Save Room in a Crisis
Libby talks about the costs of operating your time, energy, and attention at full capacity by default, and why it's worth considering intentionally having more downtime to recharge and also so that you have some room to push if there's a need or crisis.
SHOW LINKS
One Secret to Happiness: Relationships
Transcript
So as I say, in the introduction to this podcast, I believe that relationships are at the core of our well being as humans. And this is backed up by a number of longitudinal research studies of adult development, people who are in loving relationships, not just romantic relationships, but also loving friendships live longer, have greater emotional, mental, and physical health and just report being happier people. And you know, that really makes sense to me. Our brains are wired for connection. You know, We actually have neurons that are designed exclusively for connecting with other people. We have a number of them. We also live in a world that's very unpredictable and challenging. We need the support of other humans to survive. Also managing difficult times in our lives alone with no one to support us can really amplify the stress that we're experiencing. And that can just take a toll on our physical bodies.
Connection's also a great stress reducer, like just being able to process our experiences with others has been shown to help us make sense of what happened, integrate that experience into our psyche. It reduces the odds that something that is traumatic will lead to PTSD. And also just having someone is tremendously beneficial because or having someone's preferably is tremendously beneficial because the people in your life can help you share just the load of living and being a human being. So in other words, when hits the fan in your life, relationships can be a significant factor in how well you come through it. And a lot of has hit our collective fans over the past several years, the pandemic being just one thing. There's also been a global recession with supply chain problems, and there's a war going on and there's been shootings and floods and drought and wildfires.
And probably a lot of us not to be a downer, but like we're, we're looking into the future and we're not thinking there's gonna be less hitting the fan anytime soon. And so I think this is a time when we really need our relationships maybe more than ever. And, and I wanna say it again, I'm not just talking about romantic relationships. I also mean friendships. I also mean your family, whether it's biological or chosen, I'm also meaning community, which took a really massive hit during the pandemic. Like we're only just now starting to rebuild and reconnect our more loose ties with each other. But I think those are important too, but now I'm going to ask you when you reflect on, I mean, you've heard me use this term before, but relational ecosystem, right? The whole biosphere of all of the people in your life that make up maybe your inner circle and maybe like one ring further out, what do you feel when you reflect on that?
Do you feel a sense of relief and wholeness? Like yeah. My network of people has got my back and I know that if I fall down, I have people to pick me up. Or when you reflect on your relational ecosystem and maybe combine that with your overall commitments, do you maybe feel overwhelmed and exhausted and stretched thin? So I'm asking this because sometimes when I talk to people in the polyamory community, whether it be friends or clients, I hear a lot of that ladder that it's too much, I'm overwhelmed, I'm stressed out. And I wanna talk about how that can happen. And I want to invite you if that is something that's true for you, that that might be an opportunity to start to reevaluate your relationships and how they're functioning, and maybe the other commitments that you take on so that you can actually get the benefits of those relationships that you are building or have built instead of feeling like they're actually a strain.
So first I wanna talk about how this can happen. So here are the reasons that I see. So the first thing is a lot of polyamorous people have gotten into this. It's a, it's a common cultural thing, especially in our very like driven capitalistic society of being a maximizer. Now, what do I mean by a maximizer? I mean, and I wanna, I wanna put myself in this category, although ,I'm also not this person, but I'll, I'll explain. So when a maximizer wants to get the most out of life, wants everything to be as big and as wonderful and as intense as, as they can. Like, you know, these are the folks who really, you know, car DM is like their motto. And I think polyamorous folks, of course, like we often want more, like literally more, we want more partners. We want more connection.
We want more love, more sex, more board game nights. More emotional support though. And more happiness, you know, we don't wanna be constrained and, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Like, you know, I actually, one of my favorite movies is auntie Mame. And one of the things that auntie Mame says is, you know, life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death and she just like wants to go out and just live. And, and I feel that in my bones too, and I also feel that we, whether you're polyamorous or monogamous, we need more than just one person in our lives to support us. We really do need a network or a village, like I said, a whole ecosystem of folks. So looking for more than the status quo is, is great. It's a solid survival strategy.
