Полная версия
In the FLO
As a result, I find myself in the flow on a routine basis. It feels like I’m doing less—remember, I crossed things off my to-do list—but I’m achieving more because I’m focusing my efforts and supporting myself physically. I’m more creative and more optimistic, rather than feeling overwhelmed. On days when I do feel like I’m dragging, I know it’s because I’m out of sync with my cycle, and it’s time for triage. I boost my self-care with strategies you’ll discover in upcoming chapters to help me fly through any challenging days. Most important, I look at how choices I made, and boundaries I didn’t support, left me feeling burned out.
Tuning in to my cycle opened my eyes to a whole new female-centered way of thinking about time that allows me to achieve more of what I want and enjoy the process along the way by protecting my energy. But if you’re like most of the women I’ve helped over the past seventeen years, your inner dialogue reflects your single-clock lifestyle and its implications for your physical and emotional health. In addition to telling me about their hormonal health issues, women also fill me in on their daily life challenges. You can probably relate to some of the following things I hear on a regular basis.
Check any of the following phrases that sound like you.[fn1]
The problem isn’t a lack of time. Ignoring your second clock is draining your energy. The secret to achieving more actually lies in doing less. It’s almost a radical thought in our society, which forces the more-is-better philosophy down our collective throats. The idea of less can seem downright treasonous. But it’s backed by science. It’s time to let go of these old patterns and get in tune with a female-centered productivity paradigm that’s based on your biology.
Stop Ignoring Your Second Clock
You’ve been culturally conditioned to unconsciously believe some truly flawed philosophies about time. Let’s look at the biggest culprits and cyclical flow blockers and break them down one by one.
FLO Blocker 1:
You’re watching only one clock
Time to wake up! Time to go to work! Time for dinner! In our society, we’re all chained to the ticking clock. Most of the women who come to me for help with their period problems also suffer from the effects of trying to keep up with the daily grind. Because they aren’t living in harmony with their inner cycle, their hormonal systems are crying out for help. When you’re dealing with painful periods, headaches, and PMS, it’s so much harder to succeed in the male-patterned world where productivity is king. We begin to think we suck at time management.
Our entire concept of time is predicated on the male-patterned 24-hour cycle—a straight shot to an end point. It’s time to kick that concept to the curb. Instead of thinking about time in typical chronological fashion, it’s time to adopt something I call right-timing. The idea is to do things at the right moment, not necessarily sequentially. That daunting to-do list of yours? Instead of adding task after task in no particular order, think about the best time—what the ancient Greeks called kairos—for each item, and group your tasks based on the strengths of the phase of your cycle. An upcoming chapter gives specifics on how to do so and provides you with a daily planner geared to help you include both your clocks in your planning.
Ultimately, when you’re syncing with your cycle, you can stop trying to master time and start thinking about managing your energy. This subtle but powerful shift in your thought process will pay off in a big way. The concept is already catching on in the corporate world. In a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, some forward-thinking leaders at global consultancy firm The Energy Project explored the effects of managing energy versus time. They wrote, “The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story.” They’ve found that replacing energy-depleting behaviors with self-care practices that recharge and reenergize is the key to sustainable high performance without burnout. I’ve taken this finding one step further to show that these energy-building strategies are naturally built into your biochemistry and must be managed differently for women in their reproductive years.
Here’s what I mean. Think of the male-energy paradigm based on a 24-hour clock as a hockey puck being pushed across the ice. The puck accelerates, decelerates, and eventually comes to a stop. This is the energy paradigm we’ve been conditioned to adopt: you go as hard as you can, as long as you can, and then crash. The female energy paradigm, based on the 28-day cycle, is cyclical. Which, like a wheel, is arguably more powerful and efficient. When you stabilize it and give it a push, it accelerates and gains speed, gathering momentum naturally as it rolls. In fact, the industrial revolution was powered by cyclical machinery, prized for its ongoing efficiency! This is how your body is intended to work. When you intentionally and strategically support the four phases of your cycle instead of simply pushing through your agenda each day, you’ll be gaining energy rather than draining it. Syncing with your cycle keeps you engaged, and you’ll arrive at your desired destination faster and might even go farther than you originally intended. Your schedule becomes a reflection of your natural strengths, allowing you to get in the flow and perform at your best.
FLO Blocker 2:
You’re living in perpetual productivity
With right-timing, everything has an ideal moment. I learned about that natural rhythm of life in Mr. Bing’s biology class when I had to observe a tree from winter to spring bloom. We are meant to live our lives in rhythm with this cycle of creation—from seed to growth to harvest to rest.
Natural Cycle of Creation
Our culture, however, demands perpetual growth and harvest. Trying to live your life in nonstop growth and harvest mode is taxing for your endocrine system. The message that you need to be in constant production mode puts you in an impossible situation. You are pressured to strive for peak productivity at all times, ignoring your natural rhythm. You feel the need to do more even though your performance falters, your health fails, and your psyche suffers. This relentless pursuit of productivity—at work, at home, and in your relationships—forces you to put yourself last on your to-do list, if you even make it onto your list at all. Self-care goes out the window. You skip lunch, you skimp on sleep, you fuel yourself with double lattes. These make your endocrine system go haywire, and once one of your hormones is disrupted, a cascade of imbalances and a laundry list of symptoms can follow. You can find yourself living with chronic stress, adrenal fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, and more. In a vicious circle, these conditions compound any existing hormonal dysfunction. And somehow, you’re supposed to keep producing at top speed anyway. How is anyone supposed to function, let alone thrive, this way?
I’m reminded of something I’ve heard Oprah say, that life will tap you on the shoulder until it knocks you on your butt. Too many of us have been knocked on our butts. I think Oprah would agree: everything in the right season!
FLO Blocker 3:
You believe being busy is a status symbol or a badge of honor
When I ask women who come to the center, “How are you?,” they often answer with something along the lines of “I’m so busy, it’s crazy.” Think about that answer for a moment. We’re so divorced from our feelings that we can’t even give an emotional, let alone human, response to a simple question. Instead, we provide a productivity update to connect and commiserate with others. We’ve been conditioned to believe that the more tasks and activities we have jam-packed into each day, the more valuable we are. That was the conclusion of a 2017 study in the Journal of Consumer Research, which found that a busy and overworked lifestyle has become “an aspirational status symbol.” We’re basing our personal expectations on what our digital tools—computers, cell phones, and other gadgets that can operate 24/7—can do. It’s as if we’re aspiring to become machines that never power down.
The trend is taking a toll on our health and performance. In her book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Bridget Schulte dissects how the cult of busyness is leaving us feeling fractured, scattered, and mentally and physically exhausted. We’re all jettisoning ourselves from one task to the next, barely taking a moment to breathe. And women may be more susceptible to this, considering our days can be even more jam-packed than men’s. Melinda Gates addressed the issue of “time poverty” in the 2016 annual letter from the Gates Foundation. She singled out the gender gap in the number of hours we devote to unpaid work—think grocery shopping, kitchen duty, and carting the kids around. Statistics show that globally women spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work, while men skate by performing much less than half that amount. She wrote, “Unless things change, girls today will spend hundreds of thousands more hours than boys doing unpaid work simply because society assumes it’s their responsibility.”
Racing through our to-do lists also leaves no time for restorative, relaxing activities. According to the US Department of Labor, men spend thirty-three more minutes per day socializing, engaging in exercise, or watching TV than women do. In a year, this adds up to more than two hundred fewer hours of leisure time for women. No wonder we’re exhausted!
A growing number of doctors and scientists are finding that our overscheduled days are leading to difficulty concentrating, inability to focus, irritability, sleep issues, mental fatigue, physical wear and tear, and more. Suzanne Koven, an internal medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, hit the nail on the head in a 2013 column in the Boston Globe when she declared that busy is the new sick. “In the past few years, I’ve observed an epidemic of sorts: patient after patient suffering from the same condition. The symptoms of this condition include fatigue, irritability, insomnia, anxiety, headaches, heartburn, bowel disturbances, back pain, and weight gain. There are no blood tests or X-rays diagnostic of this condition, and yet it’s easy to recognize. The condition is excessive busyness.”
This is yet another detrimental effect of living in a society that values relentless productivity more than anything else. Being busy has emerged as the modern-day hero’s journey. In mythology, the hero’s journey centers on a person heading out on an adventure, facing an obstacle, claiming victory, and returning home a transformed person. Today’s hero’s journey revolves around endless tasks and efficient production, hour after hour. Sound familiar? It should. Remember that description from my biology textbook:
The testes are powerhouses of efficient production. They produce two to three hundred million spermatozoa daily …
If you’re wondering where our society came up with these values, look no further than a man’s biology. Seriously! This concept of never-ending production mimics the semen production that takes place in the testicles. It’s no surprise that the way we formed our society is based on what we’ve studied most, which is the male body. We high-five goal achievement and project completion, but we don’t reward rest, rejuvenation, or enjoying the ride.
FLO Blocker 4:
You believe success requires suffering
Thanks to trailblazing women, young girls today believe they can be whatever they want to be—president of the United States, an astronaut, a tech CEO, you name it. Anything a man can do, we can do bleeding. We’ve proven without a doubt that we can do anything. I would just like to see women doing whatever they want without incurring unnecessary health expense. I would like them to have a framework in which they feel supported deeply. Don’t get me wrong—working hard for a goal is a very good thing. But what if we could incorporate, from the start, the lessons many learned too late in life, that compromising isn’t worth the cost? Women wholeheartedly buy into the belief that we have to suffer in order to succeed—in a way similar to the way we’ve been conditioned to think we are destined to endure physical pain because of our biochemistry. It’s sadistic to think this way. It’s time to realize you don’t have to suffer from physical ailments, nor do you have to damage your health, relationships, or mental well-being in pursuit of success.
The same way you trim some tasks from your schedule, you may want to readjust your concept of success and productivity. Does productivity equal success? If you have to give up all the things you love in order to rise up the corporate ladder or reach a goal, is it really a win? If your endless pursuit of an objective makes you physically ill—think chronic stress, gut issues, or high blood pressure—is it really an achievement? If you’re riddled with anxiety or wracked with worry from constantly pushing, is it really worth it? What are you really trying to accomplish, what void are you trying to fill with this nonstop pursuit?
In Buddhism, there’s a concept known as the hungry ghost. I think of the hungry ghost as a sort of black hole within that can never be filled. In our culture, people chase goal after goal or acquire shiny new thing after shiny new thing, but feel increasingly empty inside. In Alain de Botton’s seminal book Status Anxiety, he describes this constant pursuit of more as a need for love. No matter what people achieve or how much they possess, they still want more. They buy their first condo but still yearn for the big house with the yard. They land a promotion at work but are already plotting their next career move. They lose ten pounds but feel bad that they didn’t lose twenty. You probably know plenty of women like this—you could be one of them yourself. Take heart. There’s a better way.
FLO Blocker 5:
You expect to feel the same every day
One of the things that blocks your ability to access the gifts of your second clock is the expectation that you should be a static creature. You’re not. You’re a dynamic being. Like the rest of our body’s biochemistry, our emotional energy levels expand outward and then retract inward in a natural rhythm throughout our cycle. Sometimes we’re more social and communicative, other times we’re more introspective and have a desire to be a homebody. Our society values outward energy more than inward energy, so we tend to think we’re being lazy if we putter around the house or that we’re self-indulgent if we focus on ourselves. But these ebbs and f lows in energy aren’t about you being lazy. Feeling withdrawn can be a powerful signal from your cycle to focus inward and take extra care of yourself.
We all have this expectation that we should be able to perform the same way every day so beaten into our heads that when I tell the women who come to me for help that respecting our fluctuations is key to getting in sync, they give me one of those sideways glances. In all my years of health consulting, I’ve found this to be one of the hardest concepts for women to adopt. I have to reassure them that it’s okay—make that great—for them to take a break from the grind to check in on personal well-being. In fact, it’s mandatory that you rest after a crazy productive period.
FLO Blocker 6:
You have a hormonal imbalance or are taking the pill
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: if you have period problems, PMS, bloating, cramping, or other issues with your menstrual cycle, or if you’re taking synthetic birth control, you won’t be able to fully access the gifts of your second clock. It’s important to address your hormonal health. The Biohacking Tool Kit will help you if you need period support.
YES, YOU CAN DO LESS. SERIOUSLY!
If you’re thinking the concept of doing less is impossible in your deadline-driven world, think again. I work with a lot of high-powered female executives, business owners, and college students who tend to respond, “Yeah, right,” when I tell them about this radical shift in perception. Let me show you more clearly how it can work. When I returned from a recent business trip, I had twenty things on my to-do list. I looked at the arc of my month and thought about what would give me maximum efficiency and creativity while allowing me to maintain a high level of self-care. I also evaluated my task list and carefully curated what was really worth doing based on what would be most enjoyable and rewarding. Most important, I actively ignored the inner voice that said I needed to do everything to get ahead and to do it now. Then I parsed out my task list and mapped it onto my cycle phase by phase. Suddenly, it all seemed infinitely more doable, and I went from feeling overwhelmed to feeling energized.
The Cyclical Secret: Use Your Second Clock
After working for close to two decades with women who are suffering from hormonal breakdown and struggling with their careers, relationships, and motherhood, I’ve realized their struggles are largely the result of their not factoring in their second clock in a meaningful way. Syncing with your cycle will not only help you overcome your period problems, but also give you the foundation to thrive in every area of your life. When you reframe your understanding of your body’s biochemistry and start incorporating your second clock, you can stop pressuring yourself to be in perpetual growth or harvest, stop struggling to manage chronological time, and start pursuing your goals in a sustainable way that makes you feel empowered and confident. And when you approach life from your own inner timing, you will naturally find your way to peak performance that helps you build energy and enhance your health and wellness, not drain them. You’ll unlock your creativity, find more pleasure in your relationships, and feel more fulfilled.
Seeing how much of an asset your second clock is, and how ignoring it has cost you so much from a physical, emotional, and even spiritual point of view, can be upsetting. Or this understanding could fill you with excitement and hope, knowing there is a clear answer to your quiet question: “Isn’t there a better way?” You may have a visceral reaction—positive or negative—to this information. My advice is to take these feelings and channel them into a new way of living based on the scientific facts surrounding your biology. You don’t have to wait for a major societal shift to take advantage of your natural timing, gifts, and talents. You can start today by setting your compass to your true north, and getting in sync with your body’s monthly cycle and natural rhythms. I know it can feel overwhelming to make changes on your own, so I’ve created free resources where you can get in the FLO with all the support you need at www.IntheFLObook.com/bonus.
Remember, finding your way to doing less, achieving more, and being happier isn’t just about you. Every time you take up the space you need in your life—for example, allowing yourself to cross something off your to-do list, giving yourself permission to rest and rejuvenate after a busy stretch of time, or planning your day based on your energy rather than your time—it heals your soul and chips away at our cultural conditioning. And it provides an example for other women—our sisters, friends, and daughters. By sharing what we’re learning about our bodies, we can start building a global community of women living in tune with our biochemistry. And this female reclamation will continue to grow until the revolution is undeniable.
GETTING IN THE FLO
Want to start practicing the art of doing less, achieving more, and managing your energy so you can get in the FLO? Try these simple cyclical hacks:
1. Take stock at the end of the day: How’s your energy? Do you feel exhausted and drained, or invigorated, like you’ve had a great workout?
2. Keep track of how often you say yes when you really mean no. Boundaries become a problem when you don’t fit yourself on your own schedule.
3. Take one thing a day off your to-do list and resist the urge to fill that space with something else to do.
4. Dare to do nothing for half an hour or engage in a small pleasure—take a hike, make a phone call, or catch up with a friend.
5. List three things you can do besides work.
6. When somebody asks you, “How are you?,” try answering with an emotional answer—“I’m feeling great today,” or even “I’m feeling energized today”—not the default setting, “I’m so busy.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.