368 - Finding Your Pace: Stoic Advice for Dealing with Burnout

How do you get back up when too many things in life hit you all at once? How do you get your momentum back when it feels like every step is like wading through molasses? Today I want to talk about how Stoicism and friendship can find your balance and get moving again when life knocks you off your feet.

When you have been compelled by circumstances to be disturbed in a manner, quickly return to yourself and do not continue out of tune longer than the compulsion lasts.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VI.11

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Transcript

Erick Cloward 0:00

How do you get back up when too many things in life hit you all at once? How do you get your momentum back when you feel like every step is waiting through molasses? So today I want to talk about how stoicism and friendship can help you find your balance and get moving again when life knocks you off your feet. Hello, friends. My name is Eric Cloward and welcome to the Stoic Coffee Break. The Stoic Coffee Break is a weekly podcast where I take aspects of stoicism and do my best to break them down to their most important points and find ways for you to apply them in your daily life. I pull from ancient and modern wisdom as well as from psychology and neuroscience, basically anything I can find that can help you to think better, because I believe if you think better, you can live better. This week's episode is called Finding Your Pace: Stoic Advice for Dealing with Parnout. When you have been compelled by circumstances to be disturbed in a manner, quickly return to yourself and do not continue out of tune longer than the compulsion lasts. Marcus Aurelius. So, 21 years ago, I rode my first century. That's 100 miles on a bike. And I was relatively new to cycling. I was eager, and I made the classic mistake that most beginners make. I tried to keep up with riders who were far more experienced than me. I burned hard from the start and gave everything I had on every stretch. And by the time I crossed the finish line, I was in so much pain that I could barely walk. I had a stick shift car waiting for me in the parking lot, and genuinely I wasn't sure I'd be able to drive home. Now, luckily there was a masseuse at the end of the ride.$20 for 20 minutes, and I was able to walk again. Now, I have to admit that was probably the best money I ever spent. Now, a few weeks later, I was riding with my cycling club and I mentioned it to another rider. And he smiled at me and gave me some advice that changed the way that I ride forever. He told me to spin faster and lighter in lower gears at around 110 to 120 RPM on the flat roads. He explained that spinning at that cadence engages your slow twitch muscles, the ones that are built for endurance, and it saves your power for the hills and the sprints, where the fast twitch muscles earn their keep. The point wasn't to ride easier, it was to ride smarter, to pace yourself so you always have something in reserve when the terrain actually demands it. Now, I thought I had learned that lesson. And last week well, last week reminded me that I haven't fully applied it to my life. So in the span of a single week, everything seemed to arrive at once. I had professional deadlines, a family situation that needed my full attention, insomnia, some hard conversations, and underneath it all, that low hum of existential weight that a lot of us are carrying right now from watching the state of the world. I was treating all of it like a hill, maximum power all the time on every front, and I hit a wall. Now, if you've ever felt like that, not just tired, but the specific kind of exhausted, where even small actions feel like moving through quicksand, well, this episode is for you. Because what I learned last week with a little help is that getting back to solid ground isn't about finding new tools. It's about remembering how to use the ones you already have. Now Marcus Aurelius reminds us, nowhere can now Marcus Aurelius reminds us, nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul. But that retreat was not available to me. Not because it didn't exist, but because I had exhausted myself to the point where I couldn't even find the door. Now, sometimes I get interesting comments about me opening up and sharing the things that I struggle with on my podcast. I think the fact that I'm vulnerable makes some people uncomfortable. But stoicism is not about having all the answers or having a perfect life. Just because you study and try to live these principles doesn't mean that you won't have struggles and that you won't fail. Just because you're struggling doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong. Life is messy and things never go perfectly. And that's the point. But stoicism gives you the tools to recover and to get back on your feet when things don't work out. It teaches you how to learn from those failures so that you can do better next time. And in my case, it helped me to reframe things and bring more balance back into my life. So Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations during one of the most relentless stretches of his life: plague, war, personal loss, the slow grinding weight of governing an empire that never stopped demanding things from him. And yet, what you find in those pages isn't a man running at maximum intensity on every front. You find someone who is returning again and again to a single discipline. He wrote, It is necessary to remember that the attention given to everything has its proper value and proportion. For you will not be dissatisfied if you apply yourself to smaller matters no further than is fit. That's pacing. That's economy of effort. That's meeting the moment with exactly what it requires. No more, no less. Not the accumulated weight of everything all at once. You stop burning on the flats, you stop spending fast twitch energy on terrain that only needs a steady spin. And this is stoic temperance. It's finding the appropriate balance between too much and too little so that you don't burn out, but you but that you keep making progress. It's spending effort in proportion to the task at hand. And it's also about rest and rejuvenation. And sometimes it's about getting rid of things that aren't important or don't serve you. So one of the core pillars of stoicism is built around a deceptively simple question. What is actually within my control right now? Not the economy, not geopolitics, not how other people feel or what they say or how they say it. Those are outside your lane. They're the flat stretches where spinning efficiently is the right move. Burning maximum power there doesn't make you stronger. It leaves you wrecked by the time you hit a hill that actually matters. So Marcus Aurelis reminds us, you always have the option of having no opinion. There's never any need to get worked up or trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone. When we spend energy on those things that we can't control, we're pushing up hills that don't need to be climbed. We're wasting energy on things that we should just cruise past and leave alone. And by the time we get to the things that need our full attention, then we're spent. Now, this is what Epictetus called the dichotomy of control. And most of us know it intellectually, and we can even recite it. There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. But