However, relationships also require attention and time and energy to build and maintain and grow. And those three things, time, attention, and energy. Those are finite resources. We only have so much time. We only have so much energy. We only have so much capacity for our attention and that's, that's gonna vary from person to person, but everybody has limits. And if you're a maximizer in your relationships, you may be a maximizer in other aspects of your life too. And you know, again, our culture kind of encourages us to be maximizers, you know, to the point where it's kind of shameful to like waste time, like whatever that means, like to waste time to, to not be like productive or creating something cool or doing something cool. And we're like performing it all the time on social media. But you know, this idea that you know, you gotta work hard and play hard, right?
And you know, again, the rewards that you get for being like high performing is you get access to, you know, the best things in life. And FOMO is a real thing too, like fear of missing out. However, if you are taking a maximizing approach to your life, your relationships, your work, your family, life, your hobbies, your social circles, your parenting, your community, et cetera. What you may discover is that you are stuck operating your life at full capacity. Like that's, your default is you're operating at a hundred percent on a good day. You're filling your calendar. You take on lots of commitments and you make lots of plans and your life is just full. You may even be in a relational ecosystem where everybody's doing that, where that is the norm, but it might be a good moment to reconsider whether that is actually working for you.
Because if you're operating at a hundred percent on all of your good days, what happens when you have a bad day? What happens when you can't put out a hundred percent, but that's what everybody is expecting of you. And that's what you've kind of committed yourself to. Also what happens when someone else is having a bad day and they suddenly need more from you. What happens when you find yourself in a crisis and everybody is operating at capacity. And so nobody has any extra room for you, or, I mean, God forbid more than one person has a crisis or a relationship in your ecosystem is having trouble. And if everybody's operating at capacity, if someone needs somewhere to lean and get support, what they may find is that there's no room to lean. There's nobody to turn to who has extra room. And this has actually happened to me.
I was actually part of, sort of a molecule friend group kind of thing, where everyone was, you know, just filling their days with fun things, with work things, with family, things, with kid things, with partner things. And it was amazing when it was going well, we did so many cool things together. These people were amazing fun people, and I never felt bored or lonely. Really. It was awesome. But then someone would have an issue or a challenge or a conflict, or some additional needs, maybe someone got injured and when that would happen and they needed some more attention or more care, and maybe in ways that were disruptive to the general flow of the group, it was a hard, everyone was so leveraged with their time and their energy in their attention that when something difficult came up there wasn't that much, if any, extra to give.
And that might have left the person who was in need, feeling like this drag on the group or a burden. And sometimes they were treated like that. I definitely felt like I was treated like that when I had some problems and, you know, it can feel a little bit like, you know, you're really only allowed to be there if you don't cause any trouble that is in any way disruptive to anybody's lives. Because it feels like you can't really count on people for the support. Like it was stated that you could count on people for support, but then there was a real limit to what you could actually have. I mean, I actually remember one of my friends in that group telling me that they thought I was selfish for having a difficult interpersonal conflict because it was impacting this person.
And they already had way too much on their plate with all of their other commitments and stuff that they were going through. And so they just couldn't handle it. And like, why couldn't I just like, not have that problem? And, you know, that was really tough, you know, being in a relational ecosystem like this can end up, like I said, having this chilling effect on raising issues or asking for help, because nobody wants to be a drag or a burden. And of course, I'm not saying that relationships are supposed to be like your emotional dumping ground. You, you know me well enough. Hopefully if you've been listening to this show that I don't think that's correct, but at the same time, one of the reasons why relationships are beneficial is because when you're having a hard time, when you're falling down, when things are not going well, that your hope is that you'll be held by your people by your ecosystem and supported there.
You know, there's even a wonderful BEATLES song about it. You know, I get by with a little help from my friends, but instead what it can feel like when everyone is so highly leveraged with their time, attention and energy, and everyone's perpetually stressed and stretched, you might feel like you don't actually have access to those things about relationships that have all those like awesome health benefits and longevity and happiness benefits. And then what it can feel like is like those extra people in your life are really only draws on your time and attention and energy rather than being a meaningful support for your wellbeing. So I'm gonna throw out there that, like, when you're thinking about your general operating capacity, that you consider dialing it down from like 95, a hundred percent every day to like having your baseline be like 70% or 80%. Because again, if you're at a hundred percent and then more is needed from you, then that's gonna overwhelm you.
