balancing discipline, time and rest without guilt

I'm coming on today with no polished version of myself, just honest. Coming out of a season where discipline came easy, I'm now overwhelmed trying to balance a full-time job, school, this podcast, fitness, and showing up for the people I love. Sound familiar?

In this episode, I'm unpacking why having the capacity for discipline (2 Timothy 1:7) doesn't automatically mean the barriers disappear and walking through the real, practical solution I'm building for myself: prayer as the starting point, identifying core priorities, and creating systems that actually work for this season instead of fighting against it.

We also go there on rest because Jesus rested, God rested, and somewhere along the way we decided we were the exception. I'm reframing rest from something you earn to something you strategically need, and leaving you with a journal prompt to sit with this week.

This one is for the overthinker who's tired of pushing without permission to pause.

Transcript

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Hi friends, welcome back to another episode of What If It All Works Out Conversations for the Overthinker Turn Overcomer. I am your host, Davi. If you're new here, welcome, friend. If you're returning, it's good to see you again. I hope y'all have been having such a good week. I wanted to come on here today with some honesty about what I'm feeling and how I've been feeling lately. Hopefully y'all can help me this time, right? But we're gonna work through it together. So I'm coming out of a season where I had nothing but time, right? So discipline came easy, structure came easy. And the ironic thing is that where I'm at today is exactly what I prayed for. God showed up, right? And yet I feel like I'm a little bit overwhelmed. And I don't know if I should feel that way or not. But my truth is, is that I ask God for a thing, it shows up, but it doesn't look like the way I thought it would. So let me just paint a picture of how I'm feeling overwhelmed. So started with my job. I intend to be out of work by five o'clock, but sometimes I have some pending action items and some emails I need to send that makes me not even close my laptop until around six. And then I'm also in school in a master's program. I can admit that I have submitted a few assignments late. With my fitness routine, I've been slacking hard. I have not been to the gym consistently since I came back from Costa Rica. That was since May with this podcast. My goal is to show up every week. And with my best foot forward, and I'm so proud of the progress that I've made and how I've been showing up. But that also takes work. And then my social life. I want to use a little free time I have to hang out and catch up with my people. But lately I've just been wanting to use that free time for sleep. And I haven't really had much of a social life. I don't want to talk about how we're overcoming and being more intentional, but you know, my personal life is now reflecting the same. So let's get honest and real and let's talk about how we can overcome or what ways we can make this situation better. So, yeah, my truth today is that I haven't overcame that part yet. I'm still trying to figure it out alongside you guys in real time. I'm at a place in my life where all I desire is to move forward, to grow, and to see real impact in my life. But in the same breath, I be feeling too tired to even push. So as I'm learning to navigate all these things, I think back to 2 Timothy chapter 1, verse 7. In the NLT version, it says, For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline. Self-discipline is enemy, it's deposited. I came with self-discipline, right? But why am I running into barriers? And that's a question that I have to ask myself to think about what needs to change. Not in my capacity, but in my systems. Because I don't think my issue is if I'm capable of doing it, but it's how I'm operating, right? Because I'm doing the things, but it's not being performed in the best way. So if you're feeling the way that I'm feeling, let's try to work through this together and see how we can overcome. So the first thing that I thought about was, of course, prayer. And this is your devotion, especially when you start your day. I believe that when you pray at the beginning of your days, you get wisdom on how to be intentional and not reactive. And although I have built habits of getting up to pray and do a devotion, I don't know if I was being intentional and having devotion in order to strengthen me and gain wisdom for my day. And when I was talking to my pastor about burnouts, I think it was last year, he took me to the Bible in Isaiah chapter 40, and I'm gonna read it. Isaiah chapter 40, 28 through 31, it says, Have you never heard, have you never understood? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of all the earth. He never grows a weak or weary. No one can measure the depth of his understanding. He gives power to the weak and strength to the powerless. Even youths will become weak and tired, and young men will fall in exhaustion. But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength, they will soar high on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint. And I had to realize that that's not just poetic language, it's an actual promise that if you seek the Lord, you will find strength, you will get strengthened. When you're praying in the morning, praying in the spirit, the Lord will strengthen you. You can even pray for strength for the day. You can pray for wisdom for the day. And I wasn't doing that before. And I have to get more intentional with doing that, especially now in this season, as I'm feeling too tired to push through or mismanaging my time. I need wisdom throughout my day. I need the Lord to help me. So, number one is definitely going to be prayer and asking for strength and wisdom and instruction as well. And I think number two should be identifying our core priorities and saying no to the things that don't align with that. So there are six areas of my life that I am intentionally trying to maximize or improve. But now that I'm thinking about it, that may be a lot, and I need to probably like take one away or figure out how to make it work. So it's my spiritual life, which I cannot, you know, compromise on, work, school, this podcast, my fitness, and then social. So those are six things that I'm juggling. Um, but they are also all important. But it may look like some things may take more, take up more time than others. Right now, it doesn't look like I can pour into all these things at full capacity at the same time. So the question