There is one cycle in my life that I haven’t been good at breaking. When I get down, or as I call it, the “dark side,” I stay down for a while. Eventually, I get back to my baseline or even higher, usually after a week or so. Then the next event sets me off. For me, work—especially the stupid parts—easily throws me back down the happiness slide and can keep me there.

I don’t know if it’s the same for most people, but when I feel crappy about work, it generally spills over into life outside of work. Somewhere in my brain, or perhaps in my identity, work and life are wired together. 

When work is crappy it zaps my energy, both mentally and physically. This then fuels the merry-go-round of feeling down, which makes work feel even more crappy. And on and on.

Feeling bad about work leads to me not wanting to do any work. And not doing any work leads me to not wanting to do anything else. Go to the gym? Nah, I don’t feel like it. See a friend? I’ll just bring him down. Do what normally cheers me up? It’s not really effective.

This cycle has always been there. I blame it on momentum: The body at rest stays at rest, and the same goes for your thoughts. What this boils down to is mental health.

Everyone struggles. Everyone gets into a funk. Do I suffer from these spells more than others? The view in my world, where I am the center of the universe, says I do. It’s tough to know, but I know the struggle is real. Padme goes through it, but I’d say I go through it more—or at least I wallow in it longer. Padme is in and out in a day or two. Me? Not so much. It sticks around.

Is it genetic? Maybe. My mother and her family always seemed a little on the dark side, perhaps a bit more unstable than some families. Do I have those same tendencies? I hope not, but I might.

I recognize the pattern, which is a good first step. The important step now is to figure out how to get off the ride when it starts. When I get into this funk, I eat worse, I don’t exercise, I’m more anti-social, and I drink more. It seems like I almost on purpose feed the funk.

What I need is a system to get out of it. To break the momentum.

The weird thing is, we all know how to stop it. It’s not hard to know what to do; it just seems hard to start. When I’m feeling down, I need to pick from the following list and just do it:

• Exercise – (The hardest one)
• Eat well
• Play with your kids (if they are around)
• Do an activity like board games
• Try something new
• Shut off the internet (Okay, this one is hard, too)
• Stay away from negativity (like work – retire now 😉)
• Talk to a stranger
• Help someone
• Be creative
• Just DO something.

When I’m in this mood, it’s like there is an opaque film over my life. Everything is a little more dull; the colors of life are less bright. It affects my desire to do any of the items on the list, and it makes them feel less effective. But if I do enough from the list, I will come out of it.

And maybe that’s a big reason to retire sooner. Retirement would allow more time for the list, not in a reactive way, but in a daily way—to make sure the battery is constantly charged first. To be proactive versus letting something short-term affect it.

I seem to have a finite energy state where I can only do so much in a day. I need downtime to recharge. Work takes some of this energy, which affects what I have left for the list.

To go further with the battery analogy: Work can add positives to your life, charging your battery. But work also adds negatives, which drain it. It is important that the negatives do not outweigh the positives. When the battery runs down, it’s tough to jumpstart. Leave the battery discharged long enough, and eventually, it can’t recover.

When work gets you into this slow-to-recover or impossible-to-recover state, I guess you know it’s time to retire. This is why the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement isn’t just about money; for me, it’s about mental self-preservation. It’s about building the financial runway that lets me choose to step off the merry-go-round.  To remove work as one of the causes that keeps the ride going

Today there are more negatives. Tomorrow is another day