When action is the only option
When I hit rock bottom, I heard a pop. With my door closed, I was staring at myself in the mirror, letting go of emotions for the first time in a long time, and I was really going. My heart was racing, my breathing was shallowed, and some sort hidden level of emotion was starting to surface. And just as I was falling down the abyss…. I heard my lower back snap. It was the strangest thing ever. I didn’t lift anything or move in a strange way. But I knew immediately that it was bad. I spent the next week in bed icing my back and resting. Couldn’t even walk for the first day.
I was already working insane hours pre-pandemic. During covid, running an in-person meetings startup, I went into hyperdrive. With the pressures of a newly distributed team, new hires across the country (and a few offshore), and the pressing need to pivot and change the business; I was “on” all the time. The age of Zoom made it so much worse. I was in back-to-back-to-back Zoom calls and meetings day after day. I was on slack for 18 hours a day. Once my NY teams were done for the day, then it was final hours for my SF teams, and when they were done, then our contractors in Asia would start humming. For the most part, all of these meetings and slack discussions felt like spinning wheels. Things were getting done but efficiency was low.
Laid up in bed for the week, it was clear that I had hit burnout and gone beyond. Coincidentally a friend forwarded me Stanford’s continuing education catalog and I found a course on “playful mindfulness”. That was the beginning of my recovery from burnout and my discovery of a different way to do the entire startup journey. I began to discover the path to mindful entrepreneurship.
