Nevertheless, by December 2007 it was clear that a number of major course corrections were in order. I suspended publication of my award-winning email Newsletter. I also cut down my planned road trips from ten to one, and reduced my speaking engagements and social life proportionally.
Nevertheless, in May this year, I came back from my one road trip of the year having to acknowledge the obvious. I’d been running on fumes for at least a year and now there was nothing left in the tank.
The technical term is burn-out, a direct outcome of stress. Something equivalent to the hibernation reflex kicks in. My brain was responding to a threatening situation by shutting down, by refusing to let me work, by refusing to expose me to yet more stress.
As if to emphasize the point, a few days ago, my digestive tract went on strike. One of those 24-hour bugs that lasts me 96 hours.
I had grossly underestimated the cumulative effects of two years of nonstop stress. Each event had left my brain in a weakened state, defenses down, vulnerable to the next event. There had been no time in between for my brain to reset back to whatever passes for normal with me.
To make matters worse, the brain was going all-out in an heroic effort to keep the show on the road.
In due course, my neurons will mend. Offline networks will slowly boot up. My healing will enter a new phase. All in good time, I will be able to return to work. But only if I’m smart enough not to hurry Mother Nature.
I also need to accept the likelihood that I may never be able to return to where I once was.
Despite what we would like to be, what others may expect of us, our genetic make-up poses certain challenges. We may be very creative about working within those challenges, but we get no special dispensation for taking unnecessary risks. Stress is the ultimate enforcer. It reacts to foolish behavior by hitting you with its own version of a biological cure, including heart attack.
Twenty years ago, my biological cure was career-ending mania followed by suicidal depression.
This time I was let off with the equivalent of a warning and a slap on the wrist.
First rule of managing stress: Learn to manage your life around it.
Let’s see if I’m smart enough to follow my own advice.
