I Stopped Optimizing and Started Living

I snoozed my alarm twice, finally checking texts and social media to jump-start my brain. My 30 extra minutes in bed robbed me of breakfast. During my 40-minute commute into San Francisco, I scrolled through feeds, not noticing the bodies carrying me in the stream to my office.

I plugged into the matrix—responding to emails. Email time operates differently from physical time, like a black hole.

Time didn't just disappear. I disappeared. My desire to do meaningful work was appropriated by other people's demands.

My hunger signals muted by multiple cups of coffee that turned my stomach into battery acid and my leg into a jackhammer. I performed productivity, complaining loudly about my back-to-back meetings and eating lunch at my desk. I shared with my coworkers every flashy new app and productivity system I was using. By evening, I needed an IPA to calm my nervous system and forget about my unfinished work.

Then I'd collapse onto the couch, letting the scrolling algorithms decide my night until suddenly it was midnight.

Copy-paste to the next day. Coffee to wake up, scrolling, working too much, beer to calm down, TV until bedtime. Repeat.

This was my life for a decade. I earned well, had a great social life, and did what I needed to survive as a modern knowledge worker. I couldn't see how dissociated I was from my body. I slept 6-7 hours on average, worked out once a quarter, and relied on substances to manage my energy.

These were ways to shut down my ability to feel so I could focus, work, and rest on demand. Body dissociation is a protective mechanism. You can't process emotions while trying to survive, whether avoiding a bear attack or meeting a deadline. Our survival depends on work, earning money, and productivity. So we pause our feelings, override our body's signals, and power through.

But my body hit the ultimate limit of burnout. Our bodies bring us back to reality through exhaustion or illness.

I quit my job, moved to Mexico, and spent a year in energetic recovery. I went from being dissociated from my body to hearing its signals, and then having the courage to reorganize my life around them. I allowed my body to guide my productivity.

Optimizing every aspect of my life was exhausting. I didn’t need another habit tracking tool. I needed self-awareness to know what’s important to me and the courage to disappoint others. Those of us wanting to improve productivity focus on the technical things we can control—our apps, calendars, task managers—while ignoring the intangible: feelings, fears, and hard conversations.

There's no algorithm to maximize your time based on your feelings and what you care most about. You need to rely on your body's wisdom.

We aren't machines. We are humans.

And humans need both fire and flow to be productive, effective, and joyous—the focused energy that gets things done and the spacious awareness that knows what's worth doing. Fire energy is your task management systems, calendar blocks, and project deadlines. Flow energy is trusting your intuition about what matters, knowing when to rest, creativity, and allowing space for magic to emerge.

Most productivity advice lives entirely in the fire realm. I get why—it's easier to teach someone to organize their task list than to trust their intuition.

When you try to architect every moment, you lose what makes life worth living. You crowd out the space where flow, magic, and creativity arise.

In The Sphinx in the City, Elizabeth Wilson writes about how cities reflect this tension. Nature is labeled as chaotic and feminine—"mother nature" in her wild unpredictability. Cities become man's attempt to impose order and control on that chaos. But Wilson points out the most intoxicating cities maintain a "perpetual struggle between rigid routinised order and pleasurable anarchy." When urban planners try to eliminate randomness, they kill what makes cities magical: serendipity, unexpected encounters, the beautiful messiness of human life.

I realized my life has this same struggle. Instead of fighting for fire energy to dominate, I need to balance fire and flow.

I learned this the hard way. As an artist, I was all flow—creative, intuitive, but unable to turn ideas into reality. I had to develop my fire muscles for my first project management job. I survived that job because I met Tiago in the building. I became his first productivity student when he organized my task manager according to David Allen's Getting Things Done. Suddenly I had a boyfriend, structure, systems, and the ability to complete things. But I swung too hard on the fire side and stopped trusting my intuition.

This structure helped me excel in my jobs and grad school, where I kept 2-3 jobs. But then my body ruptured my illusion of control with a thyroid cancer diagnosis, leaving me to marinate in years of debilitating fatigue.

