In the past couple of weeks I feel like I've started merging with my computer screen.

And it's messing with my head.

Long sessions of writing, analysing data and building systems, which is enough to keep me cross eyed for hours afterwards.

I get to the evening and I've never really switched off. I'm grouchy, and impatient.

(long time followers of mine will know I've had a running battle with migraines. And excessive screen time + stress is a known trigger for me)

The advice you'll get for this is take regular breaks.

Which sounds logical until you remember that when you're immersed in something, being immersed is the very thing that makes it hard to take breaks!

So here is what I've been doing to chill the f*** out.

I often catch myself barely breathing. Shallow breaths, high up in the chest, nothing going down into the belly.

It feels like I'm holding onto something, gripping it tight (I also clench my jaw and catch myself with my shoulders around my ears)

This is fight or flight mode, and it means my sympathetic nervous system is engaged, even when I’m doing something as non-life-threatening as typing words on a screen.

So it's perfectly logical that a few hours of intense work leaves me feeling like I'm burning out, because I've forgotten I have a body attached to the head doing all the thinking.

Cue Lewis Hamilton:

He also said that when he was younger he'd go to the gym and do the session flat out without thinking about his breathing at all.

This is a dude whose job is measured in thousandths of a second, and the thing he credits is breathing.

If you want to go properly deep on this, read Breath by James Nestor. He plugged his own nose for ten days at Stanford to force himself to breath through his mouth. TL;DR, it royally screwed him over, and the book is about the techniques then then discovered to breath better.

My old pattern was to work all day, fix myself a stiff drink and veg out in front of the TV.

My drink of choice - Southern Comfort and lemonade. My T.V show of choice ‘House of Cards’. All whilst reclined on a sofa bed in the attic room of a shared house in’t Barnsley.

That doesn't work for me anymore (not that it ever did)

I drink very few units now. I'll have a pint of IPA or two when I'm celebrating or seeing family and friends, but alcohol makes me grumpy even when I've had barely anything.

So I've had to find other ways of getting my nervous system to shut up.

For as long as I can remember I've used 4-7-8 breathing when I catch myself getting wound up (in through the nose for four, hold for seven, out through the mouth for eight). It gives me an immediate sense of relief compared to the tightness I had a minute earlier.

The problem with any technique like that is it relies on you catching yourself, and in the states where I need it most I'm usually oblivious.

I've also pulled my caffeine right down, rarely more than two coffees a day and often one at weekends. Coffee produces the largest cortisol response of the caffeinated drinks that have been studied, and regular drinkers only build partial tolerance to it, so it’s worth taking seriously. Reference: Lovallo et al; 2025 ESPE/ESE review

Which reminds me of catching up with Will Barron once, Founder of Salesman.com ($1.4B revenue delivered, 54.8K deals closed amongst clients), who sat there sipping chamomile tea.

It's very common with the big influencers I work with. They have intentional methods for managing stress.

My Dad would call it ‘preventative maintenance’ - especially back in the time where cars still had engines XD

I ghostwrite a newsletter that goes to 200k+ subscribers, twice a week. The revenue we generate from it depends on enough people opening it, reading it and going through to the call to action.

So I became hyper focused on subject line performance and click through rate, and I'd look at the data every 30 minutes from the moment it broadcast.

And I'd stress myself out over it. Like - seriously stress myself out.

But once something's sent, that's it. You can't delete an email once it's gone out to that many people.

There's a cool piece of evidence for this as well. Researchers took 124 adults and had them check email as often as they liked for one week, then limited them to three times a day the next.

The result? Significantly lower daily stress in the limited week. The stress came from the checking, not the work. Reference: Kushlev & Dunn, Computers in Human Behavior, 2015

Data isn't useful at a micro level. It's useful at a macro level.

Looking at one newsletter an hour after it’s sent won't give you a single thing you can act on. But look at a run of newsletters over a month and you can see trends, and you can see what's performing.

You also have to accept that anything you put out into the world (newsletter, social post, fill in the gap) has peaks and troughs, and no one can reliably predict how a single one will do past a certain point.

So my rule now is that I only look at the data seriously once a month.

Everything I look at before that point is just pointless stress for no reason.

Some people go even further. Instead of managing their reaction to the input, they get rid of the input lol.

Ed Sheeran hasn't owned a smartphone since 2015.

He works off an iPad and email now, so he doesn't wake up to 50 messages of people asking him for things. Reference: Ellen, via Teen Vogue

Christopher Nolan (forever grateful for Interstellar btw Chris) takes this to the extreme.

He doesn’t have an email address. He has a flip phone, and no phones allowed on his sets. And when asked whether he could be reached by email, his answer was that he doesn't have one. When he was asked what would happen if you were given his number, he said nothing would ring. Reference: interview coverage, EW / 60 Minutes

This is a man running $200m productions with hundreds of people depending on him!

I'm not about to bin my phone. But I do delete obligations in smaller ways. No early morning meetings, no analytics until the monthly review, and no screens at all before I've been out with the dog (mostly).

This is what's helped my energy levels most recently.

From the moment I leave the house with the dog at half seven, the whole thing takes under an hour. In that hour I've had some exercise, relaxed my nervous system and come out of it in a far more focused state, and I'm much more likely to find flow than if I'd just jacked myself up with caffeine and tried to tackle every task at once.

On gym days I'll do 15 minutes in the sauna followed by a cold shower, but I don't want to go full biohacker on you. None of this needs an infrared cabin.

Worth saying that this works because of what my mornings don't contain. I don't take early meetings, I stack them in the afternoon, and if that means I'm not at my desk until 9 then so be it. Not starting early hasn't meant getting less done.

The only problem with my own routine is that it still relies on me being organised enough to do it. Hugh Jackman doesn't leave that to chance.

He isn't waiting until he notices he's stressed. It's all very deliberate.

I go through phases of doing really well with this. Meditation, breath work, all of it. Then I start feeling better and go back into overwork mode.

Which is fine. Sometimes we have to accept that life and work are cyclic, and we're not always going to get a 60 to 90 day streak of doing everything the same way every day.

Dave Grohl has said he feels like quitting after every single Foo Fighters tour, and that it's become a running joke. Reference: NME

If the man can headline stadiums for thirty years and still call a timeout, you're allowed to as well. Just don’t let it get ‘the best of you’ XD.

There will be weeks where work is absolutely mad and something has to give.

Either way, the 80/20 is the ability to catch yourself, take ten minutes and take some deep breaths.

It's as simple as that.

Until Next Time

Adam

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