead to feelings of loneliness or a craving for solitude.
. . .
Final Thought
The conclusion I’ve reached regarding my daughter and her malaise is that it’s not an issue to confront as such; it’s another situation where I need to be there to help her as much as she’ll let me.
It’s not about tackling and challenging her behaviour but rather about encouraging her to listen to the feedback her body and mind are offering in response to her actions and choices. The feedback can help her to do more of the things that make her feel good and less of those that don’t if she chooses to listen and respond to it. I want her to see that we all get caught in the vicious cycles from time-to-time where poor choices lead to more poor choices by default.
Part of living well is to recognise that sometimes we have to force ourselves to do the things that instinctively seem uncomfortable and challenging. The payback comes from positive effects that emerge in how we feel which encourage us to do more of the same.
We all need to listen to feedback from our body and our mind, and to use it to shape our choices a little more.
—
This post was previously published on The Ascent.
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