isn't how do I do it all? I think the question should be, what do I need to prioritize now and put away without feeling guilty? And what I'm thinking is that saying no to some things or minimizing my time and effort on the thing, it isn't rejection. It could just be a timing thing. Like right now isn't the time for me to be super social. Like I need to focus on getting through school, making sure that I am performing in my role to the best of my ability, having a hundred percent devotion to my spiritual life, making sure I maintain some good physical health, and putting my best foot forward with this podcast because this is something that is important to me. Number three is for us to create systems that actually work. So automate some things, simplify some things. So this is the part that I am actually building right now. So I want to be honest with you. I don't think I have the best time awareness or time management. So time management is something that I need to master in this season. I actually need to put some tools in place for like time blocking and making sure that I'm honoring the schedule. For example, if I want to work from 9 to 5, I'm gonna start my day at 9, take my few breaks in with my hour lunch, and have a hard stop at 5 p.m. Utilizing my calendars to begin in the task and making sure that I begin my day with prioritizing whatever I need to in order to get it done that day. And then after work, I'm giving myself a brain break. I need about an hour to sit myself down somewhere and not think about anything because at work, your brain is always on. So I need to relieve myself of all of that activity and brain power that I just put in. So I'm gonna give myself about an hour brain break to either scroll or just sit in silence or whatever I need to do to decompress. But I also need to put a hard stop on that because when it comes to Doom scrolling, now I'm looking at my time and it's two hours and past I've been scrolling on TikTok. So I need to have a hard stop and a boundary on my brain breaks and then continue my day with the gym and then dinner and then the rest of my night to prepare for the next day. And then in that, I am going to learn how to automate and simplify tasks. So that can look like meal prepping my dinner in the beginning of the week, creating email templates for those repetitive emails that I see myself sending out on a daily basis, having a trainer that creates my workout plan for me. So Monday is upper body, Tuesday lower body, et cetera. And I know exactly what I'm doing before I get there. So I can be in and out within an hour versus trying to find workouts on Instagram and wasting more time because now I'm distracted, now I started scrolling, losing track of time. So none of this is about doing more, it's about removing the friction. So the discipline that we already have is in fighting against chaos. However, the next part is gonna be for us to recognize how to rest without guilt. This is a piece that I don't want to skip past because I see myself resisting it the most. So to help me, I'm gonna go back to the Bible and I'm gonna say that Jesus rested, right? And I can find a few examples throughout the word where Jesus actually rested. Starting with Mark chapter 6, verses 31. It says, Then Jesus said, Let's go off by ourselves to a quiet place and rest a while. He said this because there were so many people coming and going that Jesus and his apostles didn't even have time to eat. Next verse, Mark 4, verse 38. Jesus was sleeping at the back of the boat with his head on a cushion. The disciples woke him up, shouting, Teacher, don't you care that we are going to drown? When Jesus woke up, he rebuked the wind and the waves. Silence, be still. Suddenly the wind stopped, and there was a great calm. Lastly, John 4. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired from the long walk, sat wearily beside the well about noontime. And if y'all want more Bible, Genesis 2 tells us that God rested on the seventh day. It says, On the seventh day, God had finished his work of creation. So he rested from all his work. And that tells me that as I run, as I as I work, put my best foot forward, I can sit down somewhere and not feel guilty about it because Jesus slept, he rested, God even rested. So if the creator of the universe built rest within his rhythm of creation, if the son of God experienced exhaustion and rested while he was here, then why can't we? So I encourage us to implement a Sabbath. We know that the Sabbath day was a day to rest, a day to do nothing. So what that can look like is working Monday through Saturday, and on Sunday, you just spend your time doing absolutely nothing. You know? Just chill and recharge. And I don't want to paint a picture that rest is a reward. I want to reframe that for us because rest should be seen as strategy. Rest is not a reward you get after pushing yourself and approving yourself. Rest should be seen as a strategic necessity, a place where you recharge, a place where you give yourself a break. You cannot give yourself your all through the week without resting. Being in constant motion is physically unhealthy. Taking the time to rest does not make you look like you're lazy or a failure. It is designed within us as a function. It's totally up to you to discern the moments where you need to put in overtime because you're trying to achieve a goal by a certain time frame. But it's also up to you to discern when it's time to put it down and give your body that moment, give your mind that moment to rest, you know, and put it down, sit it down somewhere. So, yeah, y'all, that is my truth. And those are just a few ways that I plan to work through and navigate this season of my life. I am still grateful and blessed to be where I'm at. I just know it takes some reworking and some strategy, some time management and some prayer to get to where I need to be and how I navigate it. So, of course, before we go, I want to leave you guys with a journal prompt. Where in my life am I confusing doing more with being faithful? What would it look like to trust God with rest instead of treating it as a reward? So that's it for today, friend. Again, I don't have it totally figured out, and I am showing up and learning how to navigate it in real time alongside you guys. But what I do know is that discipline and rest were never meant to compete with each other. They were definitely meant to work together. So if this resonated with you, I love to hear your thoughts. Um, connect with me on socials at weall2 underscores or in the comments. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. And I'll see you guys in our next talk.