You're gonna be really at risk for burnout and you can get kicked outside your window of tolerance too, for stress. And then that's gonna make you just more tired, but also like more reactive, which can then kind of degrade your ability to be in good relationship with people. Now, I'm not saying that that means you have to have fewer partners. Although sometimes I am saying that, I mean, that question comes up a lot. You know, how many partners can you have before you're maxed out. And, and I think that really isn't the right question to ask, because it's more about cumulative commitment than it is about like partners specifically, because there are all kinds of other things that draw down your finite resources. In addition to relationships, you know, there's your job, there's your kids, there's your household, there's your hobbies, et cetera, et cetera.
But I also definitely think you can be in too many relationships. Such that like, you know, all of them are being shortchange and I mean, I've seen that happen and this can happen, especially, I wanna say when you're new to non-monogamy when you start to connect with a more exclusively non-monogamous community of people, a thing that at least I found is that,it's kind of amazing how much compatibility there is within that community. Like when you choose to just associate with people who are relating in the same way that you do, you might find that you have a lot of other things in common, even though it's a smaller pool. And so it may feel like there's just a lot of possibility of potential partners you could be in relationship with. And you might feel a little bit like a kid in a candy store and you just wanna like grab all of it again, that carpe diem, like when you have the opportunity sees it.
And so then can be tricky because if you're, if you're a maximizer, then you might like fill your calendar with dates or escalate deeply with partners while in NRE because that's what monoculture teaches us to do is to just escalate when, you know, based on how we feel rather than the structure of our lives, but then that can cause people to overcommit pretty quickly because escalator relationships specifically are pretty resource intensive, and that may not be compatible with the other commitments that you have in place. But again, commitment and escalation. Aren't always what you have to do with every partner that you're excited about. And so it's like, it's worth thinking about, like, you don't actually have to like have fewer relationships. You might just have to be conscious about like how you're structuring them and how those relationships fit into your existing relational ecosystem and how they fit into your current commitments, et cetera.
But there are other ways that people can get over committed. You know, again, another thing is not having any limits around the amount of work they're willing to put into a relationship. And this is tricky because I mean, we're all told relationships or work that we shouldn't just like dispose of people when something difficult comes up. And I mean, like, it is true. All relationships at work, even like comment type relationships where, you know, you're only seeing each other infrequently, you still have to do a little bit of investing and you have to be, you know, really kind and conscious, but you know, some relationships may be creating so much work all the time that it creates a significant strain on your wellbeing, on your other commitments. And it may feel hard to set boundaries because you feel like you've committed to a certain level of involvement when maybe the relationship might just need some adjustments to be in that sweet spot where it actually feels mutually supportive and where you feel like you actually have more room to give to yourself and, and give again in a crisis or when something comes up.
So, and another thing that can be true is kids actually can be a source of overcommitting. And honestly, they deserve their own little sidebar here, cause as a parent of children, I gotta say, children really also need downtime. Like they like operating them at a hundred percent over and over, over again, like if you're a maximizer and then you're already encouraging your kids to be maximizers by, you know, scheduling lots of extracurricular activities, scheduling lots of family activities and family vacations. And again, I wanna just point out like social media can kind of encourage this because we wanna post cool pictures of our kids and our family doing stuff. So, but children need, need to be bored actually. And I think it can be really overwhelming and stressful for children to be overbooked going from like one thing to the next thing, like all the time.
And again, if we take a look at, you know, maximizing and expecting productivity and interestingness, like every minute of your life and your kids are kind of taking that on, then they might have a hard time slowing down when they need to and be in self care when they need to and put on the breaks with their family when they need to, or it might instead come out in kind of an explosive way when really what they just need is some rest and to be bored and to just mess around and not do anything that's productive or teaching them something, et cetera. Because I mean, honestly when you're a child there's so much growth happening all the time. Like you need to rest and integrate cause like so much information that's new is coming all the time. So yeah, downtime for kids is really important, but it's an easy way to overbook your life.
