The LIFE Project

Chapter 8: Fighting the Famine

As you guys are probably aware, I have been struggling with exhaustion for a little over a year. If I'm honest, I've been mentally, physically, and emotionally drained for MUCH longer than that. There are several medical reasons for this. Any of them have been a huge challenge to overcome, but one stands out as a huge pain in my ass. That little gremlin is known as adrenal fatigue. 

You know how you're in a stressful situation that triggers your fight or flight mechanism? Well, that whole situation is your adrenal system diverting all available sources of energy to life support in an attempt to ensure your survival. 

In that moment, you're able to sprint faster than you ever knew was possible. You could lift a car off a baby. But when your adrenaline runs out, you feel like you were hit by a freight train. Fortunately, our bodily functions work to replenish all of our hormones, including our adrenaline, and we soon feel better. That is... if we're in good health and our endocrine systems work like they should. 

Mine does not. The same adrenaline rush that helps us get through tough situations and looming deadlines leaves me feeling like the living dead for days, if not weeks.

Since starting the LIFE Project, I've been working hard at recovering to a point where I wouldn't trigger my adrenaline too often, and where I could work for more than two hours per day without feeling like I'm being crushed by my exhaustion. As of June 2023, I finally felt like I could pick up the many things I'd left by the wayside last year when I no longer felt like I could cope. Two weeks ago, I finally felt human as I went about my day.

This is especially significant considering that I have been experiencing some financial pressure for about a month by that time. Despite feeling the pressure, my anxiety was under control and I was working my way through things smoothly and without any major bouts of stress or exhaustion. 

On Wednesday, June 28, a major job from an old contract of mine landed on my desk, and the time until deadline was miniscule. I wasn't ready, but I took on the work anyway after stretching the deadline as far out as I could. I had seven days to fully design and lay out 144 pages. I had to draw and edit almost 40 tables, graphs, and photos. 

To call the experience intense is an understatement. Day 1 was a slog and I could feel the stress climbing, but I simply had to keep going. I had to do so through sheer determination because my adrenal response was pretty much non-existent. My fight or flight only started up at the end of the fifth straight 14-plus-hour workday—right at the end. Thank God for the adrenaline because it helped me get through three more 16-hour days and to my contract's successful end. I was a few days late, but the end result was worth it.

I'd managed to keep myself going until my client confirmed acceptance, and then I crashed. I slept this past weekend, and by that I mean I was awake for maybe five or six hours out of 48. Here it is important to note that, although I worked horrible hours, I never slept for fewer than six hours every night, and I only worked like this for nine days. Still, I felt like hell warmed over. At first, I tried to fight the urge to sleep, but my exhaustion kept winning. Every time I woke up after a nap, I felt terrible. I had so much to do and people counting on me to do them, but I just couldn't summon the energy to stay awake for more than two hours at a time. And even when I was awake, I was too tired to do anything. In an attempt to break out of this stupor, I decided to listen to a podcast or two on Sunday. One of those happened to be The Happiness Lab.

I recommend this podcast to anyone interested in mental and emotional health. Using scientific research, the host Dr. Laurie Santos delves into scientific research to explain our psychology and how we can use those lessons to improve our wellbeing.

In this particular episode, which you can find at the top of this chapter, Dr. Santos explored the concept of "time famine" and the impact it has on us. I'm sure Dr. Santos can explain the idea much better, but the way I understand it, time famine is the sense that we are starved for time. Every minute, every second of our day is filled with some sort of activity. More often than not, we're doing the starving ourselves because we do our utmost to fill our every waking moment with something—anything—that isn't silence. It's as if we're terrified of sitting alone with our thoughts without either sharing them in some way or being bombarded by other people's thoughts and ideas.