Good day, friends. Or good morning, good evening, or good dead of night. It’s been hard to tell just what time it is lately because we’ve been doused in monochrome gray here for donkey’s years. Seriously. I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen the sun here in well over a week. Maybe two. And who cares what day of the week or time it is when it all feels like a long, dark night of the soul. Incidentally, I happen to be writing this on Groundhog Day (#apropos).
I know I’ve said plenty in previous posts about the value of reframing narratives and choosing one’s thoughts. True. True, true. But, I also believe there is cathartic value to be found in a bit of complaining, so long as one feels the feelings adjacent to the complaint. And besides it being the dead of winter in the Northeast, there are approximately an imperial fuckton (this is an actual measurement, I swear, and so does Urban Dictionary) of other reasons things are feeling sludgy these days.
Since you’re asking (play along), I’ll mention a select few such things that I’ve been noticing. For starters, we’re up to almost 120 days of war in Palestine (and who knows how many now of genocide and apartheid). Then there’s the deluge of disbelief and grief coming up as American presidential politics devolve into a 2020 election rematch (did I mention that today is Groundhog Day?). Last, but very much not least, there’s the steady dismantling of trans rights ripping through state legislatures nation-wide.
I could go on, but I shan’t. However, let us not minimize nor dismiss things on the personal level that serve to punctuate the collective claptrap. For me this week, it’s been the receipt of two separate jury summons from two separate courts; the discovery of mouse poop in my car console, and the maniacal masochistic effort of attempting to build my own web site, which feels every bit as easeful as trying to furnish my entire home with build-it-yourself furniture, using instructions in Swedish (no, speaking Swedish is not amongst my skill sets).
Every now and then, the collective and the personal collide in my nervous system. This produces a fairly spectacular nebula, what with smoke and springs and sparks flying furiously from my body, sizzling and glowing radioactively. Picture a mini Big Bang and you’ve got it.
Fear not, friend. Once the smoke clears, I always find my way through the haze. And I always manage to locate the surrender seat as it beckons me to come and set a spell. I stagger my way over to it, plunk my weary bones down and perhaps have a bit of a cry (did you know crying releases cortisol and adrenalin from our systems? This is directly related to why I spent all that time last week going on about the genius of our bodies).
Post-crash forensic reports almost always conclude that the cause of my crash can be traced to over-exertion. My over-exertion. My having tried really, really hard to either make something happen or make something not happen.
It all starts when some part of me resists some part of reality (Let me not beat around the bush. What I’m really resisting is my feelings about some part of reality). Under the incredible pressure of my resistance, do reality and my feelings about it back off? No. No, they do not. They persist. Moreover, they gain momentum. And reality and I, we continue this game of chicken, all the while accelerating and escalating until eventually, exertion exhaustion sounds the buzzer and declares game over. It is at this point that reality goes back to its very important business of gloating.
Whew. These cycles of habitual over-exertion, followed by exhaustion, then a period of puddling in an inability to exert at all are serious business. Running roughshod through life on the high-octane fuel blend of adrenalin and cortisol can land one in a state of Adrenal Fatigue, which blood tests don’t usually pick up on until it becomes life-threatening. No, thank you, and fingers crossed.
Lucky for me, I’ve caught on to the folly of this efforting business. Not just from my own mishaps, but from sources far wiser than I (there are, it turns out, many such sources).
A couple years ago, I started studying qigong and tai chi. Interestingly, the decision to do so was made whilst visiting the aforementioned surrender seat. Pretty much the moment I first walked through the door of the tai chi studio, I could feel my nervous system settle. And immediately pearls of ancient Taoist wisdom started spilling from my teacher’s mask (it was the middle of the pandemic, friends). One such pearl was a principle known humbly as “the 70% rule.”
This utterly nondescript idea states, unequivocally, that if you want to achieve 100% output, you must not utilize more than 70% of your maximum effort. What???!!!
Yes, friends. It runs counter to how most of us in the western world conduct ourselves. We’ve been conditioned to muscle our way through our days, believing that gain comes through pain and strain, feeling the burn and blahbety blahbety blue blue. We have drunk the Kool-Aid and self-flagellated and brutalized ourselves with such ideas. Oh, how we have. But take heart. Together we can let those winged monkeys fly.
It’s pure SBNE genius that’s been going strong for millennia. When we exert more than 70% of our maximum effort, it results in physiological strain. Our bodies tense, our adrenalin flows, and our nervous systems resist. We begin to feel anxious because our nervous systems start wondering just how much suffering and strain it’s going to take to get this thing done. And now we have the additional task of overcoming our mounting internal resistance, which further drains our energy.
Conversely, when we utilize 70% or less of our overall capacity, we move (or think, or problem solve) easily and naturally and yet still generate 100% of our available energy. Magical, no?
Now, clearly I forget to apply this rule, try as I might. But I keep it within close grasp, because it’s like an EpiPen for my nervous system. And unlike so many rules I’ve encountered along the way, it’s patient and forgiving. It doesn’t punish or penalize or shame you when you break it. It waits and it whispers soothingly. Try softer. Easy does it. No pain, no pain.
I’ve never heard of the 70% rule - it’s pure genius! I’ve been so enthusiastically running full speed ahead with writing and research that I waltzed myself right into a physical/cognitive/psychological coma. It didn’t last terribly long, but imagine if I had just slowed down a bit in the first place how much better that would have felt. I can feel I’ve already taken myself back to about the 90% mark today. Time for a self-imposed time out . . . which actually sounds relaxing and great. Thank you for this great post!
First of all, burn the car. With fire. I have an irrational fear of hantavirus. :) :)
Secondly, I feel this so much. I am regularly anxious and stressed to the point of devolving into tears and when you take on the problems of the world writ large, it's just too much.
So I love this 70% rule - this essay relates rather nicely to A's writing about her dealing with disabilities and how the world seems to think that anything less than 110% is unacceptable. Thanks so much for bringing my attention to this school of thought.