Hey rockstars,

I remember a few years ago, or maybe even a few months ago, I was getting coffee with my friend who told me that she thinks our brains have a limited capacity for stress. Her theory was basically this: if you have ten things to worry about, your brain has to divide its attention among all ten. But if you only have one thing to worry about, suddenly that one thing gets your entire worry allocation.

Although I haven’t done the research to see whether there is any scientific basis for this theory, I have unfortunately collected a great deal of anecdotal evidence in its favor.

When I am extraordinarily busy, I am often exhilarated by the stress and the work I need to do. Give me twelve things to do and I will make a color-coded tracker (call me the #TrackerQueen), figure out what needs to happen first, and start moving. There is no time to obsess over any one thing because there are eleven other things demanding my attention. When life gets quieter, however, my brain goes:

Wonderful, we have additional resources available. Shall we devote them all to this one mildly concerning thing? 

Apparently, yes.

This came up today when my sweet friend Elena and I were talking about our workload this week and how we had both been feeling antsy for what we think is “no particularly good reason,” although I’m sure there are lots of valid reasons. I know that exact feeling because, strangely, I think I get more anxious when I have fewer things to do. She understood immediately. “Just more time to fixate on things,” she said.

Exactly. I explained the worry-budget theory, and Elena agreed that this seemed to describe both of us remarkably well. If there is only one thing available to worry about, we will obviously invest more heavily in it. There was only one reasonable conclusion. “The solution is simple,” I told her. “We need more things to stress about.”

Problem solved.

Except, of course, it isn’t. Because Elena said something else during that conversation that made me realize we weren’t really talking about anxiety anymore. She pointed out that we are both people who derive a lot of our value from productivity. And, well. That seems less funny.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that Elena and I are both associates in BigLaw. We voluntarily chose a profession that quite literally measures our work in six-minute increments. There is always another assignment, another deadline, another thing to improve, another milestone somewhere ahead of you. We are both very good at going. It’s the stopping we’re bad at.

Elena and I have had the pleasure of working on several cases together, and we have repeatedly said that we have two settings: go, go, go and 0%. Give me twelve things to do and I become extremely efficient. Give me two things to do and somehow each one requires significantly more psychological preparation. The fewer things demanding my attention, the harder it can be to manufacture momentum for any of them. “I’ll do it later,” I tell myself as I contemplate my life for three hours (James, if you’re reading this: …sorry hehe).

And rest is somehow its own problem. People tell me to take vacations all the time. This is perfectly reasonable advice. I like vacations! I understand, intellectually, that human beings require rest. I would advise other people to take time off without hesitation. But tell me to take a vacation and some part of my brain immediately responds: You take a vacation. I have things to do.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that productivity isn’t just something I value.

Productivity is my operating system.

It gives my days structure and momentum, as well as somewhere to direct my attention. I know how to accomplish something, cross it off, and move on to the next thing. I know how to be needed somewhere. I know how to work toward something. I am much less practiced at letting an afternoon simply be an afternoon. I custom-build planners online so I can Always. Be. Prepared. while filling out a cute planner in the process. My go-to planner for the last few years has been Erin Condren, and if you’re inclined, get a discount by using my code. 

And apparently, I am not alone. After talking to Elena, I told another friend, Julia, that we had been discussing how much of our value we derive from productivity. Elena and I had half-jokingly attributed it to being daughters of immigrants. Julia had a broader diagnosis: “That’s America.” When I suggested maybe it was both, she agreed. “It’s all of it combined.”

Julia told me that she has spent the last few years deliberately creating new ways to measure her self-worth, value, and success, which for her has meant unlearning some cultural and corporate norms. I understood what she meant, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t quite my problem.

My life is not particularly narrow. Work matters enormously to me, but so do a lot of other things. I go to school. I write. I read constantly. I paint. I buy myself flowers. I go for long walks and dance around my apartment. I spend a frankly impressive amount of time talking to my friends. I make plans with my family. I travel. I go to concerts, museums, restaurants, and coffee shops. I have built a life that is full in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with my job.

And, for that matter, Elena sells herself short too. She has an incredibly full life. She is raising two kids under five while also being one of the smartest, most trusted, detail-oriented lawyers I know. She does brilliant work and then goes to pick up her daughter from daycare. She goes on family vacations and takes pictures and talks excitedly about the things she loves. She drinks coffee with me and initiates our immunity-broth walks. She is a mentor. She is vulnerable. She is ambitious and thoughtful and funny, and her joining Axinn has been one of the greatest joys of my life. So yes, Elena is hungry. But she is also already so much more than everything she is hungry for.

The problem is that I am almost always doing something.

Maybe productivity is the wrong word for it, or at least an incomplete one. I don’t necessarily need every hour to advance my career. But I apparently do like every hour to contain something. Reading is not traditionally “productive,” but I can learn something from a book, and finishing one on my TBR gives me a sense of accomplishment. A walk gives me miles. Painting gives me something I made. Dinner with a friend gives me a memory and a relationship I tended to. Even leisure, apparently, has a tendency to become an activity.

I am very good at filling a life.

