Getting Back on Track

The rituals that bring me back from the brink (of burnout)

There’s a particular kind of chaos that creeps in when you’ve said yes too many times. Yes to dinners, yes to projects, yes to work introductions, yes to drinks when you should have gone home. You wake up one day, vaguely hungover (socially or otherwise), surrounded by teetering laundry piles, an inbox in cardiac arrest, and that feeling you’re hanging on by a thread. I know things are off when “me time” becomes sitting on the floor of my bathroom scrolling TikTok in silence at midnight.

I’d been in that slightly feral mode for about 6 weeks up until quite recently, living off cappuccinos, electrolytes and random handfuls of crisps while ignoring the piles, dodging the admin and convincing myself that cancelling my gym session was actually self-care. It’s that age-old tale of when certain balls are flying high (work/friends), others (health/sleep/routine) are being dropped on the floor and kicked under a sofa. Everything’s good, great even, but I started to feel like a dog desperately trying to get hold of that ball under the sofa while still juggling the others with one hand.

Time to drill down into getting back into some semblance of ‘balance’. I put that in quotes because to be honest, I wonder if true, consistent balance is a bit of an urban myth in modern life. But I’m nothing if not a trier and it doesn’t take anything drastic to get back to normality. A consistent sleep routine, movement that feels good, food that doesn’t come from a packet or a cardboard box… Nothing revolutionary, just small and steady habits that bring me back into some kind of alignment.

These are the little (but actually kind of big) rituals I fall back on when I’m finding my way back onto the rails…

Less frazzled times

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