The ripples a simple change can make

So for the past few weeks I’ve been living on an 8 day schedule.
My weekly routine has come to be dictated by how I start and conclude my fitness routines and in this current routine I decided to shake it up and have it be done on an 8 day rhythm.

When I made this switch I had already known I wanted to increase my rest for this but then.. I had a DREAM telling me to follow through with the 4 days on 4 days off schedule and that’s when I knew it was finalized that I would be doing this.

So as I write this I just started week 5/6 and the results have been interesting.
FIRST the fatigue I feel is so much more but I am so much more rested and feel stronger every time I enter the gym.
This fatigue and tiredness is uncomfortable but was expected with any change I go through, but it has also motivated me more. It feels as if I have opened more time for myself to get in tune with some of the finer details in my daily life.

But the most important change I’ve noticed (and the entire reason I’m even writing this) is in how my mindset has changed around rest and my creative work.
I feel that before this change it was much harder for me to settle into rest and allow myself to feel at peace and have fun. I was always finding something to stress myself to continue being ‘productive’.
But with just 1 extra day of rest changing my daily rhythm left me to sit there.
I could feel it. I was on the verge of some extreme burnout, but all I believed there was, was to push push and keep pushing.

The first 3 weeks I pulled back on the amount I was pouring into my creativity, each day I felt my flame of motivation flicker and dwindle as I tried to force creation. I just couldn’t sustain it. I crashed in bed. Glued to my phone doom scrolling at a rate I hadn’t felt in years I felt my body finally just give in and rest. Any energy that could have been used to move shifted all into my thumbs to try and reach the end of my feed.

Week 4 I got to deep cleaning my room. Throughout the days I was all like I need to go home and EDIT! but the thought of that just tired me out so much more than I wanted to believe. After work I got home, smoked a joint, then got to work tidying up my rooms. I did my bit and went right to bed.

But enough about the things I did daily the main focus for this whole post is just about how taking control over our daily cycles stands to open us up in unexpected ways. The way we live our lives is always our choice, most live on the 7 day weekly systems that have been provided to them, going to work 5/7 of those days from 9am – 5pm. A life and cycle you did not get to craft. It doesn’t matter how you arrive to the moments of expression but the important thing is to live your life in a manner in which you and your needs can be put first even in the insanity of daily life.
For me this is through my fitness, when I workout I also maximize my creative output in some manner, when I rest I minimize it in the ways that it’s needed. I go to work on its cycle and live my cycle of life at the same time. It’s a wild dance between systems of expression and power, it’s fatiguing but to live a life that you yearn for you have to fight for it and exercise your autonomy in every way that you’re called to!