So anyway, there are a lot of ways that you can end up overstretched without any extra space, if a crisis came up and maybe some of you are listening, and maybe you're already really awake to what I'm saying. I'll say that. I think maybe the pandemic woke up a lot of us to this chronic overcommitting that a lot of us were doing. I mean, I know that some folks actually kind of were forcibly required to slow down during the pandemic. But I think there were also a lot of other people who were overcommitted and then got more committed, you know, where everything got a lot harder, you know, you're working a job and you're putting the pedal to the middle of the job. And then all of a sudden, now you're also responsible for a hundred percent of your childcare and you didn't have room for that.
Or you have someone who gets sick and you need to take care of them or you get sick and suddenly you can't operate at the capacity you could before, but you are looking at, you know, you still have the commitments you have. And so you can feel like, oh gosh, there's not actually any extra room to manage this crisis. And so I think a lot of people took the pandemic as an opportunity to take stock and possibly change how they were looking up their life. And, and you know, I'll also say, I think that's why this thing that's happening now called quiet. Quitting is happening. I don't know if you know about this phenomenon, quiet, quitting.I really think it's poorly named, but basically the idea is, you know, again at work, there's this expectation in a lot of workplace culture that you are supposed to show up at work and, you know, exceed expectations consistently.
You know, again, that's from the bottom to the top, like all the way through different levels of the workplace. So if you wanna get promoted, if you wanna get a raise, if you wanna stick around, in some cases, the expectation is that your key to success is to operate at a hundred percent or more than a hundred percent all the time. And I think a lot of people now are realizing they really bought into that. And then they did that and then they, the pandemic hit and they were burnt out and they're realizing they can't actually do that. They can't give it there all, all the time. They can't knock it out of the park every single day. They can't even put that pressure on themselves because it will just, it will, it will leave them no room for anything else. So quiet quitting is this idea that,I am just gonna do my job to the expectations are that are required of me.
I am not gonna do any extra. I am going to meet requirements. I am not going to exceed them consistently. And, and it's honestly funny that it's called quiet, quitting because that's, that's, it's not quitting. It's actually recognizing that it's not a good idea to do this. It's not actually healthy in a workplace to operate at or above capacity all the time. And it, then it looks like when you need to take a step back either because you're having a health problem or something's going on at home with your kids, or maybe you're just like tired that to dial it back would mean that your performance is going down. And that then you feel like stressed out about potentially losing your job or losing the opportunities at your job or being seen as not part of the team or whatever, when really like needing to dial things back is part of the human experience.
Like we, we, we're not robots. We're people, we have this whole body and this whole ecosystem of people in our lives and, and needs in our lives and interests and all different kinds of things. And we have to balance them and, and also leave room for when we might need either to back off, or frankly, there might be times where we really need to push and, and at work, even, you know, there might be times where you do need to give more, but if you're already at a hundred percent, all the time giving more can feel like trying to get blood from a stone. It's just, it's just unhealthy. So, you know, I'm, I'm actually really heartened by the ways in which people are dialing things back in the workplace and honoring their humanness. And I really, you know, I actually got this email the other day from some, I don't know, executive coach, something, something, whatever person who was like, how do you make sure that your employees won't quite quit on you?
And I was like, I want my employees to not quiet, quit on me. I wanna hope that if I have employees that like I'm encouraging them to be human beings and that that's kind of baked into the culture of whatever workplace I would create. But even as there is this quiet, quitting phenomenon, which I think is actually wise to do I do think as the pandemic is becoming like more endemic that people might be heading back to filling their calendars. And, you know, I've also noticed just a lot of new poly am folks who are discovering this about themselves or wanting to explore it. And you know, again, that kid in the candy store thing is real. So I really wanna invite everyone to not lose this lesson of the last few years. I want you to consider taking stock of your relational ecosystem and consider whether or not you might need to make some changes so that your ecosystem can support you in a crisis.
