Working Against Yourself
The cost of overriding your needs
A lot of us were taught how to push.
Fewer of us were taught how to stay with ourselves while we’re pushing.
You sit down to get some work done.
But first…
Open another tab.
Check your phone.
Grab more coffee.
Reread the same paragraph three times.
…four times.
Bathroom break.
Let the dog out.
Come back.
Try again.
Ah.
“I just need to lock back in.”
Been there.
Ever felt like you’re no longer in rhythm with what you’re doing?
It’s more like you’re trying to force yourself back into it.
I think a lot of us have become incredibly skilled at that.
Working against ourselves…
and calling it discipline.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
How many of us have become so disconnected from ourselves
that we only recognize exhaustion once we’ve already pushed past it?
On the surface, things probably still look fairly steady.
You’re checking boxes.
Moving through the day.
Doing what needs doing.
But internally, something shifted a while ago.
Focus feels heavy.
Attention drifts.
Everything takes more effort than it should.
But instead of noticing what changed…
we often double down.
More urgency.
More effort.
More coffee!
But these moments aren’t obstacles to push through.
They’re signals.
The rereading.
The urge to get lost in your phone…again.
The irritability.
That extra cup of coffee you didn’t actually need.
It’s all information.
And it’s worth paying attention to.
A lot of people come into work with me
hoping to improve time management.
And that makes sense.
Most of us have spent years trying to better organize our calendars.
Protect our mornings.
And solidify routines.
But more often than not,
the deeper struggle isn’t really about time.
It’s about energy.
It’s recognizing when focus starts slipping,
frustration starts building, and effort starts turning against you.
It’s noticing when something in your body or mind has shifted,
and your instinct is to keep pushing anyway.
Performance psychology has long emphasized
the importance of awareness under pressure.
The ability to notice subtle internal shifts
before they begin affecting execution.
The athletes who sustain focus and performance
usually aren’t the ones pushing at full intensity every second.
They know what their body and attention feel like when they’re in sync.
And they feel it quickly when they’re not.
Tension building.
A change in breathing.
The narrowing—or widening—of attention.
That awareness gives them a chance to adjust
before effort turns into overcorrection.
I think the same applies outside of sport.
At work.
In conversations.
In creative projects.
Even in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.
Because peak performance is less about maximizing every hour
and more about noticing when you’ve started working against yourself.
Sometimes that means leaning in.
Sometimes it means stepping away.
Sometimes it simply means recognizing
that what feels like “laziness”
is actually mental fatigue.
Or that the problem isn’t discipline at all.
It’s that you’ve been overriding yourself for so long,
you stopped noticing when your energy started to drift.
I think that’s where a different level of steadiness begins.
Not by squeezing every ounce out of every hour
or forcing intensity longer than your system can hold.
But by staying grounded enough
to notice when pressure starts pulling you off-center…
and catching it
before another hour slips by out of rhythm.
And trusting yourself enough to honor what you notice.
Because sometimes the most productive thing we can do
is stop working against ourselves long enough
to respond honestly to what we need.
What helps you notice when you’ve started working against yourself?
So well said
This really resonated with me. That idea of trusting yourself enough to notice when something has shifted from nourishing to depleting, and actually listening to that rather than pushing through it. So much of what we're taught conditions us to override that. What you've written here is a good reminder that honoring what we notice isn't weakness — it's wisdom.