I demanded total control over my body in the name of good health. I started daily meditation, removed inflammatory foods like gluten and dairy, eliminated coffee, and avoided blue light after 9 PM for better sleep. But this was all fire energy, more rigid rules and willpower instead of listening to my body. Whenever I faltered, which was often, I shamed myself for my "bad habits." Failure was guaranteed when I treated self-care like boot camp. My attempts at being healthy were another form of override, another way of not listening. I swapped one form of disconnection for another, mistaking control for care.

When I failed, I blamed myself and tried harder.

But then I had kids, which dissolved all my willpower. I couldn’t follow any system or routine. I barely had time to shower and feed myself, let alone use my juicer, follow strict diets, and meditate without falling asleep.

I didn’t realize I was depressed because I functioned, but had no joy or motivation. I didn’t feel much of anything.

I recognized I was in burnout, but unlike a job, I couldn’t quit and take a sabbatical from motherhood.

My achy body led me to a Pilates studio. It was hard to walk out the door when the kids cried for me to stay, but after 1 hour away I felt like a renewed mother. The kind I admired who could creatively divert a tantrum into laughter. I learned that to be the mother I wanted to be, I had to put my self-care first.

I developed practices to recover from my constant adrenal overdrive, like journaling, my morning tea ceremony, yoga, and breathwork. I went on a weeklong retreat and learned somatic practices for better body attunement. These practices became sacred, not forced. I craved and prioritized them because they made me a less reactionary, more patient, present mother.

I restored a balance of fire and flow to my life. I could now hear my body's signals and had the courage to listen. When I'm doing morning pages and notice I'm tired, I go back to sleep. This made it hard to stay on track with my book writing schedule. I ran out of contract time with my book coach and now I have to finish alone. But I wasn't going to push if my body said no.

My body knows the difference between creative work that flows and refills me and grinding that drains. It knows when I need movement, rest, solitude or connection.

Instead of rules and restrictions, I ask, "What does my body actually want?" Coffee naturally stopped appealing to me when I realized it turned up my anxiety, making intuitive writing harder. Tiago watching TV at night felt like nails on a chalkboard. I couldn't be in the room and went into the bedroom with low lights. This is what research says about blue light, but data didn't keep the habit—it was feeling "oh, this feels yucky." I don't think about social media anymore. I don't crave alcohol. I rarely want to watch TV; I'd rather read fiction or journal at night.

I learned to attune to my body's rhythms.

When I was stuck editing my book, I serendipitously found a crochet class across the street. It’s my new space to get back to flow.

I acknowledge that living this way is a privilege. I can listen to my body's signals because I don't have a full-time 9-to-5 job anymore. I don't need permission from a boss to take it slow. Modern society doesn't give most people time for this attunement where everything is urgent and people are meal prepping and doing laundry on the weekends.

Having kids, slowing down, and not working all day allowed me to explore these things. Most people only go deep on healing journeys because they have to—because their bodies force them through burnout or illness.

If you're reading this and you're in the coffee-to-IPA-to-Netflix cycle, don't shame yourself. This is just the product of being a modern human. I'm sharing my journey not as a prescription, but as a possibility for to explore a different way.

I’m not fixed or perfect. I’m still practicing, sometimes choosing coffee, the IPA, and TV consciously but now without guilt. I’m constantly recalibrating. I still go to extremes, but I can bring myself back to center more quickly. When I explode at my husband or kids, I know it’s time to ground. I just go on a walk with no headphones, talk to nobody, and feel my senses. When I stress about my book and spiral into predicting imminent failure, I play with the kids or hang out with friends and remember my important relationships will nourish me, regardless of my book’s outcome.

The more I connect with my body, the more I trust myself to do things my way, slow and intentional. But I have to regularly grieve what I can't accomplish. I have to process the gut-punch to my ego seeing the LinkedIn profiles of old coworkers and Berkeley classmates. I have to regularly "re-route my dreams.¹"

My new ambition is to take life slow, to take the scenic route of life. The algorithm I follow now isn't in any app. It's written in the language of my nervous system, my energy cycles, my authentic desires.

I'm not suggesting you quit your job and move to Mexico. But start small. Maybe ask what your body wants for lunch instead of desk-eating. Experiment with one morning of following your energy instead of your to-do list. Maybe you journal and notice patterns of what environments create flow. The most sophisticated productivity system is already inside you, waiting for you to remember how to hear it.

1. This is a quote from the song Humble Mumble by Outkast featuring Erykah Badu