Woah-oh, Halfway There (through 2026)

It’s been a (good but) weird year, and it’s (good but) weird it’s already halfway gone.

At the beginning of the year, I thought I was going to half-heartedly try not imbibing so much and then go back to normal. Instead, I have completely changed my relationship with alcohol – it’s a celebration, an occasion, a thing to do for fun sometimes, a conscious choice, instead of just what I normally do on specific days of the week to relax and unwind. After enough space to really contemplate, I found that the substance did not really relax me, quite the opposite, actually, but the ritual did. So, I’ve replaced it with things that serve the purpose.

This last month, I’ve really been focusing on that concept of the ritual of shedding stress. The goal is not to never be stressed (or activated, more accurately – because sometimes excitement is fun but reads a physical stress), but to be able to come down from it quickly. I’ve been working on the experiment of “how quickly after a workday, a social event, training, etc (things that peg my physiological stress) can I go from high/medium stress to low stress or rest?”

I’ve found the transition between things – letting something go and moving to the next – is important. When I am stuck halfway somewhere, I stress. More power to the people who can just dip into work at 8pm for a little bit and immediately go back to relaxing after, but that’s not me right now. To relax at all, I need work (or the physiological stress) to end, and I need my brain to transition away from it completely.

Just shutting my laptop and walking to the couch doesn’t do it, especially if my husband then gets off work and starts talking about his day or I think about a weird 5pm message as I was leaving that spins me up – instant activation that’s really hard to shake. Sometimes it’s not even the acute problem of being re-activated. If I had a particularly challenging day that I can’t easily let go of, which lately, has been a lot of them because I’m doing some challenging things – I can stay in that high stress place indefinitely, for no good reason, unless I actively work at it. So, I’m working at it!

So, I’ve got a few things in my arsenal now:

• If I can truly leave work at the office before commuting home, that’s usually enough. That’s not often though (since we try to leave before traffic and that’s pretty early so I usually have 2-3 “shifts” on an office day)
• If I have time after work, doing a very easy short bike watching stupid tv is a great transition
• The most reliable, fastest-acting, and least friction/effort is drinking a Hiyo.

ChatGPT calls it my fancy cup of tea and says it shouldn’t have the immediate physiological effect it does, but it’s the only thing that can reliably plummet my stress levels to resting. Immediately. So, it’s become my default ritual. Next month I plan to dig a little deeper. Is there something in it that just relaxes me? Lions’ mane mushroom? L-thiamine? Ashwagandha? Or is it just the effect of being able to say, “I’m having this beverage and it’s time to stand down for the day”? It’s not guaranteed – my stress can and will go up after if something stressful happens, so it’s not numbing medication – but it gives me a chance at relaxing. That’s enough most days.

Also, I’m trying this revolutionary thing called… breaks. I know, shocking. I hate em.

How my brain wants life to go: do all the things until they are all done and then rest. Why are you resting? All of the things aren’t done! DO THEM!

How my brain does this on a good day: DO ALL THE THINGS and then crash exhausted on the couch/bed way too late because there are too many things and I have unrealistic expectations of myself and wonder why I’m not motivated to do it all again the next day.

How my brain does this on a bad day: DO ALL THE THINGS but only the first step of them, move onto the next set of all the things, but only the first part again, so on, and so forth, until I have started 20 things, finished none of them, and feel neither accomplished nor rested and have left myself a bunch of cognitive debt, self-disappointment, and a huge mess.

How my body reacts to both: FIGHT OR FLIGHT OMG CRASH BUT ALSO STRESS SPIKES THAT DONT GO AWAY. ARE YOU PRODUCTIVE? NO. ARE YOU RELAXED? ALSO NO.

What I’m trying now: do some things, finish them if I can or get to a stopping point if I can’t. take a break. let myself relax even though not all the things are done. do more things. take another break. Do this not because you have to earn or justify breaks, but because you are more productive and less stressed when you have a few moments to downshift during the day.

