Wednesday, July 29, 2009

More Is Not Always Better

I've made some interesting observations over the past few days about human behaviour.

Quite simply, we want more.

We want more money.
We want more time.
We want more freedom.
We want a better home.
We want more to eat.
We want more holidays.
We want more friends.
We want more sex.

The list goes on....

We want more fulfillment.

WE WANT TO HAVE IT ALL.

WE WANT TO HAVE IT ALL AND THEN SOME.

BUT..
does "having it all" make us happy?

It seems that the more we have, the more we want. And the less happiness it brings us.

I'm a case in point. I logged about my manic day on Monday, Tuesday was equally as awful and the exhaustion I was suffering by the late evening put a hole in my wonderful run of eating well and training hard, culminating in an episode of overeating stuff that I really didn't need. What was driving that? "I'm tired, I deserve it" (aka, "I deserve more"). However, adding "more" didn't add to my happiness levels, rather it diminished them.

I'm not really very proud of those two days. Yes, I did a lot - but when you're doing that much and riding along the edge I believe your productivity levels take a complete dive. I thought about what it would be like prepping for a comp or trying to get uber lean under the circumstances. It would be extremely difficult to do it well. I've been trying to unlock the reasons behind why I get myself into these messes of "doing lots of everything, yet not doing everything well".

I've started to get things back on an even keel by asking John to put me back on High Performance RPM on Saturday rather than Step (goal achieved) and rather than get upset that the fish I bought for dinner was off, smiled serenely, dumped it, got in the car and headed to Coles (passing an Indian restaurant on the way - a great effort when one is hungry and tired) and bought two beautiful pieces of salmon instead.

Next stop for me is bed - I've got my regular Step class tomorrow morning, so I'm up at the crack of dawn for that one.








1 comment:

ss2306 said...

How bizzare that you should write this when my post title today is "I'm gonna get it all".

Thinking out loud here - as long as we live in the moment then WANTING more is ok. It's when we think we NEED more to make us happy that the problem lies.

Anyway - f@#k it - I'm not gonna think about it too much cause I don't want to use any more energy than I have to this morning. I'm gonna need all I can get later !!!