Oh, so this is how it’s going to be.
That was the thought I had when I rolled over and saw the clock. 1:26 am. For some people, I think that still counts as night, a time they see before they go to bed. I’d been asleep for a few hours, and my brain had decided it was time to dredge up all the unresolved bits and baubles from the previous day because 1:26 am is a perfect time for those things to demand attention, right?
There’s something existential about waking up that early in the morning / late at night, where low, persistent pressure isn’t quite loud enough to cause full-on panic but it still can’t be ignored. My heart rate told me what I suspected the moment my eyes popped open: sleep was going to lose this argument. So, I got up, grabbed my phone, and went downstairs to the couch where I spend approximately 57% of my early mornings, telling myself that the colder air and firmer back support will somehow reset things even though my experience tells me otherwise.
I checked my email, which is never a good idea when the sun’s not shining, scrolled through LinkedIn without really seeing anything, until my mind had backed away from the edge of panic enough that stretching out under a blanket and drifting back into something that resembled rest was possible.
5:12 am still came too early.
That’s how the routine unfolds so many nights, which is part of the problem. After the fitful night of “sleep,” I laid out my running gear on the kitchen counter, filled up a small water bladder, and stood there long enough to know I wasn’t going to follow through with the run. Instead, I settled on a slow walk on the treadmill while half-watching an episode of Castle, which is less about entertainment, honestly, and more about occupying space and time until my day “actually begins.”
There’s nothing especially dramatic about any of this. That’s what makes it easy-ish to dismiss. If you take it all together, it points to something that’s been building for a while. Over the past year or so, especially while writing more than I ever have before, I’ve had to admit something about myself to myself that I used to frame as a strength without ever questioning or counting the cost.
I tend to be a person who carries things whenever they are left unattended. If there’s a gap, I step into it. I absorb ambiguity like an infant’s diaper attempting to contain as much as it can. It’s the same with responsibility. If it hasn’t landed clearly somewhere else, I tend to assume it’s mine. This has been true in work, in relationships, and in all those little spaces where no one is making explicit assignments but something still feels disquieted.
There are environments where that tendency is useful, at least in the short term, because things move forward and problems get handled. There’s also a point, however, where it stops being a contribution and starts becoming a pattern that your body will keep track of even if you self-select ignoring the problem. In the last sixteen months, I’ve gained nearly forty pounds, and while it would be easy to attribute that to diet and schedule and any number of other surface-level explanations, those aren’t complete on their own because they describe the outcome without addressing the underlying dynamic. The more accurate description is that I have been living in a way that keeps me consistently activated, carrying more inputs, more decisions, and more responsibility than I have any realistic way of processing cleanly, and eventually that shows up somewhere whether you like it, want it, or not.
I’ve been reading Building A Non-Anxious Life by Dr. John Delony, and one idea in particular has stuck with me because of the way it frames what I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out on my own: the claim that anxiety itself is not the problem but rather the signal that something underneath it is way off.
For me, there’s nothing subtle about the shift in that idea, and it changes the direction of the conversation in a way that makes a lot of my usual responses feel misapplied, maybe, because if anxiety is functioning as an alarm, then trying to suppress it without addressing what it’s pointing to becomes an endless loop.
What I really like about Delony’s book is that it doesn’t present a clean, idealized version of a life without any tension. In the opening it even acknowledges that the phrase “non-anxious” is more about direction than volume. I find that oddly grounding because it removes the expectation that there is a final state to arrive at and replaces it with the idea that there are choices that either increase or decrease the baseline level of friction you live with everyday.
What’s been harder to reconcile is the implication that many of the ways I respond to that friction are not neutral, even when they feel justified in the moment. Caffeine, for example, makes it easier to keep going, but it also keeps the system on high alert. It’s kind of like trying to use gas to put out a fire. Similarly, multiple screens make it possible to juggle more at once, but they fragment attention in a way that makes resolution impossible.
Pushing into areas where I’m less effective gives me the sense that I’m expanding my capability, but it often comes at the expense of using the areas where I already create leverage.
