#6: On why we take breaks (and a look at my time before & after COVID-19)
Good morning,
It has been 65 days since I last sent you a letter.
(This will be a long one so get comfy and stay with me if you’d like to, or don’t!)
Do you remember what you have spent the last 65 days doing? Unless you accomplished or experienced something specific and major with a beginning, middle and end, I’m guessing the last 65 days feels more like a haze of emotions and experiences, as time usually does.
For me, things sharpened into focus 46 days ago. It was Saturday March 7 and around 2:45pm I was leaving a Buddhist friend’s house after a small gathering when I got a phone call from my brother, who is a post-doc at a university in New Hampshire.
“Can you talk?” he said.
“Sure, I’m walking home,” I said.
“Okay, I don’t want to freak you out but this is important so I need you to listen,” he said, adding, “I just got off the phone with mom and dad, too.”
Before I could worry about the infinite possible causes for alarm, he said, “Don’t worry, everyone is fine, but at risk of sounding like an alarmist, I need to know that you are prepared for life to change dramatically for at least a month, and probably more, because of COVID-19.”
Until then, I had been following the news and taking some general precautions, like washing my hands and avoiding large crowds, but the fear wasn’t in my bones yet.
And then, one 45-minute call later, it was.
The only reason my brother understood the details of the impact of COVID-19 and felt its urgency before I did, was because he’s a nerd who follows data scientists on Twitter and spends a lot of time figuring things out for himself. (Usually, this is why I can call him about virtually anything and he’s probably relatively informed.)
The point here is this: the 46 days that followed that phone call have been an astonishing blur. More blurry than probably any other period of my life, even the months before and after my wedding.
In this period I have felt: safe, grateful, hopeful, unsafe, angry, scared, impressed, inspired, cared for, ignored, exhausted, energized, free, trapped, confused, clear, purposeful, happy, useless, strong, courageous, weak and many other things, in no particular order.
Just lots of these feelings, all the time, and often in a succession that doesn’t seem to match the inputs around me.
The main thing I have been trying to practice is actually feeling my feelings, which, thanks to a little tool I’ve fallen in love with called the change triangle, have lead me to my most favorite, authentic state: curiosity.
When I am curious, I feel alive and happy. This is my Jihii place.
Several times, I have begun to write one of these letters about one of the things I have been curious about, but I got nowhere, because some other emotion would come up and I just didn’t feel like writing anymore.
Some of the topics I explored included:
Is my work useful during a global crisis?
When people want stories, is journalism more useful or is art more useful?
What aspects of socialism do I believe in?
What relics of life are most worth saving or preserving?
Why do heroes always win in stories but not in real life?
How have obituary writers’ work been impacted by COVID-19?
How do first responders look different in different counties?
But finally, thanks to a few great phone calls with my brother and a few book club sessions with friends discussing life and death, I’m ready to explore this one:
Why do we take breaks? And from what?
First, a disclaimer
This entire exploration has been afforded to me by my own privilege of safety, a home in which I can eat, sleep and work safely, a job that I still have, and my health. For this I am very grateful. I’m also grateful for tools and a community with which to create value and help others at this time. For instance, my Buddhist community has been engaged in a daily effort to call all of our members, friends and family to check on everyone individually and offer support and encouragement.
Why we take breaks
It all began with articles like this one: “Stop Trying to Be Productive” by Taylor Lorenz in NYT, and others that it quotes, which argue that we shouldn’t try to be productive right now, and our culture around work is unhealthy:
This urge to overachieve, even in times of global crisis, is reflective of America’s always-on work culture. In a recent article for The New Republic, the journalist Nick Martin writes that “this mind-set is the natural endpoint of America’s hustle culture — the idea that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified and pointed toward profit and self-improvement.” Drew Millard put it more directly in an essay for The Outline: If you are lucky enough to be employed, the only person who cares what you’re doing right now is your boss.
It goes on to blame millennials for being the worst victims/culprits/products of this mentality. Generally, I agree with the point. But it also irked me.
I couldn’t help but think what a clear example this is of how conditioned we are to not value care work as work. In the same way that the labor of unpaid care (in/for households and communities) is famously undervalued, I think the unpaid hours we spend caring for ourselves are undervalued, or worse, ignored. And then (see again, change triangle), we develop all sorts of coping mechanisms to either avoid our emotions (which are supposed to function as important clues that help us decide how to take action to care for ourselves), replace them with inhibitory emotions (guilt, shame, anxiety) and never make it out from under the weight of it all.
Personally, I’ve been trying to unlearn this process for the last 10 months, and it has been so freeing.
So after reading these articles I began to think: What is it that I need right now? If it is to slow down and do less, then less of what? Essentially, what do I need to take a break from? Work? Life in general? Or something more specific?
It depends on how you view work
Because I view paid work, creative work and care work as work, in my ideal life, I’m constantly working. Paid work pays my bills and helps me participate in society. Creative work makes me happy and fulfills my sense of purpose. And care work is my unique system of reading my own needs and the needs of the people around me, and fulfilling them, be it through play, food, household management, rest, pleasure, dialogue, social/community service, recreation, or self-improvement.
Those three types of work together means I don’t have any regrets about how I have spent my time. If I needed to sleep 14 hours one night because I was feeling depressed and trapped at home, that’s okay, because I chose to, and I’m going to bounce back refreshed. If I work for 14 hours the next day because I have a huge deadline ahead of me and I want to do my best, that’s also okay, because I chose to. If I sleep 14 hours every night because I cannot bear to deal with life, then it sounds like I need to do some care work.
Here’s how all this adds up for me.