And that you can be a support in a crisis if needed to take stock. Here are some questions that I think might be useful to ask yourself first, when you think about any kind of short term needing more from one of your partners or a partner or a friend, do you have this felt sense that it would be easy for them? Or do you feel like it would be a big lift and like really hard to ask how good are your people at setting boundaries and owning their choices in their relationships? And are these relationships well maintained or are they all maybe thriving on crumbs because folks are already spread so thin. Another question, how much room for spontaneity is in your life right now? How much room is there for you to just follow what feels right in the moment without having to worry about like letting a bunch of people down or dropping your commitments or seeming like a flake, how much room is there for you to have a health issue that might require some extra support, whether physical or mental, how much stress are you managing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
And are you able to decompress and move that stress through your body? Or is it accumulating? Do you have room to give more to a partner or to another person in your life or to some commitment that you have on a short term basis? Do you have any room to kind of have a, a, a push? Do you feel secure enough in your relationships that if you needed to give less to them or even maybe disappear temporarily completely because you need to give some other part of your life more attention or time and energy would that relationship still be there? Could it survive that are you able to give to yourself? Are you able to prioritize taking care of you on a regular basis? And also how available are people around you to pick up slack? If there is any, if you need to leave any, also, if you have a lot of balls in the air, do you have a sense of which ones can safely drop versus which ones are like made of glass?
And if you drop them, then you're in trouble. and how many balls that you have in the air are glass versus plastic. The ones plastic ones can drop, right. They won't break and you can always pick 'em up again. Do you, do you feel yourself already in burnout or, do you feel close to it? Do you have downtime kind of built into your life? Are you able to restore yourself after a hard day or a hard week? How do you do that? Do you have a practice around restoring yourself? Do you have people you go to where you can really unpack things and these can be friends, family, partners, professionals, whatever. Do you have a place to go to work through some of the stuff that's going on with you? Do you get as much support from the people in your ecosystem as you feel like you're putting into it?
Are there ways you're spending time with people in your life that are, that are themselves like restorative and that feel good that give you life that give you energy? Or are there a lot of times that you're spending time with people and it's more of a drain? Are the people in your life making you feel good about yourself on a day to day basis? Do they seem satisfied with the relationship that they have with you or are they always pushing for more and are those connections stressing each other? Are those connections compatible or is it sometimes like one partner's oil and the other partner's water and you're just perpetually playing peacemaker and, and just generally like check in with your body, how do you feel on a daily basis? Do you feel energized or exhausted? And I realize a lot of us probably just feel exhausted, especially if you've got kids, but like that's worth looking into.
And also, are you able to find groundedness or do you feel kind of perpetually on your toes all the time? And then, you know, as you go through these, you know, as I ask these questions, you know, sit with, sit with what comes up for you and if what comes up for you is, oh, I'm not sure that this actually is sustainable or it wouldn't be sustainable if I added like one more thing or if something that I wasn't choosing came up, you know famous line life is what happens while you're busy making other plans or another one is if you wanna make God laugh, make a plan . So if, if that, that those two sentiments kind of terrify you, it might be worth considering making some changes. And here are the changes that I recommend that, that I find really valuable as part of me managing my capacity.
So one particular one is consider what you're taking on consider whether certain projects or certain partners might be like wonderful and exciting, but just not the right moment or there's just not room. So, I mean, this can be, if you're a couple who's interested in opening up too, cause that can be a big project looking at when you're gonna start that journey. Because if you start that journey from a over leveraged place where you're already full and then you're like, whoa, but we can add this on you might encounter some challenges and that could kick you out of your window of tolerance and put you into a perpetual stress cycle and I've seen that happen. So you know, other people aren't initially necessarily going to alleviate that. Although, I mean, again, I do believe many hands make light work, but you gotta build it too.
And there's there's, there might be some structural challenges to building it. So I wouldn't do it from an overleverage place if, if it were me, another thing that would help is just like, look inside and see if there is a feeling that, you know, I'm not worthy unless I'm doing something productive all the time. Because if you have that feeling, then you're gonna, if you do start to build more downtime and more capacity for yourself, you're going to maybe feel a lot of guilt about that. Or you might just feel like, I don't know sense of worthlessness. And so that's something to really work on. If you're gonna start making more room, I think practicing meditation and having a gratitude practice is really good. It helps with the grounding especially the meditation. It helps with the grounding and being in the present moment and having a gratitude practice helps with the FOMO. It's a lot harder to get stressed out about what you might be missing. If you can be appreciative for what you have. Here's another one unschedule as in deliberately leave open places on your calendar that you don't fill and you don't allow anyone to fill them unless maybe the day of, or maybe like a few hours beforehand. Maybe I'll say this downtime is so essential. We need it. It is, you could say you are being productive by having downtime. We need it to rest. We need it to integrate our experiences and have the ability to move with greater intention. We need to be able to have time to reflect on what happened, what we did, what we didn't do, what's going on inside so that we can continue to grow and be in right relationship with ourselves. Unscheduling also leaves room for spontaneity. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say like, oh my God, my plan, my, my life is like planned out months in advance.