Like, super cutting edge stuff. Taking a break between things instead of getting up in the morning and going 100 miles per hour until all the things are done or I collapse is a novel thought to no one ever but me, but here we are. It’s totally against my nature and taking some brain-rewiring, but now that I’m realizing that transitions are important, these also count as transitions.

So, I’ll continue to work on all this. Minimizing stressful situations would be super cool, but not terribly reasonable until retirement, so I’m going to instead work on flipping the stress switch off more quickly and effectively. Looking for places where short breaks will actually make me better and more productive. I don’t want to have to hide from the world and/or do nothing to keep my Garmin happy, so the option is seeking better ways to be able to shrug off stress more quickly and move on. Let that shit go, as they say.

Let’s go goal by goal.

#1 My Meatbag

In the universe laughing at my plans here, my scale died whilst in Utah and Nevada. When the replacement arrived, it came with a warning “will weigh higher/higher body fat/etc etc”. Surely, not me, right?

Yup. It me. If numbers were to be believed, I had erased all progress since the beginning of the year with one dead scale and another really freaking rude one.

So, I’ve chosen to weigh daily but not really pay that much attention to it for a while. With the deficits I’m maintaining (not much, by design), there’s not much I can see in 2 weeks of weighing. So, I’m going to treat it as another metric I’m tracking right now, like sleep, HRV, stress, etc, instead of the north star of “how worthy I am of being a human” or whatever importance my brain previously has attached to it.

It’s probably healthier to think this way… so I’m rolling with it… but, like, eventually that number needs to go down. I do think I’m undoing many years of trauma with how I was treating it, so I can be patient. Especially since I’m seeing some other benefits. See below.

#2 Sporty Stuff

Here’s the neat thing. My increased food/protein intake, the lack of alcohol calories, the fact I’m actually taking my vitamins and a full dose of creatine daily instead of “gummies when I remember”, prioritizing recovery and all these other changes? I’m feeling really good about training.

I feel quite sturdy (knock on wood) and able to take on challenging workouts again. I am still trying to do recovery things like boots, ice, roll, stretch, etc, but I don’t break down if I am not perfect here. Heat acclimation this year has gone really well, like I can’t actually remember a year where the heat bothered me less. And most importantly, I’m feeling excited to go take on workouts that aren’t “run for as long as you feel like at whatever pace”.

My first official week back:

• Monday: 1h bike intervals – 15 mins warmup, 6x 90 sec at 200-250W with 3.5 mins off in between, cooldown. Legs at the gym. 5k miles walking
• Tuesday – easy 5k run, 5k walking
• Wednesday – Run intervals – 15 mins warmup, 5×90 sec at 8:30-8:45 min/mile pace, 2.5 min jog back to start – 10 mins cooldown. 2.5 miles walking. Chest and shoulders at home.
• Thursday – 5k walk, otherwise rest day.
• Friday – 50 mins easy bike, 5k walking, back and biceps at the gym
• Saturday – Triple brick – 20 mins bike/1 mile run x3. 120watts/135watts/152watts on the bikes, 10:37/9:50/9:18 on the runs. 1.3 mile walk
• Sunday – 1 mile walk, rest day

I’m pretty happy about this. It was a really stressful week, and I was even in a funk and questioned whether I should do Wednesday’s workout. I got out and tried. It wasn’t exactly the workout I had planned (I had 6×2 mins) and I definitely didn’t come back going “wheeee!” like I did on Monday and Saturday’s faster workouts, but sometimes it’s great to just go prove to myself I don’t need optimal conditions to make it happen.

This week is a short one, I’m camping Thursday afternoon on, so frontloading the first half of the week and intentionally taking Friday-Sunday as recovery.

• Monday: Pretty much same as this week, intervals, walking, gym weights
• Tuesday: I need 4.5 miles to hit a garmin badge 🙂 so I will extend my easy morning run just a little bit. Short walk, and home weights
• Wednesday: easy bike – 30-60 mins, walk, weights
• Thursday: brick workout – 45 mins bike, 5k run. Both starting easy to steady to race pace by the end.
• Friday – Sunday: walking, maybe one easy run if it sounds fun.

