Trying to Better All the Time. Meet Burnout!

I just posted a reply to my friend and Performance Lifestyle Adviser Shawn Phillips recent post When Getting Better Isn’t: The Endless Improvement Trap.

Here’s what I had to say.

Shawn,

Great post, what you are talking about is the probably the biggest most overlooked aspect of personal performance and lifestyle (and training for that matter). Peak performance and most people’s desire to live at or near their ideal weight all year round cannot and will not be achieved, by performing or trying to achieve all the time.

That’s a form of performance addiction and it opposes living in balance, with vibrant health…

Since few people are helping people develop their lifestyle, the bias is program, after program, after program, and the drive for better never ends. It drives people crazy, is what it does, because the marketing never stops and the guilt and tension to “take action” and perform better are always there. Meanwhile you head straight in to the downward energy trend.

It is the age of better, (what I call the age of achievement), the downside is that there are no boundaries or “seasons” any more and in reality it’s easy to see; you just can’t keep getting better and better. It just doesn’t work that way.

You’ve got to take steps back to take more steps forward. This lifestyle is sure fire and proven.

We call it periodization, and when you have a periodized pattern in your life, you are no longer susceptible to the “pin ball pull” of everyone elses’ plan for you. You have your own lifestyle plan, unique to your circumstances and you fit in what works for you, or adjust to make it fit if that works.

But if you are addicted to performance or achievement and “getting better’ you are on a sure fire path for overwhelm and that’s a big reasons why people are addicted to better. They never just get there and live “better”.

The most precious resource for business people is not time, but rather energy. Today’s fast-paced world often depletes our energy and wears us down, resulting in a trend that is difficult to recover from. Therefore, we need to find ways in which to better manage energy to stay healthy.

In our all-access, information age, which is biased toward constant output, productivity and achievement, it is deceptively easy to deplete our energy, our very force of life, by partaking in too many activities and subjecting ourselves to unhealthy lifestyle practices in order to deal with the stress and fatigue.

Time vs. Energy

Don’t get me wrong, time is extremely important, but time without enough personal energy is limited. Just living, being, hanging, relaxing and recuperating your energy during “downtime,” (not necessarily achieving) is not really downtime; it is preparation for productivity, especially when you proactively recuperate. This time is more productive than half-baked work time, which is perceived as wasted time in many cases, or what has come to be known as time that is not fully engaged.

Read more about this at the Web Success Team, where business owners are starting to live performance lifestyle.

You can be somewhat productive when you are half-baked but not for long. You will eventually hit the wall, leading to unhealthy lifestyle practices to deal with stress that often leaves you overweight and, eventually, with health complications.

Shawn and I have been leaders in the emerging field of lifestyle performance and I love doing events with him.

In this this insightful 5 minute interview, Shawn asked about the one thing people can do to optimize their energy right now.

I went back and listened to the 5 minute clip again this morning and I noticed a comment that he made at the end of the segment where he mentioned… (I paraphrase)  “that people are often looking for a more complicated answer to how to increase their energy, when the answer is simple“.

Now I know exactly what he meant and that he was right on. And yet, I then thought to myself, yes the answer is simple, but the truth is -  the simple answer’s are often very complex, not because they are complicated, but because you need to have a full understanding of all that goes into increasing and managing your energy, before you can do it well.

That’s the difference between a lifestyle solution and say drinking a cup of coffee. Drinking a cup of coffee to increase your energy is very simple, but the consequences of relying on stimulants to manage your energy will get very complicated. Learning how to recuperate you energy (sounds simple) but is actually pretty complex, but once you know how, it’s actually is simple.

It’s not enough to say, simply – sleep, rest, recover, (relax) and rejuvenate your energy and you’ll increase your energy; if it where that simple everyone would be doing it. Remember these are lifestyle activities and they require that you have the ability to stop yourself and those two words will reveal allot about your life. If your life is overwhelming for example, that alone will prevent you from being able to do even simple things like recuperate your energy.

So I wanted to share with you 3 steps for increasing and managing your energy.

Note: unlike food and fitness where you are working with tangible items in most cases, to manage your energy you’ve got to develop a mental dashboard so you can manage something you can’t see; managing your energy is a game of pure learning and getting grounded in experience.

1. Learn the difference between vital energy and food energy
2. Learn how how to actually recuperate or “regenerate” your personal energy
3. Get grounded in experience.

After all, it’s not what you know but how you actually live that matters!

~ JAM

PS: I will be uploading content and a very special ebook on this very subject at ManageYourEnergy.com in the coming weeks, I’ll keep you posted and keep sharing some posts on this subject.

There is no force more fundamental to your sustainability and longevity than regeneration, which quite simply means your body will repair itself and recast itself and regain it’s strength when you recover or regenerate vital energy, feed your body nutrient rich foods, and activate and strengthen your body based on a rich reserve of vital energy.