Like the drama-less state of my sleepless nights, there’s nothing independently significant about those decisions, yet together they create an environment where the internal siren never shuts off. Over time, the responses to that siren start to harden into habits that are really about managing the discomfort it produces while simultaneously ignoring the underlying issue.
There’s a passage in Delony’s book about people gradually becoming accustomed to the very alarms they are trying to quiet, and that observation hits different once you start looking at your own patterns through that lens. It suggests that the goal isn’t to just eliminate anxiety but to understand what conditions you have built that keep generating it in the first place.
When I look at my own life honestly, it gets difficult to argue that the anxiety I experience is disconnected from the way I’ve structured my days, my work, and my sense of responsibility. It’s less an intrusion and more a reflection, which is not a comfortable conclusion but, hey, at least it’s a useful one.
For a long time, my default response has been to treat that reflection as something I can overcome through effort. That works well enough in the short term to reinforce the approach but doesn’t hold water over longer stretches because it never reduces the underlying load. It just redistributes it across more hours, more tasks, and more mental overhead until it eventually surfaces in ways that are hard to ignore: disrupted sleep, physical changes, or a persistent sense that something’s off even when nothing is obviously wrong. At that point, continuing to push in the same direction starts to look a lot like avoidance because it delays the need to examine what I’m actually carrying and why.
It’s time to call off the inner fight. As my Director of Operations likes to remind me—she even got me a shirt—”get someone else to do it.”
Calling off that inner fight, at least as I’m starting to finally understand it, is about changing my relationship to the fight so that it becomes a source of information rather than something to suppress through more effort. It’s easy enough to describe that change but really hard to implement, because it requires looking directly at the systems and structures that I built and deciding which ones are actually necessary and which ones persist out of habit or misplaced obligation.
In my case, that includes acknowledging that not ever problem needs to be mine. My role isn’t to be the point through which everything in my business or my life flows. There are people and systems around me that are capable of carrying more than I sometimes allow. That’s a bitter realization pill to swallow.
That acknowledgement also includes making smaller, less visible adjustments that impact the baseline of my daily life, such as reducing inputs, creating space for focused thinking, and allowing periods of rest to exist without needing to be justified by prior exhaustion.
Delony’s paints this great analogy that’s been in my head since I read it. It captures something easy to miss when you stay in analysis mode too long. There’s this difference between understanding a problem and addressing it. It’s possible to spend a lot of time naming, categorizing, and discussing the nature of anxiety without making any changes that would reduce it. I’ve spent enough time in that space to recognize it when I see it.
The alternative is about action at a scale that feels underwhelming, which is probably why it’s easier to overlook (or actively ignore). Turning off an extra screen (which I did), handing off a responsibility that doesn’t need to be mine (I have 29 employees to choose from), choosing not to reach for something that keeps the system elevated (Goodbye Diet Dr. Pepper. You’ve been a good friend.), and creating space where there was previously constant input don’t present themselves as major interventions, but they do alter the environment in ways that accumulate over time.
I don’t think there’s a version of life where that siren-signal disappears entirely. I’m not convinced that it should. I am starting to see that there’s a difference between living in a constant state of internal resistance and allowing that signal to guide adjustments that make the overall system better and more sustainable.
If there’s a change to be made here, it’s probably not going to be a dramatic swing from one state to another. It’ll probably be a slow, gradual unwinding of the assumption that everything needs to be carried and managed through effort or force. Again, the assumption’s been useful enough to get me where I am, which is part of what makes it so hard to question, yet it’s also the thing that, left unchecked, continues to produce the tension I’ve been trying to eliminate.
So, calling off the inner fight is alignment, not surrender, which is a less visible process that unfolds in decisions that are easy to dismiss individually but meaningful when they change the overall pattern.
To be clear, I’m not there yet, but I can see the direction a bit more clearly than I could before, and that alone feels like a better place to stand than continuing to push against something that was never meant to be fought or carried in the first place.
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