I am less good at leaving space in one.

And maybe that is because there is another possibility I have to acknowledge: perhaps I don’t fill my life entirely because I am afraid of being unproductive. Maybe I am just a little greedy about being alive.

Life is short, and there is so much I want to know. The goal in life has always been to be such a badass that I’m grossly overeducated. Anyone who knows me knows that I think one graduate degree is insufficient, so I am getting an MBA, and I fully intend to get a master’s in architecture someday because there are buildings in the world and, unfortunately for my free time, I would like to understand them better. I want to read books; I want to see places; I want to learn how things work; I want to paint and write and go to concerts and wander through museums and have long dinners with people I love. I want to notice things; I want to understand things; I want to experience as much of this very large world as I reasonably can.

I am not trying to optimize my life. I am trying to participate in it.

And I don’t particularly want to change that. I don’t want to become less curious or less ambitious. I don’t want fewer books on my nightstand or fewer places on my list. There is so much to learn and see and love in this world, and I feel incredibly lucky to be interested in so much of it. But perhaps when you love participating in your life, it becomes very easy to confuse full with well-lived. Maybe my problem isn’t that I need to want less from my life. Maybe I need to get better at actually being inside the life I am so busy filling.

A few days ago, Neel sent me an Instagram post about the idea of “wasting time.” The post’s point was that an afternoon is going to pass whether you spend it making money, running errands, improving yourself, or sitting underneath a tree. We have just collectively decided that if we fail to convert those hours into something measurable, the time itself has somehow been wasted.

I read it and thought:

Yes. Absolutely. What a healthy and beautiful way to think about being alive.

I would still probably get up from underneath the tree after twenty minutes. 

This is a work in progress.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe I have been defining rest too narrowly. I keep imagining the alternative to go, go, go as 0%: doing absolutely nothing, accomplishing absolutely nothing, perhaps staring serenely at a tree while achieving a level of inner peace that I simply do not possess.

But I have written about this before. A year ago, I wrote a post that one of my goals in life is to “do more things that make you forget to check your phone.” I wrote that when I am with people who make me feel safe and happy, I slow down to 0.5. I stop checking my phone. I stop worrying about everything happening outside the moment I am actually in.

I found that feeling again this past weekend. I went to a very fancy dinner with someone I love, and we spent most of the night laughing about absolutely everything. We loved our waiter, Samantha. I became reasonably convinced that our sommelier, Abby, hated us after she spent approximately twenty minutes recommending a bottle of wine, I tasted it, hated it, and immediately asked for a different bottle that I already knew I liked. She later returned with a very polite “just for future reference” explanation about wine, which I am sure was useful information. Unfortunately, if you ask me why I like a particular wine, my most sophisticated tasting note remains: it’s good.

That dinner was one of my favorite parts of the entire weekend, and I have nothing measurable to show for those hours except a credit-card charge and a renewed understanding that perhaps I should not antagonize sommeliers.

I was just really, really happy.

For a few hours, I wasn’t thinking about whether I was using my time well or what was waiting for me the next day. I wasn’t trying to extract anything from the experience. I was laughing with someone I love, eating very good food, drinking the wine I stubbornly selected for myself, and completely inside the life I was living.

I forgot to keep track of myself.

Maybe that is another kind of rest. Not necessarily doing nothing, but being so present in what I am already doing that my brain stops looking around for somewhere else to allocate its resources.

Elena said something else during our conversation that I keep returning to. She acknowledged that our relationship with productivity probably isn’t always wonderful for our mental health, but she also admitted that she doesn’t really want to be any other way. “I feel like having this kind of hunger is important,” she told me. “Like I don’t take success for granted.”

I understood exactly what she meant. I don’t want to need accomplishment to prove that I am valuable, but I also don’t want to stop wanting things. I like caring deeply about my work. I like wanting another degree for no particularly practical reason other than the fact that there is more I want to know. I like that there are books I haven’t read, places I haven’t seen, things I haven’t learned, paintings I haven’t made, and versions of my life I haven’t reached yet that I am excited to meet.

I don’t think wanting more from my life means I am insufficiently grateful for my life. And I don’t think learning how to rest has to mean learning how to want less.

Maybe what I need to get better at is leaving some of the budget unallocated.

Not every quiet moment needs to be converted into productivity, and it certainly doesn’t need to be converted into worry. An hour can be well spent because I accomplished something, learned something, made something, helped someone, or spent it with someone I love. But it can also be well spent because I laughed until my face hurt, drank my coffee slowly, sat in the sun, or simply enjoyed being alive for it.

That last category may be a little underrepresented in my portfolio. I don’t need to find more places from which to derive meaning; my life is wonderfully, almost absurdly full of them. What I may need is a broader definition of what it means to spend time well.

I suspect the theory about the worry budget is accurate. Give my brain fewer things to worry about and I remain reasonably confident it will try to increase its investment in whatever remains. I also suspect I will always be someone who likes moving. But I don’t think I need to dismantle the operating system.

So perhaps my solution to Elena this morning wasn’t entirely wrong: I just need to diversify the portfolio.

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

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