And I feel like half the time when I approach the plan, I don't actually wanna do the plan. And it's because there wasn't room for you to have these moments of time where you could just follow your desire. And I think that's so important to just be able to be in the moment, listen to what you are feeling in the moment. And then do that thing. Even if it's like, you know, binge watching Netflix and eating a pie of ice cream, that can feel so good. And again, I mentioned before, figure out the, which balls in your life are plastic and which ones are glass. And if you've got too many glass balls in the air, maybe figure out if there's a way to put them down. And, and just, you know, even just being aware of what you can put down and being clear with people who might be those plastic balls or commitments, that might be those plastic balls to just like, be clear, Hey, I might not always be able to do this all the time.
I can do this sometimes, but I can't always do it. Sometimes I have to put it down because I need to leave myself room and, and, you know, in general, I think it's good to have more explicit conversations about expectations that people have. Because again, if you've been operating a hundred percent, a hundred percent, a hundred percent, I'm gonna give everything, give everything. Maybe what you need to do is, is shift. And that might mean shifting expectations so that everybody understands what's happening. Another thing is being honest about the compatibility of the folks in your ecosystem, especially the ones that are in very close orbit with you and each other, because that can have an impact on everyone's capacity. And you know, it's important to be honest about that. It's not always fun, but I think, you know, if what we're wanting is something that is sustainable for us to maintain.
It's important to, to have that as a shared goal, like we want this to work. Maybe we need to collaborate on how to make it function better so that if there are clashes that are consistently happening, maybe we can support that. I mean, like just a silly example on my end, like my two kids have been having a hard time getting along over the past few months and they were sharing a bedroom and we were just like, you know, we were fortunate. I mean, this is a privilege that we were able to move them into separate bedrooms, but them having separate spaces has dramatically changed our lives. And this is where I say that, you know, boundaries can sometimes be a solution to clashes and difficulty and things that just kind of keep creating more drains on the system. And, and again, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
You know, like if somebody, or if a relationship dynamic is creating a lot of stress on your ecosystem, that doesn't mean that, that, that person or that relationship or that situation or that even that hobby or whatever it doesn't mean you have to cut it out. It's not like all or nothing. What you can do is you can deescalate or you can reconfigure things by changing the boundaries, you can get really granular with boundaries and you can create boundaries that are contextual and circumstantial and supportive and loving rather than sort of like, well, you're not doing enough or you're doing too much or whatever. So you're out. You know, another thing that I think is useful is creating rituals around rest renewal and self-care, and I say rituals, because it can be easy to be a maximizer of self-care, you know, treat it like yet another thing on your to-do list, another way in which you're gonna be productive.
But I think it's important that self care feel restorative and in communion with your body rather than another achievement and, and really be okay with resting just it's okay to rest. It's okay to sleep. It's okay to stay in bed sometimes it's important. So to recap, if you're a maximizer consider, whether you might be living your life too full, you might be at your capacity all the time. And that may be aiming. You squarely at burnout. If there is a crisis consider whether you might want to make some changes in your life and in your relational landscape to leave more space so that you can feel restored and supported. And also so that if you do need to push whether in a crisis or because there's an increased need, or there's just a lot of excitement that you have the room to do that consider, consider this, not just around your relationships, but also around your other life commitments.
And it's important to note that polyamory doesn't actually necessarily give you access to more of the finite resources. You don't necessarily have more time, more energy and more attention just because you have more love to give, which means you may have to adjust deescalate or even say no to certain kinds of relationships. You have to consider, not just whether you're compatible or whether you, this is fun, but whether it is actually something that's gonna work and it's important to be honest about your capacity. And again, I encourage you to operate well under it. This is countercultural y'all and it's radical ,but it's also caring towards you and it's caring towards those around you. Because when you leave room, you're able to give them more when they need it and give yourself more when you need it to.
