Where Do You Direct Your Effort?

My regular Wednesday morning client arrived at 7am today feeling hopeless and exhausted because she’d stayed up late watching her chosen candidate lose the presidential election. Judging by my social media feed, my client is far from alone. These are trying times. We face conflict and climate change, hunger and homelessness, inequality and inflation, poverty and polarization — just to name a few challenges. No matter what your political views are, we are all human, we all share this planet, and it feels like it’s on fire right now. Even those of us who manage to avoid getting burned can still feel overwhelmed by the suffering all around us. And our inability to fix any of these problems may leave us feeling powerless.

My client and I talked about how it’s tempting to respond to our despair by anesthetizing ourselves. We can drink all the wine. We can play all the Candy Crush. We can eat all the ice cream. We can watch all the episodes. Maybe we work too much. Or maybe we pull the covers over our heads and wish it all away. We may get temporary relief this way, but we don’t solve anything, and we may even make things worse.

A better strategy — though not an easier one — is to focus on what we can control. We can’t single-handedly overhaul the government, repair the healthcare system, or make people drive better on Atlanta roads. We can’t even control the thoughts in our own heads. But we can choose our priorities, our actions, and how we treat people. We get to decide where to direct our efforts in our tiny corners of the world.

This morning, the only thing my client was able to control was her workout. Deadlifts and bench presses — her most difficult exercises — were on the menu. I offered to scale them down in deference to her fatigue, but she shook her head. A friend had said her posture looked better since she’d started working out, and she wanted to continue that trend. Even though she couldn’t control the election, she could control her effort with the barbell. So she did the workout as planned — and hit a deadlift PR.

The moral of the story isn’t that you should always push yourself hard in the gym, even when you don’t feel up to it. (Trust me, that way lies trouble.) The moral is that concentrating on the things you can control is a potent antidote to despair. What matters in your world? Choose to direct your efforts there.