Strategies for Maintaining Physical and Mental Harmony
I tore something in my shoulder in the spring of 2022 reaching for a box on a high shelf, which is an undignified way to acquire an injury and a very effective one. I could not swim, could not carry anything on the left, and could not sleep on my preferred side for eleven weeks.
What surprised me was how quickly the rest of it came apart.
The thing nobody put in the discharge notes
Within a month of stopping swimming I was sleeping badly, eating worse, and being sharp with people who did not deserve it. My physiotherapist asked about this at the second appointment — not as small talk, as part of the assessment — and I remember being faintly annoyed, because I had come about a shoulder.
She was right and I was wrong. The swimming had not been exercise. It had been the forty minutes of the day when nobody could reach me.
Take away the thing and you find out what it was doing. Usually it was doing more than one job, and only one of them was the one on the label.
What I do now
One non-negotiable, protected like an appointment
For me it is the evening walk. Thirty minutes, phone in the other pocket, the same route most nights. It is not enough exercise to matter physically and that is not what it is for.
A floor, not a target
I stopped setting goals and started setting minimums. Not swim four times a week but do not let three days pass. Targets made a bad week into a failure. A floor makes a bad week into a bad week.
Naming the input rather than the mood
This came out of therapy and it is the most useful thing I took from it. When I feel terrible, I now go down a list before I go down a spiral:
- When did I last eat something that was not a snack?
- How much did I sleep, actually, not how much was I in bed?
- Have I been outside?
- Have I spoken to another human being out loud today?
Four questions. About seventy percent of the time one of them is the answer, and the feeling turns out to be information rather than a verdict.
Somebody who will ask
My sister calls on Sundays. She would call anyway, but we made it explicit after the shoulder, and the explicitness matters — it is much harder to quietly disappear from something somebody is expecting.
What I am still bad at
Rest days. I either do the thing or I do nothing, and the middle setting has never installed properly. I am told this is common and I have stopped treating it as a personal defect, which is itself a kind of progress.
The shoulder is fine now, mostly. I am careful with high shelves.
