Tag: self-care

I’m Tired, and That’s Allowed

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m thirty-five days into the third round of a year-long challenge that has me running seven habits every day. Across the year I’ve kept a near-daily exercise practice, published two books with a third in proof, built and grown a daily Bible illustration project that’s reached a real audience, started writing songs again, held a demanding day job, and tried to be present for a marriage I take seriously.

Tonight I’m tired.

Not defeated. Not broken. Not in crisis. Just tired in the specific, accumulated way that catches up with you after four months of pushing the engine.

This post is about what to do with that.

What the Tiredness Actually Is

It’s physical, first. Four months of consistent training has produced real results — I’ve shed nearly ten percent of my body fat since June and gained skeletal muscle along the way. The body did what I asked it to do. It’s also asking for some recovery time, and it’s right to ask.

Some of the physical part isn’t training-related at all. Allergies have kicked up. The weather has shifted. The barometric whiplash that comes with changing seasons has me a little under the weather, in the literal sense. None of it is serious. All of it adds to the load the body is already managing.

It’s mental, in a way I notice when I sit down to write. Two months ago I was bursting with ideas faster than I could capture them. Lately I’m getting the needful done every day, but the creative shine has dimmed. Not gone. Dimmed. The fog isn’t blocking the work — it’s making the work feel like work, where for a stretch it had felt like discovery.

It’s emotional, in the lowest-key version of emotional. Not down. Not despairing. Just thinner than usual on bandwidth.

It’s not spiritual. The Bible study and the prayer have held. That’s the one input that hasn’t started to ration.

This isn’t burnout. Burnout has a specific signature — cynicism, dread of the work, joylessness, the sense that you’ve stopped recognizing yourself. None of that is here. What’s here is the simpler thing. I’ve been working hard, for a long time, and the body and brain are asking for some space.

What I’ve Already Quietly Adjusted

If I’m honest with you and with myself, I’ve already started conserving in places.

The other book projects have been getting fragments of attention instead of focused sessions. The Substack engagement has been scrambled. Brainstorming for the next round of work has shifted from intentional walks to whatever pockets of time I can find between obligations. I’ve been answering messages slower. The Bible illustration project and the daily blog posts are consuming most of my creative hour, which means everything else is competing for what’s left.

None of those slips are catastrophic. All of them are signals. The system is telling me where the load is too heavy, and I’ve been hearing it without quite saying it out loud.

Tonight I’m saying it out loud.

The Two Wrong Scripts

There are two stories the personal-development world wants to tell about this moment, and both of them are wrong.

The first is push through. The breakthrough is on the other side of the wall. People who quit are soft. Discipline means doing it anyway. That story produces broken people who think they failed when their body called the bill.

The second is honor your tiredness. Rest is sacred. You don’t owe anyone your hustle. Your body is wisdom. That story produces people who use self-care as cover for never doing the hard thing in the first place.

Both stories are absolutist. Both stories are wrong because they both assume the answer is universal. The actual answer is discernment — knowing what you can push through, knowing what you can’t, and being honest enough to tell the difference in real time.

I’ve spent four months pushing through. The pushing produced real results. It also produced this tiredness. The next discipline isn’t to push harder. It isn’t to collapse, either. It’s to look at what I’m carrying and decide, deliberately, what stays and what shifts.

The Streak Was Never the Point

When I designed the 7-40 framework, I wrote into the document that the streak isn’t the important part. The habit participation is.

I’m grateful to past-me for putting that in writing. It means tonight, when I’m tired and considering whether to skip something or shorten something or move a workout, I’m not breaking the system. I’m using it the way it was designed to be used.

If I decide to call Round 3 a few days early to take real recovery time, that might be the most important decision I make this round. Not because I’m quitting. Because I’m reading the data honestly and adjusting before the cost gets higher than the benefit.

