Why You Make Everything Harder Than It Needs To Be
Why You Make Everything Harder Than It Needs To Be
The lesson that must be learned, usually over and over again...
Hello reader. I’m finally ready to write again. After writing my book in 2021, then promoting it for all of 2022, to say I was tired of the written word was an understatement.
The Old Me would have given myself a few months of down time from writing, but then the taskmaster within would have cracked the whip and ready or not (most certainly not ready) there I’d go getting back to it.
And because I would have been writing from a still virtually empty cup, I’d have strained the whole way to put down on paper informative, helpful, and interesting things for you.
But I’m not the Old Me anymore. (And hopefully the Me I am now will be “Old Me” once again soon.) So I took a year and a half off from writing much of anything. Because this is the lesson I continue to learn:
When we draw from an empty cup that we are usually fibbing to ourselves about just how not-empty we think it is…
When our commitments (as noble as they are) are out of alignment with the energy we actually have to give to them…
When we use discipline as a weapon against ourselves…
When our efforts go beyond striving to straining…
We are making whatever we are doing much harder than it needs to be. And we are selling ourselves short on the results we could be achieving.
In today’s return essay, I’m going to quickly unpack what I’ve learned about why we do that. This applies to every avenue of life, but I’m going to focus on the health and fitness aspects in my examples.
You don’t “believe” in systems theory
You ever hear the phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”? That’s systems theory.
Systems theory is the study of how different parts of a system interact and work together to form a whole. It emphasizes that everything is interconnected and that changes in one part of the system can affect the entire system.
Two excellent examples of systems theory are ecosystems and the human body.
Everything must work together to keep everything working together.
If you try and lose weight by following a low-calorie diet and hitting the gym hard, you are neglecting the systems in your body and how they work together to, in this case, reduce your weight.
Cutting calories and expending a significant amount of them through workouts will cause your thyroid to decrease its function. This, in turn, lowers your metabolism. Which in turn makes it harder to lose weight and keep it off. You’ll have to eat less and less and move more and more until your body just finally gives up and gains weight out of the stress of it all.
You might also experience other common symptoms of low thyroid function, like being cold all the time (especially in your hands and feet), fatigue/exhaustion, constipation/gut issues, brain fog, low energy for any workouts or activities you want to do, and hormonal imbalances.
By cutting calories and working out hard in the gym, you’re making it way harder on yourself than it needs to be, both in the short- and long-run.
You only know how to experience life in extremes
I’ve seen this as a coach for 23 years, and a human for 43 years: the majority of us do not trust things less than top level intensity. Here are a few examples:
When you get a massage, you always want harder pressure and don’t think the massage ‘does anything’ if the pressure is lighter.
When you workout, you focus on things like HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) and getting a “burn” going in your muscles, and you don’t think less intense workouts are ‘worth it.’
When you try to lose weight, you light up at the idea of a really intense challenge like 75 Hard, even if it’s totally unsustainable for the long-term and deep down in your heart you know it.
If you try and live at the extremes, you will constantly ping-pong back and forth from one extreme to the other. Go intense on your workouts. Get exhausted and injured and stop completely for months. Gain weight and feel terrible. Get back on the intense workout program. Rinse and repeat until you get sick of yourself and are ready to relent to a better way.
The better way is to give appropriate effort and get appropriate results. This is the only sustainable way. But if you don’t trust it and aren’t willing to do it, you’re making your health and fitness efforts way harder than they need to be.
You’ve got an energy leakage that you’re unaware of
This is my most recent insight regarding this life lesson of why we make things harder than they need to be. When you’re leaking energy, it’s incredibly difficult to actually do the things you say you want to do that will make you feel your best.
We recently had a few sleepless nights with a sick pup and to say I was cooked by the end of it was an understatement.
My energy to do even the most simple things, like go outside and get some fresh air, was nonexistent. My motivation to cook a healthy and nourishing meal, despite how good it would have made me feel, was gone. Lack of sleep had caused all my energy I had in reserves to leak out.
I needed to close that energy leak with several good nights of sleep if I was to have any chance of returning to my life that had naturally included an array of health supportive activities that were usually easy to do.
To do the basics of health and fitness, you have got to have a fundamental wellspring of energy to do it. That wellspring is what feeds your motivation, it’s what drives your discipline, and it’s what upholds your physical and mental capacity to do the things you want to do to feel your best and achieve your goals.
If you’ve got an energy leakage in your fundamental wellspring of energy, you’ve got a big problem.
Common causes of energy leaks: poor sleep, being indoors too much, too much technology use, constantly being tuned into the news, eating food-like products instead of real nourishing foods, eliminating entire food groups, unresolved stress and trauma from your past, and many more.
Just imagine - you might not actually lack discipline after all, you just might be leaking energy that feeds your ability to be disciplined. But by not closing those energy leaks, you’re making it way harder than it needs to be.
I hope you found this essay insightful. I’m seeing the best success with my clients these days when we focus on undoing these three reasons I’ve shared here regarding why we make things harder than they need to be. Give them a try and see what happens for you. And if you don’t know how to, stick around here and I’ll have more for you in the future.