I’m kind of here for it. I have a focused block here I’m doing, then a jaunt over to Europe which will be a lot of activity, but non-specific for a triathlon, then a sharpening block when I return before I race Kerrville. I’m excited to see how the summer goes, and then after that, consider where I want to go next.

#3 Adulting

• Do taxes (done!)
• Did a bunch of financial stuff (taking credit for what we did do)
• Get rid of the garage fridge
• Clean off and take the table in the garage back to the front door
• Take garage stuff from work back to work
• Take garage stuff that needs to go to goodwill to goodwill
• Clean out the shelves in my office.
• Clean out the under the counter weird stuff (done)
• and the shelf where the cat food is and just has random junk
• Get the new lights put up (done)
• Call ABC on the thing falling down outside (done!)
• Sell our old garmin watches
• Sell or get rid of the e-bikes we dont ride
• Hang pictures that are in frames
• house painting (this is a biggie, I call this a bonus)

So, definitely not completing everything, but we didn’t completely ignore everything. I’m going to reset for Q3 and get rid of everything that is outside or not in the AC. I just think the garage is the garage for right now until it’s not a million degrees, it’s too much effort to deal with the house painting, and I just kind of don’t want to be in my office when it’s not work time. Q3 list-

• Complete our wills
• Transfer my 401k
• Hang pictures that are in the frames (home and office)
• Get other arts I found framed and hung
• Get eye appointments and new glasses
• Hair dids before Europe
• Hang the light fixture Joel’s parents got us for our birthdays
• Bonus: house painting (since this is not US outside)
• Bonus: shelves in my office (but i see this as kind of unlikely)

We shall return to the garage cleanout when it gets cooler. Anything we do there I consider a super-bonus!

#4 Hobbies

Here’s another interesting place I need to keep an eye on. All of these hobby things bring me joy. It didn’t make sense at all to me why I love writing, painting, gaming, photo editing, etc, but I can’t always bring myself to do them. Through exploration, I’ve found that it’s not physical tiredness that keeps me from there, and it’s not even really mental tireds either – it’s that being creative is a bunch of micro-decisions and in a day where all I do is decide things, it’s really hard to want to end my day making a bunch more decisions, even though they are fun decisions. Writing is a lot of decision making. So is painting, and since paintings just look horrible until they are done and look good, there’s not a lot of dopamine reward until the end. Games are basically decision-making simulators. Photos are the lowest stress but still looking at a screen and selecting photos to edit takes some cognitive load.

So, I now have a daily scale – Executive Function Points. Similar to spoons but focused on decision-making more than effort. Case in point – if I know I really want a sandwich from a restaurant a mile away, I will have no problems ordering that sandwich and walking down there to get it. It will actually bring me joy to do that and cost no EFPs. However, if I just am sitting here hungry, no idea what I want to eat, and I’m low on EFP? I’ll just open the refrigerator and eat random ingredients because that doesn’t require making a decision and I’m all out of making-decision-juice.

If I sleep well and am well-recovered, we start at Green brain. Green brain is excited to make decisions, cook things, walk to the store, write, do chores, do focused work, etc. On good days we start here. I still have to be careful to not overdo things because I can easily run green brain right into the ground because I love me some productivity, but if I treat it well, green brain is a gift.

Yellow/Green brain is when things aren’t perfect, but I’m doing pretty well. We are ready and capable of decision making in the morning but realize there’s a counter that capability that will run out eventually depending on the day’s activities. On workdays, this means I can probably do a normal workday + one thing after that takes social or decision-making energy, or a tough workday will use this all up. On days off, I can probably spend my morning and afternoon doin’ stuff but want to relax by late afternoon/evening or I go into debt for the next day.