And today, that means you must manage your energy better than ever before if you are going to maintain a physical position of strength, given there are so many energy drains per day (stresses) that if you are not careful you will end up in the downward energy trend.

When we press on and never slow down for yellow lights – the signs and symptoms of too much stress, or not enough energy, or the consequences of not having the right kinds and quality of energy to operate with, you drive yourself into the downward energy trend.

You literally “drive” yourself down (in some cases into the ground) and while the body is resilient it is only resilient to a certain point; which, if passed, no amount of heroic efforts at diet and exercise will turn you around as fat loss resistance and metabolic syndrome will take hold.

Regeneration is quite possibly the most powerful aspect of lifestyle and you need to know it as it is the number 1 (numero uno) consideration for (peak performance) performing at your peak there is, even before food and fitness.

This is a video from my buddy Jon Hinds of the Monkey Bar Gym on the subject as it relates to training, even though he doesn’t refer to “regeneration”.

I will be delving into that subject more at ManageYourEnergy.com, one of the key Performance Lifestyle solutions that we will go live with soon.

If you are feeling low on energy, and your training is not going so well, it’s time to start managing your energy better  by periodizing your schedule.

You can learn the ins and outs on periodization at The Lifestyle Coaching Center.

After just meeting up with Jon at couple local events in NJ (Jon and Jessica are from Wisconsin), at first I was ready to change my plans and go.

When you get a chance to train with Jon Hinds and Jessica Rucker you take that opportunity seriously. You’ll never learn fitness the way you’ll learn it from Jon and Jessica – they are are among the top trainers in the country and you’ll know it quickly. They know how to train and progress.

But I had a family outing planned and I wanted to prioritize my family over anything else (something I haven’t always done in my life, but take great pride in today). I was also looking forward to slower intensity in August after a very intense first 6 months of the year that came to a crescendo in July.

As you may know, one of the things we manage to in a Performance Lifestyle is staying out of the downward energy trend for significant periods of time. The downward energy trend undermines your ability to function and perform well, and I was in one of those trends, relatively deep, by the end of July.

Then my nephew qualified for nationals in soccer and my sister’s family was now on their way to Kansas, postponing our family event, so naturally I felt compelled to join Jon at the intensive.

Now in my annual periodization schedule going into the downward energy trend somewhat is not all that out of the ordinary as I head into August. It’s the end of a peak quarter for me in my business, and it’s not unusual for me to be in need of an extended rejuvenation period to prepare for the second half of the year.

Its not that you won’t get run down from time to time even proactively living a performance lifestyle, that’s natural; it’s a question of how long you stay there and what you do to correct course.

It’s not that you’re not motivated when you can’t follow through and you find it hard to keep things together, it’s that you’re in need of regeneration. Nothing can arrest your capacity to function and perform well more, and leave you prone to injury than lack or recovery.

And it happened to me…

The first day of the Intensive was awesome and the second day was even better, at the start, but for me, after day 1, I am injured.  I never got a chance to post yesterday because I literally couldn’t get up.

JAM Injured

Coming into the week, I was concerned about tweaking old injuries, even though I have taken steps in the past year to minimize the chronic nature of these old injuries through bodywork.

What I hadn’t done, was fix the underlying misalignments that were causing them to remain chronic and ready to flare when just the right stress was there… and low and behold, I tweaked an old injury in my back, even while being careful!

It had nothing to do with the training or whether I was taking the right progressions (that’s a cardinal rule in the MBG 3 Training System). I was.

Earlier in the day I was standing on my hands which I had worked up to for the previous two days.

John Allen in Handstand

The reason I got injured was because this progressive way of training has not been part of my regular schedule (including yoga every day) and my physical condition, in recent months, has declined due to work load and lack of rejuvenation.

I knew it, and Jon knew it it too. I showed up out of alignment, and in a relatively run down condition, which as you will learn on this blog is almost always coupled with extra pounds. Yeah, I need to lose some weight.

Understanding my present situation…

In the past two months, I went into a downward energy trend that had a hold on me for a variety of reasons I won’t get into in this post. It gained further momentum because my planned vacation in July turned into a business trip (super busy schedule) on top of the fact that I had to complete the go live version of the new www.NutrientRich.com, which was supposed to be done the Friday before I left, and my vacation was no more.

It was at once an exciting time and an incredibly frustrating time at the same time. I was excited to launch our new site about eating nutrient rich foods (a cornerstone of a Performance Lifestyle), but I was doing it at a time when my vital energy was very low and in desperate need of recuperation.  This led to lets say,  very “touchy” behavior.

My outlook and attitude started to crash along with my body. It’s what happens when you don’t or can’t manage your energy well, faced with circumstances, that affect you like these affected me.