The framework moves forward either way. Bible study stays. Gratitude stays. Eating and water stay. The workouts might slip a little. The reading might pause if my brain isn’t holding information well. The streak number doesn’t matter. The person I’m becoming by doing hard things consistently — that matters.

I am not worshipping the streak. The streak is a tool. Tools serve the work. When the tool starts asking the work to serve it, the relationship has inverted, and the honest move is to notice and correct.

What I Think Sustains This

Most people who try a 280-day personal transformation challenge don’t make it to Day 122. The ones who do come from a lot of different places — some run on extraordinary willpower, some on sheer momentum, some on a vision that pulls them forward, some on disciplines that were already in place before they started.

What’s sustained me here, I think, is honesty.

Not the absence of struggle. Not toughness. Just the daily practice of telling myself the truth about what I’m carrying and what it’s costing. I’m not pretending this is easy. I’m not pretending I haven’t been quietly cutting corners. I’m not pretending the streak is the prize. The journey is mine. The load is mine to design. And I’m no good to anyone — not my wife, not my son, not the work — if I run myself into the ground proving I can.

That’s what sustains it. Not toughness. Not surrender. Honesty about what I’m actually carrying and what it’s actually costing.

What I Tell My Wife at the End of Hard Days

There are days when my wife has worked herself to the edge — a long day of physical labor in the yard, or a stretch of caring for someone, or just a day where the load was heavier than she expected. At the end of those days, I tell her some version of the same thing.

You did an amazing job. You did everything you needed to do today. I’m proud of you. I admire you. Anything else that needs to be done, we can handle tomorrow. For today, it’s done, and you’ve done well.

I’m telling myself the same thing tonight.

I haven’t reached every goal I’ve set. I’m not in the shape I want to be in yet. There are projects in the queue I haven’t started. There’s work tomorrow and the day after.

But for today — for this evening, on Day 35 of Round 3, with seven habits done and one more day in the books — I’ve done what I was supposed to do.

I’m proud of myself. I’m grateful.

I’m allowed to rest.

The Beauty of Routines

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Most writing about habits frames them as productivity tools. Build the right habit, do the thing, become the more efficient version of yourself. The vocabulary is discipline, willpower, accountability, consistency.

That’s not why I built mine.

I built mine to give my brain somewhere to go when it would otherwise reach for food, wine, or my phone.

The Architecture of Comfort

Around dinner time, every day, my brain wants comfort. That’s not a moral failing. That’s how the brain works. Stress accumulates over the course of a day, energy reserves drop, decision-making capacity gets thin, and somewhere in the early evening the system goes looking for something that feels good.

For most of my life, that something was food. A second helping. Dessert when I wasn’t hungry. A bowl of something while watching television. The eating wasn’t about hunger. It was about the dopamine hit my brain expected at that hour, in that mood, after that kind of day.

Wine had the same job, on the days that wasn’t food. So did doom-scrolling — the slot machine of the social feed, infinite small rewards for no real cost in the moment.

Three different behaviors. Same neurological function. The brain wanted comfort and it had learned three reliable ways to produce it.

The Substitution

Here’s what I figured out, slowly, over the past year.

The brain wants comfort. The brain will find comfort. The variable isn’t whether you give it the dopamine hit. The variable is which behavior you’ve trained it to associate with the hit.

Around dinner time now, the urge that used to send me to the kitchen sends me out for a walk. The urge that used to send me to a second glass of wine sends me to the floor for abs and push-ups. The urge that used to send me into the social feed sends me to a book or a blog post.

I’m not white-knuckling those choices. I’m not “resisting temptation.” I’m getting a real dopamine hit from the walk. My brain has figured out that the walk is comfort now. It produces the same internal reward I used to get from the thing I was overdoing.

The compulsion didn’t disappear. The compulsion got redirected.

The Compulsion Reframe

Some people would say I haven’t actually solved anything — I’ve just traded one compulsion for another. The behavior is still automatic. I’m still running on autopilot. I just happen to land on healthier shores.

