Your Nervous System Might Be the Bottleneck

By:  Lisa M. Hayes

Too often we treat a nervous system problem like a discipline problem, and it is an expensive mistake.

You are not getting enough done, so you tighten the schedule.

You are not writing enough, so you stare at the document longer.

You are not exercising enough, answering enough email, making enough money, cleaning enough, creating enough, or somehow being enough, so you decide the obvious solution is to push harder.

Sometimes that works for an afternoon.

Sometimes adrenaline is useful.

But as a way of life, I think it is one of the stupidest bargains we make with ourselves.

You cannot reliably out-perform the condition of your nervous system.

You can drag yourself past it for a while. Humans are remarkably good at that. We can function on grief, terror, resentment, sleep deprivation, dread, overstimulation, and sheer bloody-mindedness for astonishing stretches of time.

We can even look productive while we are doing it.

Then one day we cannot remember why we walked into the kitchen.

We cannot make a decision.

Everything feels irritating.

The thing we used to love feels like another demand.

We sit down to work and discover that our brain has apparently left the building.

At that point, most of us have been trained to reach for more pressure.

I think that is exactly backward.

When my output starts getting weird, I am increasingly interested in looking underneath it.

Have I slept?

Have I eaten something that resembles actual food?

Have I been outside?

Have I spent six straight hours absorbing other people’s emergencies?

Is my body hot, tense, dehydrated, overstimulated, or waiting for the next bad thing to happen?

Have I had one goddamn minute in which nobody needed anything from me?

These questions are much less glamorous than a new productivity system.

They are also considerably more useful.

I am starting to believe that tending the nervous system should come before almost everything else because so much of what we call discipline sits downstream from it.

Creativity does.

Patience does.

Executive function certainly does.

So does our ability to tolerate frustration without deciding our entire life is a failure.

When my nervous system is well cared for, I do not have to negotiate quite so hard with myself.

I get ideas.

I finish things.

I notice what needs doing and often just do it.

My sense of humor comes back.

The world contains doors again.

A stressed nervous system can make life feel impossibly narrow. There is the problem, the obligation, the thing that might go wrong, the thing you forgot, the thing you are behind on. Your field of vision contracts until your whole existence seems to be five unfinished tasks standing around your desk demanding an explanation.

Then we call ourselves lazy.

Cruel little diagnosis, that one.

Sometimes the smartest thing you can do for your work is go swimming.

Sometimes you need food.

Sometimes you need twenty minutes with your feet up and the phone somewhere you cannot reach it.

Sometimes you need to stop talking to the person who leaves your entire body humming for three hours afterward.

Sometimes your productivity problem is actually that your life has become too loud.

This does not mean we wait until we feel perfect before doing anything. I would never get anything done under that arrangement.

It means I no longer believe self-neglect is a serious productivity strategy.

If I want more from myself, the first question cannot always be, “How do I make myself do more?”

A much better question is, “What condition am I asking myself to perform from?”

That question has changed things for me.

Because a tended nervous system gives back.

You care for it and, very often, concentration returns on its own. Curiosity wanders back into the room. You become less avoidant without having to wage war on avoidance. Work stops feeling like something being extracted from you.

The rest begins to follow.

Not perfectly.

Not every day.

But often enough that I have stopped treating nervous-system care as something I earn after the work is finished.



It is part of the work.

Maybe the first part.