How I’ve spent the first 16 weeks of 2020
Since January, I’ve been tracking my time to see how many hours out of each 24 hour day, I feel proud of and consciously engaged with. This has been insanely helpful during the blur I’m currently experiencing.
My criteria for “engaged” time (i.e.: work) is as follows: I could be working, resting, playing, socializing, or taking care of myself or others. But I’m doing it consciously and when I look back, I have no regrets about how I spent my time and probably couldn’t have done anything differently, given how I felt and what was tugging at my attention at the time.
By contrast: During the “unengaged” time I was either not being conscious (ie: mindless scrolling, procrastination activities that ultimately didn’t make me feel good, or sleeping).
I tracked all this by using my calendar in reverse: each day, I log what I did, every hour of it, from work tasks to appointments to meals to naps to reading, exercising, watching TV, being on the phone and on and on. As long as it was a consciously decided and served some purpose of value to me, it counts.
Here’s a graph of what that looks like (thank you nerdy brother), where X is week of the year, and Y is how many hours per day I averaged as “engaged” in life/work that week:
On this graph, Week 9 is when my brother called me, Week 10 is when I became fully preoccupied with the news, Week 11 is when most of my work and social activities were cancelled and Week 12 is when NYC went into lockdown.
We made this graph because I was curious about how my “engagement” with life was affected during COVID-19 weeks. Here’s another look at the same data where this time, X is hours engaged and Y is the frequency of a particular # of hours engaged.
I was curious to see if/how I’ve changed since the virus affected my city. Did my practice over the last 10 months to value and become conscious about care work impact how much “work” (again, how engaged in & proud I am of how I spend my time) I’m able to do in a day? If so, then the amount of time I spent engaged in care/creative/paid work, shouldn’t have changed too much.
This is what I learned:
Yes, my average time engaged in work didn’t change much: 13.3 hours per day before the virus, and 12.9 after.
But the mode (the most frequent # of hours I spend engaged) did change: before the virus it was 16, after it was 11.
And the standard deviation (how much my engagement changes day to day) became lower: 2.2 post-virus vs. 3.2 pre-virus. [edited this after sending it out bc typo!]
I interpret this to mean that I’m pushing the upper bounds of my energy less; where in a previous week, I would do an extra 2-3 hours of something after I was already tired, now, I’m just checking out and vegging a bit more - scrolling, sleeping, watching TV to deal with overwhelming feelings. This makes sense.
On the whole, I think my care work experiment has been working. If I am intentional about my care work, I can nourish myself far more quickly than if I’m not. For example: one hour of rest in the middle of the day, say, by reading and drinking a cup of coffee, can nourish me far more than 3 hours of watching TV at midnight because in TV land, I’m avoiding what I am feeling.
Remember this NYT piece from last March? In it, experts explain that procrastination has nothing to do with laziness. Instead we learn:
People engage in this irrational cycle of chronic procrastination because of an inability to manage negative moods around a task.
This is very true for me. By observing myself so carefully, I have noticed that when I procrastinate my work on account of worry, fear, or anxiety, it’s because I’m avoiding the negative feeling associated with the task, not the task itself. And avoiding negative feelings usually takes up a LOT of time — time spent on a soothing behavior (for me it’s almost always TV, ineffective organizing, picking a fight with my husband etc). So in the end, I’m losing time by procrastinating.
Now, if we consider both care and paid work as work, we probably procrastinate both. I definitely do. If I don’t know how I feel and I don’t have a way to figure it out, you’re much more likely to find me watching 3 episodes of Criminal Minds while eating mac n cheese and ice cream, than eating multiple food groups and taking a shower. The latter will definitely make me feel much better. But I’m procrastinating it because it is care work.
These days, what I’m really trying to practice is noticing the uncomfortable feeling and trying to address it a conscious way; for instance, last week, I felt really burnt out after finishing a project and then reading too much news, but instead of being a couch potato, I decided to sleep early, have a slow next day, and I ended up choosing activities that genuinely helped me rest: a long nap in the sun, a few hours reading a book I love, and cooking Indian comfort food I’ve never made before.
This is something some of us probably do well, naturally. But many others, like me, never learned it. It wasn’t modeled to me. I don’t see great examples of it in society or social media.
But I’m finding that if I take a break from being mindless, I can actually engage in more work, many kinds of it, and they help me feel alive and add up to something special. To me, a great indicator for happiness is lack of regret. And any hour you feel good about how you spent your time is a plus for your life overall, even in times of crisis.
In a book I’m currently reading, Unlocking the Mysteries of Birth and Death, which is about the Buddhist perspective on life and death (in short: it’s an eternal energy, so what you do now matters for a long time), Daisaku Ikeda discusses spiritual death as something just as grave as physical death. He says something similar in a Tricycle piece on the same topic:
I believe that the ultimate tragedy in life is not physical death. Rather, it is the spiritual death of losing hope, giving up on our own possibilities for growth.
There’s a difference between growth for the sake of social productivity, and growth for the sake of happiness, hope and fulfillment.
In short, I think we can push the upper bounds of our willingness to really live life, even as we slow down and stay in, by doing more care work - for ourselves and for others. At a time when everyone is grappling with a global battle to protect physical life, doesn’t it make sense to protect spiritual life as well?
For me, today marks the beginning of that process. The care work I wasn’t doing for myself (which, I learned, was sleeping well and exercising), prevented me from writing, which is the thing that makes me happiest. But here I am, back to work. Slowly.
Jihii
P.S. Practical things I did make in the last several weeks are:
And I’ll probably have something coming along on news literacy soon :)
P.P.S. If this was forwarded to you or you are reading online, you can subscribe here: