Second Cup: Remind yourself to relax

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to remind yourself to relax if you know you will need downtime after something stressful or intense. Don't set yourself up to forget and then be kicking yourself when you don't get the rest that you need. Today's tip was inspired by Sarah hart unger my co host on my other podcast, Best of Both Worlds. As a practicing physician, she takes call at her hospital system every few weeks. Her particular call runs from Monday morning to Monday morning, and during this time she needs to be available quickly and often in the hospital seeing patients. She then sees patients all day Monday at the end of her call week, since that is a usual clinical day for her. So needless to say, by the Tuesday after her call week, she is pretty tired. Of course, she has lots of stuff that builds up during her call weeks that need to be dealt with, so the obvious way this plays out is that Tuesday then becomes packed, but she knows that she will not feel like doing much productive, so recently she actually wrote on her calendar,

1:33Speaker 1:don't schedule anything for the Tuesday after her next call week. Now we all know that this may not work perfectly, but if she does go to schedule something on that Tuesday, she will be reminded of this admonition. She will need to make a conscious choice, knowing that this will be time she would desperately like to have open. I think this is a smart idea. If you too know that you will be coming out of a stressful or intense time, you may need to remind your future self to relax.

2:13Speaker 1:For instance, if I have just given a speech, I tend to need a little downtime afterwards. That means I wind up resenting my past self. If I have assigned myself some must do task for the flight home, or I just don't do it and I have to deal with the schedule realities of making that choice, it would be better just to acknowledge that all I will want to do is read a magazine and build my workflow around that truth. Or sometimes people who are very much mourning people decide that they will finish up a work project after they get the kids to bed at night.

2:55Speaker 1:Then they are predictably exhausted, and can't make it work, or it takes twice as long as it should. Better to figure out another time, even if it means getting up a little earlier in the morning. You would think we would remember to relax, but we don't always. So if you are going to desperately want some downtime in the future after something you know will deplete you, don't rely on luck. Come up with some way to remind yourself. Put a giant block on your calendar or write a message on a paper calendar. Tell your assistant to check with you before scheduling things, even if he or she normally has the ability to make these decisions. When people feel unproductive, it is often because they have set themselves up to do work that is not a good match for the amount of energy they have. So if you can see a low energy time coming up, make a plan to deal with it. Remind yourself to relax, and there is a slightly greater chance that you actually will in the meantime. This is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the moose of our time. Thanks for listening to before breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,

4:33Speaker 1:you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.