Busyness as Stress Relief

I’ve recently come out the other side of a stressful time.

Self induced. But stressful all the same.

After twelve months of tinkering and editing, my novel was finally done (for the most part), money was starting to run thin, and it was finally time for me to jump back into the job market.

As it turns out, it was probably time for me to ‘jump’ back into the job market about three months before I made that call…but unfortunately I didn’t have access to a crystal ball at the time.

The economy, inflation, high unemployment—throw a dart at the list of factors and you’ll land on one valid reason why the conditions for securing a job are tough across the board, right now. But let’s not get into that. Just understand that hirers are being conservative. So taking on somebody with a finite work visa and no experience in this country was a bit of a hard sell.

In any case, I had no business being as casual as I was RE: finding a job and this process quickly became a much more stressful activity than I’d initially expected it to.

Although I’d allowed myself enough of a buffer to delay an immediate state of crisis, any time I spent a little bit of money, it was hard not to picture a hole in the bottom of my bag of grain, just a little bit more trickling out. How long till there’s none left?

The Waiting Routine

My days took on a ritual of updating the job listings, progressing the applications I was already working on, prepping for my next interview.

Meanwhile, my book was out there with literary agents, waiting for feedback, trying not to tinker too much with my completed manuscript.

It was all waiting, refreshing emails, trying to squeeze extra milage out of the already spent job listings for the day.

I had plenty of time on my hands, but beyond the compulsive submitting of applications, there’s a limit to the actionable steps one can take.
So I signed up for a Jiu Jitsu tournament.

Yes, when I was stressed out of my mind, when I was running low on cash, I paid an entry fee to walk myself into a one on one combat situation.

How could that go wrong?

An Unrelated Comparison

Last month, the UFC featherweight Champion Alexander Volkanovski took a fight on ten days’ notice to face the lightweight champion Islam Makhachev. He lost by knockout in the very first round.

During the post-fight presser, he commented. “Staying at home without a fight booked was doing my head in. I took the fight because I couldn’t wait until January. I just needed to get back in there.”

Afterwards, armchair commentators were quick to jump on this wording, “doing my head in.” They pointed out how much talk of this kind Volkanovski had been doing in the lead up to the fight and speculated whether he was dealing with more than just itchy legs:

Is this depression? CTE? This is worrying talk to hear from someone in such a high pressure sport. Should they let him fight in January as he’s now campaigning for?

—Blind speculation from people who have never stepped foot in the cage, throwing around advice to the most successful and calculated fighter of this generation—

Sure, there is a time and place for conversations of this kind in a sport where head trauma is the aim of the game, and yes in hindsight, the shortened training camp might have been ill advised. There’s certainly no substitute for preparation.

But in this case, the answer to why he jumped back into the octagon so soon, might have been as simple as the following:

This man made a career out of creating opportunities in places they didn’t exist for him, and leveraging every bit of momentum he gained from this to achieve goals he had no business chasing.

This is born from an uncommon strain of initiative.

None of this approach involves waiting for accolades to come to him. None of that involves sitting on your hands until the conditions are perfect.

Now that he’s reached a place of career stability—financially set up, reputation solidified—as far as goals are concerned, the pickings are getting thin.   

The only rung left to climb is legacy, all-time status etc.

That’s what the Islam Makachev fight represented. A chance to fight a champion in another division, a chance to cement himself as pound-for-pound number one.

From the outside, the line, “Doing my head in,” may appear to be a shift from this man’s usual trajectory, even a worrying lapse into vulnerability. But looked at from this distance, it’s coming from the same place as he’s always approached things.

If there’s more work to be done. Stay ready for it. If an opportunity comes up. Take it.

Sure, it’s easy to sit behind a screen, drowning in hindsight and say the “smarter” move would have been to wait it out—get a full training camp in. But there’s a parallel universe where he won that fight and now looks like a genius.

Just ask Michael Bisping after his shock upset over Luke Rockhold to claim the middleweight title in 2016, or more recently, and a bit more bitterly, just ask Sean Strickland about his title win over Israel Adesanya earlier this year.

Yes, I’ve just spent a whole section demonstrating how a policy of “taking action” can end badly. But as a rule I think it’s a better long term strategy.

So I signed up for a Jiu Jitsu Tournament…

I lost five kilograms in two weeks. I under-ate and overtrained, and ended up losing all of my matches. But it did the trick.

By the time that tournament was over, I’d found myself a job.

—Despite the extra training I’d been doing, I’d maintained the same rate. of daily job applications. I’d also kept my mind off the novel over the course of that two weeks.

The choice to throw myself into extra stress doesn’t make any sense on paper. But in practice it was the most logical thing I could do.

Having a sense of personal agency, even if it’s got nothing to do with your goal at hand, is invaluable.

By having that date on my calendar, by having a goal weight I needed to reach, I was able to fill my days with actionable tasks. Getting into the gym, focusing on eating right. Things I could control.

Though this changed nothing on the job hunting landscape, my body couldn’t tell the difference. Though it changed nothing i/r/t how soon an agent would get back to me. All my body knew was, “shit, we’ve been working hard. Must be getting closer to the goal.”

As I said. It doesn’t make any sense, but it also makes a lot of sense.