The mind is willing but the flesh is weak

My body is telling me I'm tired and need to rest, my mind is telling me we are fine.

Hey there, it’s me again.

I hope you’ve been good. I hope you’ve been fine. I hope the week has not been too stressful and I hope that you’ve had some excitement to hold on to.

As always, I am always coming into knowledge of new things and I often try to share them to the best of my understanding with the hope that someone relates to it, someone understands it, and someone is helped because of it.

Last week I shared something about the conflict between exploration and stability. I mentioned the fact that most people in their 20s are consistently trying to figure out what stability looks like, where they should be exploring, when they should settle and focus on one thing.

There are arguments for exploration: try different things, figure out what you love, figure out what works for you, understand yourself. And then there are other arguments around once you find that one thing, chase stability.

I then drew a comparison between how that can look.

Quick recap

Firstly, before you even have a career path or something working for you, you do some exploration, right? You start a couple of businesses, you learn a couple of skills, and then at some point, you are trying to figure out what works for you.

And then suddenly you find something that works and then you run to that for a while and pursue it, and it’s good. For some people, they are lucky enough that the thing they find sustains them for the entirety of their lifetime. They’re able to transition along the verticals of that particular thing. But some other people are not entirely lucky. Or maybe life just has more exploration for them ahead.

In that case, they still have to go through another cycle of exploration where the thing that has already worked now has to be reevaluated for whether or not it will sustain them for a longer period of time. They then have to define what success looks like again and recycle the whole exploration phase.

So the big question last week was,

Are you exploring or are you chasing stability?

And I’ve had a couple of interesting reactions around that.

But now, I want to move on from that thought process into what I have for this week. Which is closely related,

If even one line here made you pause, rethink, or feel more focused—imagine the impact of getting this kind of clarity every week. Hit subscribe and don’t miss the next one.

I pride myself in the fact that I’m an averagely self-aware person.

I try to be as in control of my emotions as I can be.

I try to be aware of what is happening to me, what my environment is like. Once I can know this, I know when I’m stressed. I know when I am doing too much and I need to slow down and rest.

Based on the same signals, I also know when I am not doing enough and I need to apply pressure.

I know when my voice is loud in an argument. I know when I’m wrong and I know when to apologize. I know how to communicate. I know how to articulate myself in many scenarios.

But no one is perfect, and I have recently come into a new experience where self-awareness does not really translate to what I have always perceived as a signal pointing to stability or the lack of it.

I’ve always thought that once you are a self-aware person, someone who is conscious of their words, their actions, and able to draw those outputs from yourself based on the things that are happening in your environment, you can make connections and say:

“Hey, this is how this thing triggers me. This is how this stimulus is affecting me and is making me act.”

And then you can, based on that understanding of those feelings, have better control of yourself and understand yourself better.

Recently, I have been giving off certain signals that are a little bit confusing.

Typically, when I feel stressed, I know.

When I’ve been doing stressful things, I feel stressed.

There’s a direct correlation and I can tell myself…

“hey, slow down”

When I obey that, I no longer feel stressed.

Or when I’m reacting a particular way or I’m triggered by something that would typically not trigger me, I know why that thing triggers me and I adjust.

Recently, my mind and my body have been doing this thing where they are not in sync, where what my mind believes is different from the outputs that my body is providing, where I don’t feel tired but I have migraines.

As a matter of fact, sometimes I have intense migraines but feel fine just minutes before.

I feel like my schedule is regulated. I’m not stressing myself. I’m not working all night. I’m eating okay, but then my body is communicating something else.

So I started to explore some solutions.

• Tried to rest more,

• Tried to sleep more,

• Tried to reduce screen time,

• Tried to do a bunch of things

… and some of those things helped in a way, but I still really could not place what the root cause was.

I eventually had to go do a checkup and, well, there was a bit of malaria there, but migraine, especially intense migraine, is not a malaria symptom for me, and neither did it stop after treating the malaria.

So it meant that there was something else, and my doctor told me it was stress.

How could I be stressed when I did not feel stressed?

As a matter of fact, I feel fine.

I did not feel like I was doing too much. I did not feel like I was pressuring myself or using my mind and my body in a way that was beyond the capacity that it was used to.

It was until I sat myself down and had a conversation with a friend about all the things that I am handling, I am juggling, things that my mind consistently processes and thinks about, that I got an idea that while I do not feel stressed, this is enough to cause stress.

So now I have established that while I do not feel stressed, these events should trigger stress.

The medical analysis says that it was stress, and it was right.

Somehow my mind is saying that I’m fine, but then my body is saying, no, you’re not fine.

The mind that I’ve always relied on to be the determinant of the true state of how I am doing or how the things around me are affecting me is not properly representing the facts of the situation.

So I naturally started to study the subject.

I know I know. The irony of being diagnosed with stress and proceeding to do research instead of resting.

Trust me, I RESTED.

Introduction to Unprocessed Pain / Grief / Emotions

Apparently, there are certain triggers or things that would happen in your life where your mind would figure out a way to manage the experience and communicate to you that you are fine for a specific period of time till you’re in a better position to process it.

It’s essentially a phenomenon where events are not fully being digested by your consciousness. So there are things happening around you that are causing stress or triggering some sort of response in your body, but your mind is saying…

Nahhh, don’t worry about it.

Ignore it.

Sometimes your mind tries to make you feel safe about what is happening or disguise the true weight of everything that is happening and tells you that you are OK.

Eventually, you start to fall sick, your body breaks down, and in my case migraines kick in.

What this has taught me is that I need to look beyond what I used to believe. While I might not feel stressed, while I might not feel tired, while I might not feel exhausted or confused, my body can actually communicate exactly what the reality of the situation is, and I absolutely have to listen.

Either it’s emotional suppression or numbness, delayed processing, a cognitive override because you’ve convinced yourself that you’re okay, or your body just taking over the role of expressing what the true emotion is, I have come to understand that I need to look not just at my emotions, but also at the signals in my body that reflect the impact of what is going on around me.

I think it’s okay if my mind protects me and that sometimes the body does the communication, but I would really like for my body and my mind to be in agreement as to what is going on.

We can’t be throwing wrong signals around now, can we? We have deadlines, boysssss.

Because of all the things I’m doing, working on, applying for, all the rejections that I’m getting, and all the responsibilities that I’m having to juggle, there’s an emotional and mental strain to them all.

It is incredibly helpful to rest as much as possible. Even when I don’t feel like I should, I need to rest, pay attention to slight headaches or dizziness or whatever.

This is just something that I’ve experienced personally and I wanted to share. And I hope that it helps someone.

LOL.

I’m editing this at almost midnight to send out. And I just finished talking about stress. OK, fine, I’m going to listen to my body now, even if my mind feels OK. I’ll go to bed. And I think you should take the same counsel and do the same.

Cheers and stay alive.

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In summary

• Even if you feel fine, go for a check, your mind or body sometimes doesn’t tell the full story.

• Self awareness is still valid. This is just an added layer.

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