Learning to listen to the body: burnout, hyperglycaemia and the internal GPS

May 14

Periodically, my body just shuts down. Once or twice a year it somehow decides that the energy tap must stay closed for a while and that no matter how strongly my ego - nothing more than a crying baby - rebels to the decision, the body will just slap it on the butt and force the reservation mode until it is necessary.

When this happens, it usually lasts for about a week or so.
During this time my body does not allow me to do anything intense or extreme: I workout less, I walk less, I eat less, and so on.
There are only two things that increase in this phase:

the amount of hours I sleep, from my average 7.5-8 to somewhere near 9-9.5 hours
my insulin resistance, and consequently the average blood glucose level.

Both of these are a clear expression of the accumulation of stress that has slowly built up in the organism. Day by day work, physical exercise, side projects, and all the work and non-work chores pile up until over a period of some months I reach the red-zone of physical and mental shutdown.

One should never reach that point. And I reached it twice during the last 8 months, with all its consequences on my diabetes and overall health.

There are lessons to learn here, since it really looks like I am not paying close enough attention to my body. To be frank, I am ignoring its recovery needs because my Ego, the crying baby screaming for “I want to burn more calories”, “I want to do more of this”, “I want to do more of that” is in charge.
But I have understood now that the body is far smarter and powerful than the stupidity of the Ego, and when it decides that “enough is enough”, it just shuts the door and forces the slow down.

But how can one avoid reaching such point of exhaustion? Call it burnout, mental or physical breakdown, forced recovery, injury or whatever, there is a way each of us can navigate themselves with more awareness.
That is: developing an Internal GPS.

Getting off track

According to the GPS website, the Global Positioning System “provides users with positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services.”. In the context of this article, however, the navigation is not around the globe as much as it is within ourselves. Just as GPS data is used to efficiently move through space and time, to allocate energy and resources where they are most needed in a geographical space, we can deploy the GPS principles to understand our body and mind better in order to allocate our energy according to their rhythms and their recovery needs.

This is easier said than done, because this practice requires an immense amount of self-awareness, and an even greater ability to tame that voice (the Ego) that always wants more, even when doing more is counterproductive and leads us to the ‘red-zone’.

In my case there are multiple signals that I have reached (or close to) the danger territory:

I start to feel an overall lack of energy,
I lack motivation and drive to attend to my daily activities, even the ones that usually excite me like studying and doing physical exercise,
consequently, I become unable to stay focused during hard mental tasks, or even shallow ones for that matter (consequence of the above), and my physical exertion decreases in quality,
I feel more sore and sleep is less restorative overall,
…so my insulin resistance increases, causing higher blood glucose levels,
and because of poorer sleep quality, my ghrelin (the hormone that signals to the brain when you're hungry) overtakes leptin (the one that controls the sense of hunger). Result: I crave food more, which doesn’t help with stabilizing blood glucose.
Plus, I recover less efficiently between workouts, and when the stress accumulates, injuries happen.

Just like a GPS will send you signals when you’re out of the road you were supposed to walk and headed into unknown woods, the Internal GPS will send you all these signals in advance, as a very kind (or not so kind) invitation to get back on track as soon as possible.

If you follow your GPS, then you can return to the main road quickly without getting lost in the woods and finding yourself in dangerous situations, like facing a bear.

Similarly, when you have developed an Internal GPS - the ability to listen to the body -, then you can regain the lost equilibrium. Otherwise, you may face a burnout or injury.

I have both: months of unattended and uncontrolled stress levels have produced a drastic decrease in motivation and focus at work and in study, and an injured knee. The knee is the weaker piece of my chain: when a stressor overtakes me, that is the first part that pops. The problem is that I noticed it develop and grow during my runs, but ignored it as “something that will surely pass”. I was getting deeper into the woods without paying attention to the GPS signals. Then after a long run I should not have done, I found the bear in the woods: a pain that would impede walking and running for at least a week.

Be it a physical injury or a mental breakdown, one should never reach that point. There are multiple signals we can acknowledge before real damage is done, and that is why we need to invest some effort into developing our own Internal GPS.

How to develop an internal GPS

First you need to map yourself out. you need to get an idea of the territory and of your resources to navigate it.

Then you need to draft the strategy and the hurdles that may arise. These could be external (long stretches of the road without a gas-fuelling station or a secure source of food) or internal (your ego pushing to go a bit further even when the gas tank or the food in the backpack is nearly finished).

Once you have determined the path and figured out your action plan, you need to develop the ability, and the humility, to follow the right strategy you have determined. If you plan to do this much today, because you have this much energy and you want to be sure to be able to do some more tomorrow, then you need to stop at point X, even if the Ego wants to go past that point because the destination feels closer and it would greatly satisfy him.

