1691. Exhausted Daily? Take the Cure

Your Highness Lisa,

At post 1690 you inquired “how do you suggest a super busy, intellectual, ambitious young woman who works long hours in a stressful environment find the time to make the most of her appearance? By the time I get home late and have to wake up early, I am exhausted.”

You just told me what you consider important about yourself: “super busy, intellectual, ambitious young woman who works long hours in a stressful environment….” The root of your exhaustion is constantly trying to live up to your image of yourself, continually trying to prove yourself to others. Change your image and you change yourself, so you might as well change your image so that you escape exhaustion.

Her Highness Meggrz (also at post 1690) described her new revelation like this. “I realized it was more important to [men I work with] to think I’m pretty than for them to think I’m smart. Obviously it’s important they think I’m competent – this is a job – but I’d rather they think I’m pretty-and-competent than brilliant-and-competent.” I suggest you let some of her wisdom rub off on you. You’ll see why below.

I suggest you and all women who regularly find themselves exhausted consider the following.

Re-sort your priorities, reshape your self-interest, and picture a new self-image. You’re not tired from lack of energy but from burning too many calories, which means unnecessarily. Have you noticed? Important people tend to move slowly, more deliberately, and never frantically. So, make yourself more important to yourself, and you’ll move slower and less frantically, and become not so easily exhausted. Here’s a plan to prevent exhaustion.

• First, commit until it’s habitual: make prevention of exhaustion your most important daily function.
• Second, make a habit of the ‘pretty time’ described in posts 1440, 1441, and others mentioned therein. Start each day by putting you in charge of making the world react to an important person you purposely make prettier before the mirror.
• Third, change your daily habits. Drink a lot more water without ice (about 80-100 oz. per day), less coffee, and no soft drinks. (Ice cold drinks stress the body, and soft drinks tend to dehydrate.) Upon arising, drink one and preferably two glasses of water and allow yourself one coffee to jumpstart the day. One caf-coffee is enough, so none after that. Avoid alcohol except perhaps for the minimum to be socially accepted, and especially nothing more on nights before work. You’ll not tire as easy and also recover better during sleep.
• Before you exercise, load up on water. Not thirsty? Drink anyway! In addition to what you drink during exercise, drink at least two glasses before even short sessions and more for longer or more intense sessions.
• Under-eat to preserve your prettiness. If you don’t know what that means, figure it out before you eat again. (Hint: Excess food takes extra energy to digest and helps make you tired, and excess calories not used up pile up and require extra energy just to drag around.)
• At the first hint of tiredness at work or elsewhere, change your habit of thinking about it to action that eliminates it: Drink two glasses (12-16 oz.) of room-temp water. Just taking the break to do that pushes you to slow down and shift gears into slower work habits. The re-hydration also works wonders.
• At the first hint of tiredness at work or elsewhere, moderate your ambitions to put R&R first for the rest of the day. Don’t think of tiredness but ways to prevent it. Moderate your intellectual capacity to outsmart whoever or whatever prevents moving toward R&R. (I’m not suggesting you work fewer hours or less intensely, just describing a new mindset to get ‘more miles per gallon’ out of your energy engine. We get what we think about all the time, whether we want it or whether it’s good for us. So, the last thing to think about is tiredness/exhaustion. Remove both from your vocabulary and it will also help.)

If exhaustion increases rather than decreases, you’re doing something wrong. Fall back, reconsider, re-plan, recover, and make yourself more excited about getting back to the new priorities in the order shown above. Action cures anxieties and fears and starts at the morning mirror. Initiate thinking and aim for what makes you feel important, i.e., mirror time, prettiness, grooming, etc. Avoid thinking about feeling frustrated, ineffective, less important, tiredness, exhaustion, stress, and busyness. Also, avoid thinking about “super busy, intellectual, ambitious young woman who works long hours in a stressful environment….”

I offer one rule: Don’t try NOT to think about something. It can’t be done. Instead, as soon as an unwanted thought enters your mind, stamp it out quickly by thinking of something else that makes you feel favorable about yourself in your current surroundings. For example, you feel tired, go to a mirror and fix up face and hair. It won’t solve your problem but get your mind off of ‘tired’. If you see ‘tired’ in your face, primp and groom until the thought goes away.

You’re too young to let exhaustion control your life. All the above should help evaluate and redefine your self-interest, which I’ll summarize as making yourself prettier to make yourself more important in order to make yourself less tired and seldom exhausted.

Best wishes,

Guy

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