Stress and sickness as feedback, not defect

'The recognition of the role of stress in the development of illness leads to the important notion of illness as a "problem solver." Because of social and cultural conditioning, people often find it impossible to release their stresses in healthy ways, and therefore choose - consciously or unconsciously - to get sick as a way out....

'Examples of this (self-healing) phenomenon would be periods of ill health involving minor symptoms. These are normal and natural stages in the organism's process of restoring balance by interrupting our usual activities and forcing a change of pace.' --Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi in The Systems View of Life

These quotes combine a couple of things that I have been thinking about, based on the book above and Antifragile, which I have written about previously. 

The idea is that when we experience sickness, stress, temperatures, feelings of lethargy, this is our body's way of giving us feedback.

My approach in the past has been to pump in things into my body, to add more of something into the mix in order to rectify the 'problem'.

My evolving approach is to first stop and listen to the feedback, to observe it and consider what it might be trying to tell me, and then to act.

Usually it is telling me something like 'remove stress from your life', or 'you are sleep deprived', or 'put better things into your body'. Rarely is it telling me 'you need to take more Panadol or drink more coffee'.

A headache is not a defect, something to be numbed by a drug without thought. A headache is an indication that something about the way I am living is out of whack and it would probably be a good idea to rectify it.

When in doubt, for a moment stop.

I was not good at woodwork at school. I have no idea why this was the case - I am pretty good with my hands, and have even managed to make my own dining room table (still standing after 6 years of hard use). For some reason though, I was always trying to make the thing I was suppose to make, rather than the thing I wanted to make.

Anyway, for all my anguish in woodwork class my teacher did leave me with one pearl of wisdom. He told us students that if, while we were cutting a piece of wood with a saw or plane or chisel, we got a hunch or were worried that we were going off course, that we should tell our hand to stop straight away, and if it failed to listen to us, to take our other hand and force it to stop.

With woodwork, once the wood is cut away it is very difficult to get back into place. Taking a moment to assess the situation before proceeding is the best way to minimise damage.

I am a big fan of the lean way of working - test and learn, progress in small steps with a tight feedback loop, experiment. I am not writing to counter this wisdom.

I am writing to say that sometimes the best course of action is to stop experimenting, to stop testing and progressing, and to pause. Remove as much sound as possible from our environment. Remove all distractions. Make a cup of tea. Sit down. And allow ourselves a moment to come back to earth and remember what it is we actually care about.

Today is one of those days for me. There are so many things I think I need to be doing, and I seem to be doing none of them. Time to stop trying to do any of them. Time to sit and allow myself to calm down.