That criticism is technically true. It’s also useless.

If compulsiveness is your method — and for most humans, in most situations, it is — then your job isn’t to transcend compulsion. It’s to choose which compulsion runs the show. Most of what we do every day is habitual. We don’t deliberate over breakfast. We don’t strategize about whether to brush our teeth. We’re going to do something compulsively at five in the afternoon. The question is which something.

And here’s the part most habit writing skips: the body cooperates with you eventually. Exercise releases endorphins. Walking outside resets your nervous system. Reading a book at night settles your mind. The compulsion that started as a deliberate substitution turns, after enough repetitions, into genuine desire. You’re no longer choosing the walk over the wine because you should. You’re choosing it because your body now wants it.

That transition — from forced substitution to actual desire — is the part that takes time. It also takes faith on the front end, before the brain has caught up to the new pattern.

When the Routine Slips

I’m 34 days into my third 40-day round of a year-long challenge. I haven’t missed a day. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been perfect inside the day. There have been meals I shouldn’t have eaten. Glasses of wine I didn’t need. Stretches of phone time that didn’t serve me.

The framework I run by isn’t never slip. It’s one slip is a treat. Daily slipping is a detriment.

The difference matters. A perfectionist framework can’t survive contact with real life — one missed day and the whole thing collapses because the framework didn’t have room for being human. The framework I’m using has room. It assumes I’ll slip. It just doesn’t let the slip become the new pattern.

The discipline isn’t avoiding the slip. The discipline is what you do the next morning.

The Whole Person

The seven habits I run every day aren’t a productivity stack. They’re an architecture for a whole person — spiritual, physical, mental, emotional. I have cravings across the full spectrum of who I am. I can meet them with good things or bad things. The seven habits are my way of meeting each one deliberately, before the brain decides for me what to reach for.

That’s why all seven exist. Removing one doesn’t just leave a productivity gap. It leaves a comfort gap that something else will fill. Probably something I don’t want filling it.

Hydration is just hydration. But a body that’s well-hydrated thinks better and feels better and works better. None of the seven are decoration.

The Kid in the Memory

There’s a kid still inside me who remembers opening the refrigerator a long time ago and finding nothing.

Not nothing-I-want. Actually nothing. The light came on, and the shelves were empty, and the question wasn’t what should I eat but is there anything to eat.

We’ve long since passed that. My family is provided for. My fridge is full. But the kid who looked into the empty one is still in there. He’s the reason food became my most reliable form of comfort. He’s the one who learned, early, that when food is available you take it, because there were times it wasn’t. That wiring didn’t disappear when the conditions changed. It went quiet. It didn’t leave.

He’s the one suggesting the second helping I don’t need. He’s the one noticing the open bottle of wine. He’s the one reaching for the phone when the day has been long.

He’s not bad. He learned what he learned, when he learned it. He just hasn’t gotten the memo about the new program.

I’m not trying to silence him. I’m trying to thank him for getting me here, and then choose something different now.

The routines are how I do that without having to argue it out every evening.

Drive-Through Talking

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It had to have been the early 2000s. My bride and I were sitting in a church auditorium listening to Kevin Leman speak, and the phrase he kept using made me chuckle every time I heard it: drive-through talking. I kept mistakenly calling it drive-by talking in my head — which, as I’d later realize, is an entirely different communication style and not one anybody recommends.

But the drive-through? That one I knew well.

In my younger years, my wife and I ate out constantly. There was a Taco Bell just down the street, and we learned a small but important truth at that pickup window: when the kid on the headset repeated our order back to us, we got what we ordered. When they didn’t repeat it back, the odds of getting something we hadn’t asked for went way up.

Marriage works the same way. The window is just invisible, and the cost of getting the order wrong is much higher.

The Technique

When your spouse is talking and you’re listening, act like you’re at the drive-through window. Repeat the order back. Make sure they know you actually heard the words they said — not the version your brain rewrote on the way in.