Stick to the bigger strategy and make the needed changes on the tactic level: observe, listen to your body and mind, and adapt your tactic accordingly so that the strategy remains sustainable.

I like to imagine my total capability on any given day as the circle in the picture below, let’s call it “energy circle”.

The circle represents the amount of energy holistically: both body and mind contribute to it.
The greater the circle, the more energy I have at my disposal and the greater the effort I can sustain.
The arrows that push outwards are those that increase the area of the circle. These arrows are things like sleep, recovery, stretching, developing good relationships, meditating, going for a walk in nature, eating healthy foods, do physical exercise and spend quality time doing energising and fun activities.

The arrows pushing inwards are those that shrink the circle, or in other words are all the things that drain your energy. For instance, you eat too much or too much of unhealthy foods, you sleep poorly, you exercise too much, you spend too much time alone, you don’t allow yourself to find time for recreational activities, and so on.

The area of the circle becomes smaller when the arrows pointing outwards are outweighed by those pointing inwards, when you do too much of what drains your energy and too little of what energises you.

Now you can maybe appreciate that the size of the circle can vary greatly on a day-to-day basis, and that energy balance is a constant dance with all that could happen in a given day: a day without enough sleep, a stressful work situation, spending too much time in front of the computer will translate into a much smaller circle than one with good sleep, a productive day at work and a good walk outside.
On that day, you should adapt your tactic to stop the inwards-pointing arrows and start adding some outwards-pointing ones.

How not to use the internal GPS

Mastering the Internal GPS is a fancy way of maintaining a good and sustainable balance of energy. But to really understand how to use it it is worth considering how not to use it: the worst way of using the internal GPS is by not using it at all.

When we don’t pay attention to the signals that our body sends us overtime, we end up in unknown territory and all of a sudden we are lost and lack the resources to find our way back. We only see the damage when the damage is too big to contain it.

Let me make this more tangible: this is how I lost motivation, I partially lost control of my type-1 diabetes, became unable to focus and injured my leg. There is a close connection between the mental stress I had been accumulating and its physical expression as pain, injuries and hormonal imbalances.

On the physical side, my Ego was pushing for more reps and sets at the gym and for faster and longer runs. All of this while spending additional times on my legs walking, standing and cycling in a city that is known for its up-and-down morphology. I was ignoring the plan crafted by my running coaches to “walk only this much today, in order to refuel your legs for tomorrow’s scheduled run”: I would walk 2 hours instead of 1, because my Ego thinks that one hour is too short. Compound this light stress over a long-enough period of time, and you get an injured knee during a supposedly easy recovery run.

On the non physical side, my Ego somehow persuaded me that every day I was doing enough and I deserved some good chill time, even when deep down I knew that I could have done much better (careful here: not more, but better!). The comfort of stopping to work was greater than the effort to do a bit better. While comfortable in the short-term, this became mentally draining on the long-term: working worse and underdelivering according to my own standards produced a frustration that undermined my motivation.

To this mental frustration of not being in control of my own work ethic, add a body that was slowly but constantly growing in pain and a progressively poorer sleep quality produced by the accumulating stress.

How to use the internal GPS

How do you think my “energy circle” looked like while adding all those stressors and ignoring their effect? It was as narrow as it could possibly be, and it was constantly shrinking. And I was too proud to see this. Even worse: I saw this, and I ignored it!

I failed to respect my body and mental energy when it was asking for rest because the Ego-induced “no rest-day”/”go all-in” mindset was prevailing. There is a time and a place for the extra effort, for going off-track a bit, if that serves the longer-term. But that is clearly confined, has a clear purpose and is not passively carried through more than needed.

Using the internal GPS is a daily practice of Virtue. It is an humble practice of coming to terms with a narrower circle today, and adapting our effort accordingly. It is acknowledging that you should run X, even if your Ego feels like running X*2, because your body will keep the score and ruthlessly come seek you afterwards. It is acknowledging that you can do better at your job, even if the Ego tells you that you already did enough after all, and you can just close it for today.

Navigating life better

Balancing mental and physical energy is crucial and requires great self awareness and control. It is the difference between being constantly off-track and exposing ourselves to avoidable dangers, and being able to plan a path, seeing the obstacles and prepare for them accordingly.

My knee pain, my high blood glucose levels and my lack of motivation are GPS signals that I am off-track. I have now seen them and slowly walking back to the main road.

What signals is your GPS sending you?

Giovanni Tertulli