As someone who is naturally driven and ambitious, I’ve always been focused on the doing – making progress, exploring, learning new things and achieving goals. However, over time, I’ve come to realize that there are times when it’s more important to prioritize stability over progress.
I’ve noticed that I tend to go through cycles where I get really excited about new projects and take on more than I can handle. At first, everything seems great – I’m making progress, achieving more and more, and feeling really good about myself.
But eventually, the workload becomes too much for me to handle. I start feeling overwhelmed and stressed out, and my productivity begins to suffer which only drives me to work more and harder to counter the decreased productivity. Eventually, I hit a breaking point and have to take a step back from everything.
These falls and burnouts are really difficult. Not only do they set me back in terms of my progress towards my goals, they crush some deeper sense of self, things I used to do without any problem become impossible and I find myself completely helpless in front of the situation.
If you relate to what I’m describing and can identify similar patterns within yourself I would like to point out that it’s possible to work on that. The tricky part is that may be hard to even want to work on it while you’re at the high end of that rollercoaster- you’re functioning phenomenally, achieving great things and nothing holds you back, but it comes at a great cost.
Over time, I’ve learned to recognize the warning signs that indicate I may be pushing myself too hard. By paying attention to my body and my emotions, I can tell when it’s time to slow down and focus on maintaining stability rather than pushing for more progress.
When I feel myself getting overwhelmed or stressed out, I try to take a step back from whatever I’m working on and focus on self-care instead. This might mean taking a day off work to relax and recharge, or it might even mean scaling back on some of my projects which I’m always a little sad to do.
Sometimes you can’t completely alter your natural patterns but learn to live with them. By prioritizing stability over progress in this way, I’ve found that the falls I experience are less extreme and are easier to recover from, the periods of time between them are also increasing gradually, Instead of hitting rock bottom every few months, I’m able to maintain a more consistent level of productivity and well-being over time.
Of course, there are still times when it’s important to push myself outside of my comfort zone and sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. But by learning to recognize your limits and prioritize stability when necessary, you’ll be able to do so in a way that is sustainable and healthy in the long run.
