Effort and Extra Strain

You're writing an important email. You need to answer carefully, without being sharp and without promising more than you can deliver. Your fingers move across the keyboard. But something else is working too. Your teeth are clenched. Your shoulders are raised. There are only three sentences on the screen, yet it feels as if you're moving a heavy cabinet.

Afterward, it's easy to say, that was a difficult email, so of course I'm tired. It may well have been difficult. But Call asks us to separate two things. What did you need to do to write it? And what else were you doing that didn't help you choose a single word?

The email needs your attention, your understanding of the situation, and the movements of your hands. A clenched jaw doesn't check the facts. Raised shoulders don't make your answer more accurate. They may accompany the work. But accompanying something and helping it aren't always the same thing.

This is the central distinction in the book. Useful effort has a job to do. Extra strain seems to join in everything, yet it often has no useful job of its own.

Imagine you're carrying a package. Without some effort, you'll drop it. It would make no sense to demand that you relax completely. But while your hands carry the package, your face doesn't have to maintain a fierce frown all the way there. And once you've put the package down, your arms can stop carrying it.

Call sees using our energy more carefully as something we can learn. It isn't just a fortunate personality trait that you either have or don't have. We develop a habit of tightening up in familiar situations. That means we can gradually notice the habit and change the way we act.

Why isn't understanding enough? Because a familiar reaction can begin before we've had time to think the situation through. You know you don't write emails with your shoulders. But as soon as you see the name of someone who's difficult to deal with, your body is getting ready for a fight. The thought that there's no need to tense up arrives later.

That's why Call challenges the expectation that common sense will put everything right immediately. Knowing how music should sound doesn't mean you can play it. Knowing you could move with greater ease doesn't mean you'll automatically move that way.

And learning can easily become a new struggle. You notice your shoulders and angrily order yourself to lower them. Now the tension has company: irritation and constant checking. Am I calm enough yet? Why can't I get this right again?

Something strange has happened. We're trying to remove unnecessary effort by making an even greater effort. It's like pressing harder on a button that's stuck, when it might help to look first at what's keeping it from moving.

Another approach begins more modestly. The email really does matter. It needs to be written. But does it need the gripping you've already noticed? If it doesn't, you might let that gripping ease a little, without turning the moment into a test of complete relaxation. The sentence stays on the screen. The work continues. One small, unnecessary part of it has dropped away.

Call also looks at what happens after someone rests following exhaustion. The person recovers and returns to daily life, but keeps the same habit of adding tension to every action. The break helped for a while. Then the habit returned along with the work. That's why she's interested in how we work, as well as how much we rest.

With our email, that could mean noticing what happens while we're answering, as well as taking a break after a difficult reply. We don't necessarily need to think less. We might think more clearly and stop assigning our shoulders a task that belongs to thought. And if there really are too many emails and too much work, we can acknowledge the size of the workload. Using energy carefully and keeping work within reasonable limits belong together.

This isn't a universal explanation of fatigue. Call sometimes went much further and attributed a wide range of illnesses to the misuse of our powers. We won't draw those conclusions. People may be tired because of the amount of work, too little sleep, illness, caring for someone, or difficult living conditions. They may need help or a lighter load, rather than another obligation to do everything the right way.

Even when the workload is real, though, it can help to notice an additional layer. Waiting for an answer and feeling an internal jolt every minute aren't quite the same activity. Preparing for a meeting and constantly imagining a catastrophe aren't quite the same activity either. We often call both of them working, even though they produce different results.

Let's return to the email. If, after easing a little, you can still read carefully, spot an inaccuracy, and revise a sentence, the work hasn't disappeared. You've separated it from something that was making tension feel like useful participation.

That's the idea to carry from this first lesson. For Call, calm doesn't mean abandoning the task. It means giving the task the energy it needs, without making your whole body prove how important it is.

But stopping an action doesn't necessarily mean resting. The email has been sent. The keyboard is silent. Your shoulders still seem to be typing. Next time, we'll look at why our habit of working can continue even during the minutes we've set aside for rest.