knowing it and being able to access it when you're depleted and emotionally flooded are two very different things. When everything hits at once, the principle doesn't disappear, but the fog of burnout can make it completely invisible. Which brings me to something that the Stoics understood that often gets overlooked in how we talk about this philosophy today. Stoicism is not a solo practice. Seneca wrote letters to his friends Lucilius for years, not because Lucilius was a student, but because the act of articulating your thinking to a trusted person clarifies it. Marcus had his teachers. Epictetus had his community. They understood that we cannot always be our own clearest thinkers, especially when we're in the middle of a storm. Sometimes the most stoic thing you can do is to call a friend who will help you to see your own thinking more clearly and have the humility to actually listen. So Marcus Aurelius reminds us the first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are. So, how did I actually get out of this and get things back to level? Well, I wish I could tell you there was one traumatic moment of clarity. There wasn't. It was a constellation of small things that slowly cleared the fog. First was a conversation with a trusted friend, someone who knows me well enough to be honest with me. And as we talked through what I was carrying, he started reflecting things back to me, reframes that shifted how I was seeing my situation. And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, he mentioned something very important. He was teaching me my own material, things he had learned through this podcast. The tools were never gone. I just couldn't see them from inside the fog. And this is why Seneca reminds us associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual, for men learn while they teach. And here's some more things that he helped me see. Some of the interactions that had felt like attacks were actually people just being vulnerable with me. They were sharing how they felt because they care, because I matter to them. When you're depleted and emotionally flooded, well, vulnerability coming your way can feel like criticism. Your nervous system reads it as a threat and goes straight into fight, flight, or freeze. The reframe wasn't to dismiss my reaction. It was to look at what was actually being communicated underneath it, to see things for what they are. So another thing that I was burning a lot of energy was something that was completely outside of my control. The economy, geopolitics, the general state of the world. I knew this and I teach this, and yet there I was treating these things like hills that required my full power. Awareness of the dichotomy of control isn't enough when you're in the middle of the spiral. Sometimes you need someone outside the fog to shine a light and point you back to what you already know. The hopelessness I was feeling about my work not moving forward fast enough was also rooted in wishing things were different than they are. And Marcus Raleigh has called this one of the primary sources of suffering, the gap between reality and our expectations of it. My situation wasn't hopeless, but I was measuring it against an imaginary version where I thought I should be by now. And like a good stoic, he encouraged me not to worry about trying to work on all of the things I needed to, but instead to find a few small actions that I could take. When we feel hopeless, we feel like we're not in control. Taking action, even small choices where we do have control, is how we get the momentum going again. And finally, and this one landed quiet quietly but hard. He reminded me that I actually have a substantial body of work, a podcast with real traction, a course, a book in progress. The spiral had made me feel like I was starting from zero. I wasn't. I just needed to figure out what comes next, not restart from scratch. But the conversation was only part of it. I also got some decent sleep. I went for a walk. I had dinner with my daughter. Unglamorous, simple human things. And they mattered just as much as the philosophical reframes. And this is the part that grind culture gets completely wrong. Rest isn't the opposite of progress. Sometimes it's the only path back to it. Rest and recovery need to be a part of our discipline, not just the things that we want to accomplish. As Seneca reminds us, we must indulge the mind and from time to time allow it the leisure which is its food and strength. We must go for walks out of doors so that the mind can be strengthened by a clear sky and plenty of fresh air. It also means letting go of trying to control everything and feeling that frustration that things won't bend to your will. Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish, but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life. Finding the right pace means that your effort and your speed are appropriate for the terrain. It means slowing down to catch your breath from time to time and taking some time to enjoy the scenery rather than just trying to grind to the finish. So let's go back to that quote from Marcus Aurelius. It is necessary to remember that the attention given to everything has its proper value and proportion, for you will not be dissatisfied if you apply yourself to smaller matters no further than is fit. The lesson from that first century ride wasn't that I was weak. It was that I hadn't yet learned to distinguish between how to ride the flats and how to ride the hills. It took some wisdom and some temperance to figure out how to pace myself. And just like that lesson on the bike, it takes wisdom and often the input of a good friend to help you find your pace in life again, to remind you what deserves everything you have and what just needs you to keep moving steadily through it, between the things worth your full power and the things that will drain you if you treat them that way. Because strength is not constant intensity. Strength is knowing where to direct what you have. When everything hits at once, and sometimes it will, the goal isn't to match the chaos with equal and opposite force. The goal is to get back to level, to find a sustainable pace so that you can spin efficiently through the flats and have something left when the hills arrive. That might mean calling someone who can help you see your own thinking more clearly. It might mean more sleep. It might mean a walk or dinner with someone you love. It might mean letting someone reflect your own wisdom back to you and having the humility to receive it. You already have the tools. Sometimes you just need to clear the fog enough to find them again. So thanks for listening to this episode. And if this episode resonated with you, share it with somebody who might need it today. And whatever hills you're facing this week, I hope you find your cadence. And that's the end of this week's stoic coffee break. As always, be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and thanks for listening. Also, if you haven't purchased my book, Stoicism 101, I would really appreciate it if you would. You can find out more about that at my podcast website at stoic.coffee. Also, if you aren't following me on social media, it'd be great if you would give me a follow. You can find me on Instagram and threads at stoic.coffee and on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn at stoiccoffee all one word. Thanks again for listening.