Yellow brain is when I haven’t slept that well (but not that terribly) and my recovery stats are fair to middling. Yellow still means functional adult, but I don’t have as much capacity before I start sliding down the scale towards being fried or feral. If I start at yellow on, say, a Tuesday, and I work out (not that many EFPs to do it but sometimes the lingering activation causes stress), go into the office (peopling, commute, putting on real clothes, etc costs EFPs), have a bunch of meetings (some minimal EFPs for maintenance meetings, more for challenging or emotionally charged meetings), and come home – that’s probably it for the day. It helps to have that expectation so I don’t wonder why I can’t do stuff – even fun stuff – after hours.

Orange brain is where I’ll end up after challenging workdays or workdays where I start at Yellow. I haven’t had a morning this bad yet since I’ve been tracking, but it would be the kind of day where I did the bare minimum to get done, home, and back in bed because I’m risking ending in Red or Black brain if I don’t. Ending my workday here means food needs to be already picked for dinner or I will eat the easiest thing possible (which for me is usually a can, box, or leftovers, takeout takes more EFPs so I guess that’s working for me), though I can still help prepare it if Joel is taking the lead. This means reading or TV after dinner, not productivity or decision making unless forced at knifepoint.

Red brain is done. Fixed und fertig as the Germans say (according to my Duolingo app). Bring me food, put on the TV and pick something to watch, hand me my book and say we’re reading, I am doing whatever is the easiest thing that doesn’t make me think or decide. Trying to be better to myself these days, I think I would seriously consider calling in sick if I started the day here. I’m guessing I probably used to start at least a day per week here, or maybe close, more like Orange/Red, and barely manage to make it through the day.

Black brain is the feral raccoon who has rescinded all adulting and is standing in front of the fridge eating ingredients and growling at people. I’m taking care to not get here anymore if possible. And if I do – definitely not pushing through my day. That’s what sick days are for, I hear.

So, back to hobbies – in July we’re trying to balance recovery but also finding space to do some things I really want to do as well. I don’t want to put away my hobbies until I retire! That sounds awful.

• PHOTO EDITING: I am now finishing up San Francisco 2025. I still have the cruise and Oklahoma camping to finish up 2025. That seems like a good softball goal for Q3 – one small project per month.
• WRITING: I am really trying to make space for a few hours a week, and not all at the same time. I do love my monster writing days, I’m really productive if I can just crank on it, but not at the cost of burning out on it and not touching it for months after.
• PAINTING: I plan to take my in-progress painting and a blank canvas camping and see where it goes. I’d really love to get back into this because it’s one of my hobbies that doesn’t involve a screen, but for some reason its really difficult.
• GUITAR: Ok, let’s really see if I can do this in July. It’s a natural break. I need breaks. Hmmm….
• WALKO TACO – Q4.
• MORE GAMES WITH JOEL: we did some games! I actually have found that playing games is a perfect activity paired with a few drinks – both are HYPE/FUN vibes, not relax vibes.

And travel-

• Krause Springs July camping
• Cotswold Way hiking + other stops Europe adventures
• Kerrville Camping in Sept
• Probably a few short camping trips in fall TBD

#5 Work/Life

I won’t belabor the point, but I’ve been REALLY strong here. Solid A for effort. I mean, I have worked long hours/weekends a few times when absolutely necessary, but I’ve balanced it with the habit of reasonable workdays and shutdown times most of the time, and really going all in on the strategies on how to leave work at work because it pays huge dividends for me (both how I am wired and also my title). The biggest thing for me is making sure I don’t keep open loops. At the end of the day, everything needs to be done, delegated, parked, or next step determined or I just think about it constantly. So, I’ve come up with a system and strategies that are working here 75% of the time. With the transitions, rituals, and recovery and this, I think I’m in a healthier place than I’ve been for a while. Also, the challenging work I’m doing at work will pay off to help me here even more (though in the long term, more stressful in the short term, but that’s always how it goes, right?).

And on that note, I’m going to take a BREAK and go read a few chapters in the bath before I start my next project. See, I can learn!