We’ve been doing this for over twenty years. It usually sounds something like, “Hold on — I think this is what you’re saying. Do I have it right?”

Over time, four phrases have done most of the heavy lifting:

  • Can you repeat that, please?
  • Do I have this right?
  • Is this what you said?
  • Help me understand.

That last one is the one I have to be careful with.

“Help Me Understand”

When I say it, I mean it the way it’s supposed to be meant: I’m being dense, I’m missing context, I need more from you so I can actually track what you’re telling me. It’s me admitting I’m the bottleneck.

That phrase has a problem. It can land as “you’re being too vague — explain it better,” which puts the work back on the person already doing the talking. Same words. Different posture. Completely different effect.

I’ve had to work at making sure my tone matches my intent on that one.

What the Research Says

Charles Duhigg points to research on couples who argued differently — specifically, on what separated couples who stayed together from couples who fell apart, based on how they fought.

The pattern is uncomfortable in its simplicity. Couples who focused on controlling the other person tended to end up divorced. Couples who focused on self-control — managing their own reactions, taking responsibility for their own part — tended to end up still married, and happier in the marriage they were still in.

That’s not abstract to me. It’s been my goal for twenty-seven years — to be the husband who’s regulating himself, not the one trying to manage her. Drive-through talking is what that goal looks like in practice. You’re not trying to win the conversation. You’re not trying to control where it goes. You’re regulating yourself long enough to clarify, repeat, and confirm — so that the other person actually feels heard.

I also use this with my son, too. Testosterone gets in the way more often than I’d like to admit, on both sides of those conversations. But the same courtesy I extend to a stranger at a checkout counter is the courtesy I want to extend to him — and even more to him and to my wife than to anyone else.

He and his mother shouldn’t get the worst version of how I communicate just because they’re the most familiar.

The Pushback

Someone might tell me their marriage is fine without all this work. That they don’t need techniques. That things are good.

I’d push back. “Fine” is an invitation. Just because something is good doesn’t mean we stop trying to make it better. Just because things work okay right now doesn’t mean they can’t fail later. The roof you don’t maintain is the roof that fails in the storm — not on the sunny day you decided it was fine.

I’ve never wanted to be over-prescriptive about this. I’m not a counselor. I’m a husband who’s been married a long time and has paid attention. My belief is this: because we’re friends, because we have the mutual aim of respecting each other, taking care of each other, honoring the vows we made — we can work through things. Not because the technique is magic. Because we love each other, and we choose to be married to each other, every day.

The drive-through window just helps us hear each other while we’re choosing.

The Reciprocity Gap

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The researchers brought them in expecting a fight.

Two groups of people, opposite sides of a topic so polarizing I don’t need to name it for you to picture the room. Each side walked in believing the other side was the enemy. Each side believed they had nothing in common with the people across the table. Each side believed the conversation would go nowhere.

Then the researchers did something most of us never do. They trained the participants. Not in debate. In listening. In how to make the person across from you feel heard — not agreed with, not validated, heard. Then they paired them off.

What happened in those rooms wasn’t agreement. It was something rarer. One of the participants said it was the most understood he had felt in any conversation in his adult life. The person who made him feel that way held beliefs and values that were the opposite of his own.

That’s the experiment. That’s the result.

Then the researchers tried to scale it.

They built a Facebook group. They invited the participants who had been through the training. And they invited a hundred more people who hadn’t.

It took 45 minutes for the whole thing to fall apart.

Not because the trained participants forgot what they had learned. Because a hundred untrained voices walked in with their default attack methodology, and the medium itself rewarded them for it. You can’t make someone feel heard through a comment thread when the people next to you are sharpening knives. The training couldn’t survive contact with the platform.

I read this in Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators this week and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Here is what the experiment proved that the researchers didn’t set out to prove. The reciprocity you get from listening to another human being is not available through a keyboard. Not because keyboards are evil. Because writing is a high-skill medium, and most of us are not skilled at it.

