Get Yourself Ready#

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do for your mind is feed your body a decent meal.

About three years ago, I was convinced something was deeply wrong with me. I couldn’t concentrate. I had no interest in things I used to enjoy. Every conversation felt like it cost more energy than I had. I started reading about burnout, depression, midlife crises. I was already drafting a narrative in my head—some profound psychological shift that demanded profound psychological treatment.

Then my wife asked me a question that stopped all of it: “When did you last sleep more than five hours?”

I couldn’t remember.

It turned out I’d been averaging four and a half hours a night for about six weeks. Not because of insomnia. Because I kept telling myself I’d go to bed after one more episode, one more article, one more scroll through my phone. The tiredness crept in so gradually that I mistook it for something else entirely. I was diagnosing a cracked foundation when all I really had was a leaky faucet.

I slept eight hours that night. The next morning, the world looked different. Not transformed—just clearer, the way a window looks after you wipe off the dust. The problems were still there, but they were their actual size again, not the inflated shapes my exhausted brain had been projecting onto the wall.

Since then, I’ve learned to check the simple things first. Before I wonder what’s wrong with my mindset, I ask: did I eat something real today, or just coffee and a granola bar? Have I moved my body at all, or have I been sitting in this chair for nine hours straight? Is there a dull ache somewhere that I’ve been ignoring so long it’s become background noise?

These questions feel almost embarrassingly basic. That’s exactly why they get skipped. We want our problems to be interesting, complex, worthy of serious reflection. “I’m experiencing existential fatigue” sounds far more important than “I forgot to eat lunch.” But the body doesn’t care about the narrative. It sends the same distress signal either way.

A neighbor of mine, a retired carpenter, once told me something I’ve carried with me ever since. He said that before starting any project—before picking up a saw or drawing a single line—he always did the same thing: checked his tools. Not the fancy ones. The basic ones. Was the blade sharp? Was the level accurate? Was the workbench stable? He said ninety percent of bad carpentry comes from skipping that step.

I think the same is true for how we live. Ninety percent of the heaviness we carry around might not be existential at all. It might be that we haven’t eaten a vegetable in four days, that our shoulders have been clenched since Monday, that we’ve been breathing shallow breaths all afternoon without noticing.

Getting yourself ready isn’t about becoming a health enthusiast. It’s about minimum maintenance—the kind a house needs just to stay standing. You don’t need to renovate. You just need to make sure the roof isn’t leaking, the pipes are clear, and the pilot light is still on.

The next time that familiar fog rolls in—the one that makes everything seem harder than it should—try asking three honest questions before you reach for any bigger explanation: How did I sleep? What did I eat? Where does my body hurt? You might find that the answer is simpler, and closer, than you think.