So here I am in Madison in a condition that was going to be easily aggravated by just enough stress to put it over the edge, and it happened. I aggravated my back doing kettle bells.

If you don’t know what Kettle Bells are, here’s a pic from the training. That’ Jessica Rucker teaching the progressions to use them safely.

Jessica Rucker Teaching Kettle Bells

So what is this all going to mean for me? Obviously I can’t train today as planned. I’m here in Madison, I want to learn as much as I can from collaboratively Jon, Jessica and the other trainers getting certified.

There’s a little ego involved although not that much. Although yesterday, in my frustration over my repeat injury (which was my responsibility) that had me feeling like an old man amidst my younger training partners, my ego had a firm grip on me. I left the gym and went back to my room and just lied flat and fell asleep wondering what was going to happen next.

Then the next phase of the episode unfolded. Jon who just finished leading the training seminar, and knew I left, came back to the condo to see what was up.

I’ll share what happened in my next post.

You can’t see it. It’s difficult to describe. It’s rather like being stuck in one spot. It’s a feeling of discomfort or lack of well-being. There’s a sensation of exhaustion or inadequate energy to accomplish usual activities. It’s the hidden variable that’s holding you back.

It’s called Personal Energy Debt or “DET” referring to what happens when you are in the Downward Energy Trend.

Personal energy debt or as my friend and associate Brendan Brazier calls it “biological debt” is what happens when we fail to meet the personal obligation we have to ourselves to find the space and time we need in order to replenish the vital energy that makes health and success possible.

Being in personal energy debt feels a lot like being naturally tired but with a few very important differences. When you’re in personal energy debt, your efforts to get the sleep, rest or to recuperate – even if you have a healthy eating plan and exercise plan in place – aren’t paying off for you in terms of increasing your energy.

The experience is different for everyone.  You may get exhausted very easily. You may feel like you just don’t have anything left to give to anyone or to put into your work.  If one thing happens in your day that is unexpected, you don’t have the energy to deal with it. Everything you are asked to do – even if it’s to enjoy the company of friends – feels like it’s just one more thing you don’t have the energy to do.  You may notice that you’re more irritable and sometimes you may feel more hopeless than you even did before.

If you’re experiencing these types of things – and particularly if everything you tried to improve your energy has not worked, or worked for a while but then stopped working – you are likely in personal energy debt.

What’s the most important thing to know about it?

First, it’s how to take the right steps to change your course, get out of personal energy debt, get into balance, and be released from these restraints. Energy debt is vicious. It’s like being chased by an ax murderer you can’t see. Sound bad enough? That’s what’s like, and it really helps to get it our in front of you. It’s allot easier when you can at least see your foe.

Feeling tired after a hard day’s work or even a great day of play is natural.   Feeling muscle or mental fatigue after spending a good deal of time doing the same type of activity for awhile is normal.  Your feeling naturally tired or fatigued, when it is clearly a result of your exerting yourself without rest is your body’s way of signaling to you that it’s running low on vital energy.

This type of natural tiredness and fatigue is signaling that its time to lessen your activity so that your body can “recharge” so to speak – to take in or regenerate energy without your spending it as fast as it comes in.  To do this in a natural healthy way, the smart strategy is to create space, meaning that you put distance between your activities or thoughts.  For example, you take a break, you clear your mind, or you give yourself ten minutes or more between meetings to re-set.

WARNING: If you are smirking at that “ten minute” break as some cute little healthy living idea, then the time you will need to get out of personal energy debt if you are overspending will only increase.

Creating space in your schedule and in your mind gives your body a chance to “re-store” your vital energy reserves, and to build-up the vital energy you need to invest in your activities with a little left over so that you can flexibly adapt to the unexpected events that happen throughout your days.

You can’t get this energy with raw eating, eating healthy food, eating better, eating healthier, better eating choices… we are not talking about food energy here. I am referring to vital energy and you can only get it when you recuperate it.

In effect, creating space really means that you purposely, proactively and periodically lower your activity level to the point where you’re absorbing more energy than you are using for the purpose of restoring and building energy for effective action.

The idea of creating space is attractive to many of us; but for many of us the idea of creating space also translates into thinking about the time it takes to re-store our energy as being “unproductive”.  The tradeoff between creating the space we know we need and the time it will take us to restore our energy can create a real dilemma for us.  We may start to think “I can’t get everything I have to do, done as it is.  If I add in “space”,  it’ll be even worse!”

Many of us feel like we have to make a choice between creating space in our mind and schedule to re-store our energy and using our time productively and effectively.  This is a false choice.  Creating the space you need is how you stay productive and effective!

One of the ways that you move passed this roadblock to managing your energy is to translate your concern about time into some useful knowledge about your energy system that will help you make smart decisions about how to keep yourself feeling energized.