Most people are not good at writing. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it as a fact about the moment we live in. Writing carries no face. No tone. No pause. No softening of the eyes when something hard needs to be said. The whole apparatus humans evolved to communicate meaning is stripped away, and what’s left has to do all the work alone. That’s a hard medium even for skilled writers. For most people, it’s an impossible one.

What’s left is venting. You sit behind a screen, you type how you feel, you hit post, and for a moment you feel better because you got it out. Then it lands in front of someone who can’t see your face, can’t hear your tone, can’t extend you the benefit of the doubt because the medium has trained them not to. They read venom you didn’t mean to send. They send venom back. The cycle compounds.

Both sides do this. I am not picking a team.

We are alike on most things. Family. Food. The basic dignity of being known. Where we differ is sometimes a question of method — how to organize, how to solve — and sometimes a question of values, of who gets protected and who pays the cost. The deeper disagreements are real and they don’t dissolve just because two people sat across from each other. But the experiment showed something the participants didn’t expect either: even when the values were opposite, the experience of being heard didn’t require agreement. It only required the room.

The Facebook group failed in 45 minutes because the people who hadn’t been through the training brought the old habits in with them, and writing — for most of us — can’t do the work that face-to-face does.

So we have to go back.

Not as a preference. As a necessity. The technology is going to keep accelerating. The amount of text in the world is going to keep multiplying past anyone’s ability to read it carefully. If we don’t relearn how to sit across from each other and listen, the fracture that social media started will widen until there’s nothing left to bridge.

This doesn’t get fixed by politicians. It doesn’t get fixed by platforms. It gets fixed by two people, in a room, doing the work the experiment proved was possible — and the Facebook group proved was fragile.

One conversation. Then another.

The Impostor

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I look in the mirror and I see a different version of me staring back. Someone who doesn’t know me now, but thinks he has the right to speak into my life.

It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent twenty years building a career. It doesn’t care that I’ve published a novel, or that I’ve given more speeches than I can count, or that I’m 115 days into a challenge that has changed my body and my mind. The voice doesn’t listen to evidence. It just talks.

Here’s the thing about the impostor — he doesn’t show up as some stranger. He shows up as me. A younger version. A twelve-year-old kid with his insecurities and his fears. They never left. They just learned to whisper instead of shout.

I can flip through snapshots of my life like a photo album. The arrogance of seventeen, when I thought I had the world figured out. The joy of twenty, newly married to a woman who would become the strongest person I’ve ever known. The fear of twenty-six, sitting in a doctor’s office hearing the word cancer for the first time. The elation of twenty-nine, finding out we were going to be parents. The terror that same year, watching her get taken back for an emergency C-section, not knowing where she was or if she or my son were okay. The relief later that night, sitting in a hospital room, watching her hold him, seeing a kind of love I’d never witnessed before.

All of it lives inside me. Every version of who I’ve been is still in there somewhere. And the impostor uses all of them. He takes the fear of the twenty-six-year-old and mixes it with the insecurity of the twelve-year-old and tells me I’m not going to make it. That nobody’s going to listen. That the world is too crowded for what I have to say. That I’m going to miss this moment, just like I’ve missed others.

I don’t listen to him. But the voice is loud sometimes. And it is hard, from time to time, to tune him out.

I’m saying this because I’m almost four months into one of the hardest things I’ve ever done on purpose. I’m excited about everything I’ve accomplished so far. And I’m overwhelmed by everything I still have in front of me — even though I put it there myself. I want to be more and do more. Because accomplishing feels good. And I feel like I’m standing on the edge of one of the most opportunity-filled seasons of my life.

The impostor tells me I’m going to miss it.

He might be loud. But God has not given me a spirit of fear, but of love and power and a sound mind. So I keep looking in the mirror. And I keep choosing which voice to listen to.

Some days that’s easier than others.