You have slept badly for weeks and you notice it during the day.
Take this situation apart. Each piece goes in one box: yours, or not yours. There is no third box, and almost nothing falls in one piece.
Yours
- Whether you stop with screens and caffeine in time.Dull, familiar and entirely within reach. The Stoics would say: remove the impression before you have to resist it.
- Whether you make an appointment with the doctor today.Weeks of bad sleep is something to have looked at, and making the appointment is one two minute act that is wholly yours.
- Whether you adjust the day to what you can manage today.Move the difficult conversation, pull the demanding task into the morning. You cannot choose the night and you can choose the shape of the day.
Not yours
- That you lie awake while you are tired.Sleep does not take orders; the harder you force it, the further off it goes. That is not a defect of character but how it works.
- How much you actually sleep tonight.The outcome falls outside your power even if you do everything right. Treat the night as an exam and you guarantee a poor result.
- That your fuse is shorter today.A tired body gives a shorter fuse; that is physiology. What you do about it is a second question, but the effect itself is not a choice.
The reasoning. With the body everyone wants to put the outcome in the right-hand box, and it does not belong there. Sleep, recovery and energy do what they do. What is yours are the conditions and the arrangement around them: what you take in during the evening, whether you seek help, and what you ask of yourself on a day after a short night.
- If you are pained by anything external, it is not the thing but your judgment about it, and that you can erase now.Marcus Aurelius
Nearby situations
More on this topic: Body and mortality